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Under the Sign of Ares
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10782 |
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BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
Date : |
3 / 1993 |
3,329 Words |
| Author
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Wilfred M. McClay
Wilfred M. McClay is an assistant professor of history at
Tulane University in New Orleans. |
LINCOLN, THE WAR PRESIDENT
The Gettysburg Lectures
Edited by Gabor S.Boritt
New York: Oxford University Press, 1992
242 pp., $23.00
The American Civil War and the enigmatic American president whose election in 1860 precipitated it have proved to be subjects of virtually inexhaustible interest. That fact is vividly illustrated by the thousands of volumes on both subjects that have streamed out of publishing houses in the past 130 years. Yet the reasons for such enduring interest, bordering upon obsession, permeating both the scholarly world and the general public, are not obvious or superficial. There are few if any decisive new facts remaining to be unearthed, few glaring lacunae in the historical record crying out to be filled, few interpretive gambits that have not been explored. Although there are, for example, Lincoln assassination enthusiasts who luxuriate in recondite speculations about what did or did not happen those fateful days in the spring of 1865, such individuals do not account for the interest in the man--any more than the popularity of Shakespeare's plays derives from the rather tiresome search to ascertain true authorship.
No, the enigma of the Civil War taps into something far deeper, a vein of half-conscious feelings charged with numinous meaning. Even Civil War buffs and hobbyists, who tend to pride themselves upon their encyclopedic factual knowledge of battlefield tactics and connoisseurship of wartime paraphernalia, also know that the object of their obsession is something mysterious, precious, even sacred. For the Civil War is thought somehow to contain within itself the very marrow of American national identity.
Perhaps that is why such a surprising number of Americans two years age decided to set aside their usual television fare, and instead devoted an extraordinary amount of time and energy to the viewing of Ken Burns' well-produced, well-researched, and sensitive (if, at times, interpretively simplistic or one-sided) PBS series on the Civil War, despite the comparatively greater demands those programs placed on viewers' attention spans. The subject of the Civil War exercises an enduring attraction that is not easily explained; some of the immediate appeal of the Burns series may have to do with the growing need for historical touchstones and meaningful precedents at a time when out sense of national identity and national purpose seems relatively weak and indecisive.
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