Washington Schlepped Here by Christopher Buckley

Author:Christopher Buckley
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Nonfiction
ISBN: 9780307422620
Publisher: Crown Publishing Group
Published: 2009-03-08T16:00:00+00:00

It was built over a filled-in swamp, in an area so desolate and forlorn that it seemed an insult to put it here. The Speaker of the House, “Uncle Joe” Cannon, harrumphed, “I’ll never let a memorial to Abraham Lincoln be erected in that God-damned swamp.” There is something reassuring about thwarted congressional asseverations.

What’s perhaps more remarkable is that this site was once virtually the front line of the war that Mr. Lincoln fought and won. The South began on the other side of the river. What’s more, just up the hill is Arlington House, the home of Robert E. Lee. For four years, the Union ended right here in the goop at the river’s edge.

On reflection, maybe it’s just as well that it takes forever to put up memorials in Washington. Rush jobs don’t always turn out for the best. They certainly didn’t rush this one. It wasn’t completed until 1922.

Earlier plans called for another obelisk and a pyramid. One obelisk per capital seems about right, and no pyramid, however grand, is going to outdo Cheops’s.

It was dedicated by President Harding. Chief Justice and former President William Howard Taft was there, as was President Lincoln’s son, Robert Todd Lincoln, by then a distinguished-looking old man in neat white whiskers, spectacles, and, you can see from the photo, his father’s large, signature ears. He was born in 1843, the year Samuel F. B. Morse stretched his first telegraph wire and Charles Dickens wrote A Christmas Carol. Now near the end of his life, there was little of American history that Robert Todd Lincoln had not personally witnessed.

After graduating from Harvard in 1864, he begged his father to let him enter the army so that he could take part in the war. The president had by this point lost two of his sons—another would die after he did, before reaching adulthood. He wasn’t about to lose this one. Grant made him a member of his staff. Robert Lincoln was present at Appomattox on April 9, when Lee surrendered. Indeed, Lincoln’s first eyewitness account of the occasion came from his son. Five days later, Robert was at his father’s side when he died, nine hours after Booth fired the bullet into his brain.

That much I knew. What I did not know, until I read Philip Bigler’s excellent book about Arlington National Cemetery, In Honored Glory, was this: In 1881, President Garfield appointed Robert Lincoln his secretary of war. Lincoln was with him at the Baltimore and Potomac Railroad Station when Garfield was shot. Twenty years later, in 1901, Robert Lincoln was present in Buffalo, New York, at the Pan-American Exposition when President McKinley was assassinated. This grim trifecta stands in apposition to his achievements: he became minister to Great Britain and a successful businessman. Alas, tragedy continued to haunt the Lincoln line. Robert’s son Abraham “Jack” Lincoln II died at the age of 16. (The Lincoln line died out finally in 1985 with the death of Robert Todd Lincoln Beckwith.) Robert Todd

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