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Adam Gopnik, one of my favorite New Yorker Writers, brings us this lovely literary look at how two letters can make all the difference: Annals of Biography: Angels and Ages: Reporting & Essays: The New Yorker
Coming to the end of the book, to the night of April 14, 1865, and Lincoln's assassination, I reached the words that were once engraved in every American mind. At 7:22 A.M., as Lincoln drew his last breath, all the worthies who had crowded into a little back bedroom in a boarding house across the street from Ford's Theatre turned to Edwin Stanton, Lincoln's formidable Secretary of War, for a final word. Stanton is the one with the long comic beard and the spinster's spectacles, who in the photographs looks a bit like Mr. Pickwick but was actually the iron man in the Cabinet, and who, after a difficult beginning, had come to revere Lincoln as a man and a writer and a politician—had even played something like watchful Horatio to his tragic Hamlet. Stanton stood still, sobbing, and then said, simply, "Now he belongs to the ages."...
For the flight home, I picked up James L. Swanson's "Manhunt," a vivid account of the assassination and the twelve-day search for John Wilkes Booth that followed. Once again, I came to the deathbed scene, the vigil, the gathering. The Reverend Dr. Gurley, the Lincoln family minister, said, " 'Let us pray.' He summoned up . . . a stirring prayer. . . . Gurley finished and everyone murmured 'Amen.' Then, no one dared to speak. Again Stanton broke the silence. 'Now he belongs to the angels.' "Now he belongs to the angels? Where had that come from? There was a Monty Python element here ("What was that? I think it was 'Blessed are the cheesemakers' " the annoyed listeners too far from the Mount say to each other in "Life of Brian"), but was there something more going on?
Hi all!
Looks good! Very useful, good stuff. Good resources here. Thanks much!
G'night