[from Arlus Stephens]
In the May 28th issue of the New Yorker, Adam Gopnik has an essay on Lincoln that touches on the Soldiers Home and Matthew Pinsker's book "Lincoln's Sanctuary". Here is the relevant excerpt:
"The one place in America where you can get a sense of Lincoln the President at work and at play is the Soldiers’ Home, on the outskirts of Washington, about three miles from the White House. After the death of his son Willie, in 1862, Lincoln used a cottage on the grounds as a kind of retreat, a proto-Camp David, and spent summers there from 1862 to 1864. Every other place associated with him either predates the Presidential years or has changed so much that it is unrecognizable. But Lincoln’s cottage, which has been largely neglected, still resonates with the period. It was an odd location for him; though it was cooler than central Washington in the summer, it was also a soldiers’ retirement home, with a cemetery just alongside, where the Union dead were sent to be buried. Lincoln loved the Soldiers’ Home, preferring it to the stolid White House. Walking through the buildings, one sees that the rooms have a nineteenth-century spaciousness and ease; and one is reminded that, as the British biographer Richard Carwardine points out, the young Lincoln was avid as much for bourgeois respectability as for riches, or even for fame.
It was in these bright but cozy rooms, too, and out on the surrounding lawns, that he and Stanton really took the measure of each other. The story of Stanton and Lincoln—the reason that, at the very last moment, the assemblage deferred to Stanton to say the final words—is well retold by Doris Kearns Goodwin and, in particular detail, by William Lee Miller. In the eighteen-fifties, Stanton was a prominent litigator, and in 1855 he and Lincoln were thrown together in a complicated patent litigation [...].
At the Soldiers’ Home, Lincoln and Stanton became friends. They shared a common tragedy - both had lost a son in the course of the war - and a common nature: outwardly remote, inwardly passionate. [...] Stanton, too, had a cottage at the Soldiers’ Home, and spent summers there with Lincoln. Most people intensely disliked Stanton; one Cabinet secretary called him “rude and offensive.” But at the Soldiers’ Home, as Matthew Pinsker shows in his book “Lincoln’s Sanctuary,” another side of his nature became apparent: he played mumblety-peg with a soldier and, on one memorable occasion, spent an evening with Lincoln untangling peacocks. (Small blocks of wood had been tied to the birds’ feet with strings to keep them from flying away, but the lines got snarled in the trees.)
As Stanton came to know Lincoln, he formed an opinion of his intellect so high that he said to one of his fellow-lawyers, 'No men were ever so deceived as we at Cincinnati'. It was a friendship deep enough, and famous enough, to make everyone in Lincoln’s last room wait for Stanton to speak."
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