President Lincoln and the Homestead Act

[David Lockmiller]

(04-19-2020 06:45 PM)RJNorton Wrote:  As author David Mearns said of Lincoln, "If he belongs to the ages it is because he belonged to his own age, his own fellows, his own environment ... if we would honor him, recognise and understand him we must return to his [age]."

Roger, I think I would substitute the word "time" for the word "age" in brackets.

First person narration is like looking at a scene through the eyes of the author at the "time."

I give the following example from Noah Brooks as published in the Century Monthly Illustrated Magazine – Vol. 18 at page 586 (“Lincoln’s Imagination”):

When we were in Virginia together, just after a fall of snow, I found him standing on the stump of a tree, looking out over the landscape. He called attention to various subtle features of the view, and said, among other things, that he liked the trees best when not in leaf, as their anatomy could then be studied. And he bade me look at the delicate yet firm outline of the leafless tree against the sky. Then, pointing to the fine network of shadows cast on the snow by the branches and twigs, he said that that was the like the profile of the tree.

The very next day, somebody was discussing with him the difference between character and reputation, when he said, -- with a look at me, as if to remind me of what he had been talking about the day before, -- "perhaps a man’s character was like a tree, and his reputation like its shadow; the shadow is what we think of it; the tree is the real thing."

The President was at that time weighed down with anxieties; it was a few weeks before General Hooker’s crossing of the Rappahannock, at Fredericksburg; and he was daily expecting to hear of an attack on Charleston. I remember that it seemed to me a marvelous thing that he could unfix his mind from all these great cares long enough to consider such trifling things.

The point of the story is that the New York Times Editorial Board cannot change the fact of Lincoln’s actual character, but the Editorial Board can distort in the minds of its readers the “shadow” (i.e., the reputation) of President Abraham Lincoln. It is this insidious distortion of President Abraham Lincoln's reputation by the Editorial Board of the New York Times to which I strongly object.