Surratt Society Meeting and "Conference" 2021

[Gene C]

Thanks Rob for the link to the New Yorker article by Adam Gopnik.

There is a word that I am unfamiliar with - "ur-source"
Still, his account, the ur-source of the “angels” quote, sounds fairly solid. (last sentence of your post - a quote from the New Yorker article)
I wasn't sure if it was a typo and should be un-source, but Wiktionary (the only source I could find that defined the word) defines it as "an original source"

It was an interesting article, but the article spent to much time on how Lincoln spoke and phrased things. After all, it's Stanton's quote.
if you don't want to read the full article, just jump to the end.

" In the brief moment given to each visitor to look inside (the Peterson House), I wished for a machine that would be able to re-create every breath of air, every vibration that ever took place in a room. And then I knew that we probably would not have understood any better had we been standing there than we do now. Stanton was weeping, Lincoln had just died, the room was overwhelmed, whatever he said was broken by a sob—the sob, in a sense, is the story. History is not an agreed-on fiction but what gets made in a crowded room; what is said isn’t what’s heard, and what is heard isn’t what gets repeated. .....
The past is so often unknowable not because it is befogged now but because it was befogged then, too, back when it was still the present. If we had been there listening, we still might not have been able to determine exactly what Stanton said. All we know for sure is that everyone was weeping, and the room was full. ♦"