I can’t vouch for its historical accuracy (although I’d guess it’s probably pretty good) but Gore Vidal’s “Lincoln” is a wonderful read.

After encountering the Churchill speeches on Simon Schama’s history of Britain documentary a few years ago, I was inspired enough to go out and borrow a copy of Churchill speeches from the library, and was a little surprised by the length of them.

Then he winds himself up for a few zingers at the end and that’s that. I’m a big fan of Churchill in lots of ways, and of his great speeches, but thinking about it, they’re just great rhetoric. Their distinction is that they embody Churchill’s indefatigable (and foolhardy) physical courage. Lincoln’s on the other hand it seems to me having thought about it a bit are on a much higher plane. He’s really trying to say some difficult things. And he subverts the form of the great speech because he intends also to subvert the function of a great speech. He’s not really rousing the troops. In many ways it’s the opposite of that.

“People who like this sort of thing will find this the sort of thing they like.”

A bit misleading about the Churchill speech; his most famous remarks are from long speeches, and although he did originally make the remark ‘Blood, toil, tears and sweat’ on Cabinet, he later expanded upon it substantially, and some of the other remarks made in this speech are almost as famous:

http://www.winstonchurchill.org/i4a/pages/index.cfm?pageid=391

Patrick, that’s the one mark looming large over Lincoln. As a product of his time he saw the national as some absolute. I suspect allowing secession would have been a better thing to do. The line in the second inaugural about all that blood we’re going to shed – the last man and last shilling kind of stuff – isn’t a good look from this distance.

Andrew Johnson.

I too admire Lincoln, very very much. It is perhaps hard to tell with the passage of a century or so whether he has been overly hagiographised, but I haven’t seen any suggestion of it.

As a child I had to learn, amongst others, the Gettysburg address off by heart. I enjoyed it thoroughly, even then.

And maybe you are right about American pragmatism. After all there is Lincoln’s response to being informed that Grant drunk a bottle of whisky a day (then send all my generals a case of it!). And there is the sheer horror and carnage of that war – if America had fought any of its subsequent wars with such ferocity and ruthlessness as Sherman burnt the South, they would have been much shorter and far more devastating.

Not to mention the mental challenge of adjusting to the new status quo – for both sides of both conflicts (North/South; White/Black).

Fertile grounds for pragmatism.

But then again, and Lincoln is one of my all-time political heroes, how terrible that pragmatism was. Would a more pragmatic George Bush have simply burned the Middle East from the Gulf to the Caspian? Or was Lincoln in part a product of his time, and only in human measure able to surpass it and its unfathomable daily quotient of misery?