Daniel Day-Lewis in Lincoln.

Okay. So Lincoln, Steven Spielberg’s bloated $50-million history lesson about Abraham Lincoln’s final days in office as he attempted, by hook or crook, to abolish slavery, is noble, civic-minded, exhaustingly researched, immaculately detailed, crowded with a parade of cameos by good actors who look like Smith Brothers cough drop models, and noteworthy for another critic-proof performance by Daniel Day-Lewis in the title role. It is all of those things. But Lincoln is also a colossal bore. It is so pedantic, slow-moving, sanitized and sentimental that I kept pinching myself to stay awake—which, like the film itself, didn’t always work.

The Civil War is in its fourth year. Lincoln has already signed his famous Emancipation Proclamation, a year before his re-election to a second term. Now he wants an anti-slavery amendment to guarantee that the slaves he freed will stay that way forever, protected by law. He needs votes from a hostile, divided Congress to pass it. That means getting the support of Democrats—rabid right-wing conservatives in those days—as well as liberal, left-wing Republicans. (How times have changed!) And that’s what Lincoln is about. People pining for a comfortable cinematic biopic about the controversial 16th president like those made, in the past, by Henry Fonda and Raymond Massey will be disappointed to learn that the film’s interminable self-indulgence sheds no new light on the life and death of the man himself. Based on the book Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln by historian Doris Kearns Goodwin, it boasts a dry, ponderous screenplay by long-winded playwright Tony Kushner, whose verbosity does to movies what a House filibuster does to action on a health-reform bill. It’s a whopping drag.

Instead of concentrating on Lincoln and the war that divided a nation, the movie stays off the battlefield and focuses on the internecine shenanigans behind closed doors on Capitol Hill—the House debate, the ranting and shouting, the insults in both aisles of Congress, the arguments defending and denouncing blacks. Instead of action, we get intellectual ideas set forth while storming around conference tables behind the scenes of history. Ugly sets make 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue look like a rooming house. The sun never shines in 1865. Instead, garish lighting filters through dirty windows into dark rooms that look like the inside of a Hershey syrup can. Into this matte-finish gloom marches a cumbrous crowd of expensive-dress extras, most of whom Mr. Kushner never bothers to identify. Oh, look, it’s Joseph Gordon-Levitt as Lincoln’s oldest son Robert, a rebellious college student who defies his parents’ wishes (every family has one). And there’s David Strathairn as Secretary of State William Seward. Here comes John Hawkes as a lobbyist, and an unidentifiable James Spader. Who is he playing? He’s gone before we get to know him. The ensemble enters through one door and exits through another: Jared Harris as General Ulysses S. Grant, and Jackie Earle Haley, Hal Holbrook, Tim Blake Nelson, Joseph Cross and a cast of hundreds playing senators, soldiers and servants. Jean Kennedy Smith, the last surviving sibling in the Kennedy dynasty, is listed in the credits as “Woman Shouter.” It’s that kind of movie. An endurance test with guest stars.

Upstaging them all is Tommy Lee Jones as passionate abolitionist Thaddeus Stevens, chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, who has all the bitchy lines, and a secret black mistress to boot. He’s belligerent, tortured and committed to the abolitionist cause (with personal motives that don’t always extend to the country’s best interests). His cantankerousness gives the film a desperately needed pinch of comedy. And there’s no mistaking the valuable contribution by Sally Field, adding fire in an inspired performance as Mary Todd Lincoln, the woman behind the man. Daniel Day-Lewis does what he can to delve beneath the legend and make Lincoln an ordinary man: Lincoln telling corny jokes, Lincoln visiting the wounded in a military hospital, Lincoln talking turkey with black soldiers, Lincoln threatening his wife with the madhouse for her grief over her favorite son killed in battle, Lincoln fumbling with his hands yet writing speeches that changed history with clarity of vision. But his power is diminished by a script that forces him to explain his theory of equality by quoting Euclid on the rules of mechanical reasoning. In reality, Lincoln believed in equality under the law, but not racial equality; he had no use for blacks and maintained a strong personal belief that whites were a superior race. In his efforts to get his amendment passed, Honest Abe was not so honest either. He and his cabinet of rivals were not above bribery, lies, suspending habeas corpus or bending the Constitution to break the South’s economic infrastructure. These are facts Spielberg conveniently overlooks. The title is misleading. Lincoln is about the votes, not the man. I’m more interested in the way the movie shows the terrible physical toll the passage of the 13th Amendment took on the man’s life than in the disparate personalities he fought, cajoled and strong-armed in order to pass it. The movie ends on Saturday, April 15, 1865, when Mary bosses her reluctant, bone-weary husband into the carriage that takes them to Ford’s Theatre. There is no mention of the name John Wilkes Booth.

In all, there’s too much material, too little revelation and almost nothing of Spielberg’s reliable cinematic flair. But on the plus side, there is nuance and wit, and Daniel Day-Lewis always makes you care. And you can’t deny the timing of Lincoln. In a divisive election year when the Sunday morning pundits knock themselves out debating whether the political system still works, it’s a good time to revisit a year when it did.

rreed@observer.com

LINCOLN

Running Time 120 minutes

Written by Tony Kushner (screenplay) and Doris Kearns Goodwin (book)

Directed by Steven Spielberg

Starring Daniel Day-Lewis, Sally Field and David Strathairn

2/4

Now, it turns out that the feed @1865lincoln is tied to the upcoming Robert Redford movie, The Conspirator, about said assassination. Still, the effort behind the Twitter feed, which officially launches on Feb. 12, Lincoln's birthday, seems a noble enough one: to not only promote the movie (of course) but also to present the president's words in a digestible form for the kids today.

So! If this fresh feed decides to break down the Gettysburg Address, Lincoln's most famous and enduring speech, how many tweets would it need? Back-of-the-envelope calculations show the address to include 1,474 characters, meaning it would break down into roughly 10.5 tweets. So the first tweet would look like this: Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposi

(And, just an aside: This reporter, at 1:42 p.m. on Friday, became the first Twitter user that this new feed followed. I received an email with the subject line: "Abraham Lincoln is now following you on Twitter." Not bad, not bad.)

tacitelli@observer.com and @tacitelli

When Abraham Lincoln arrived in New York in February 1860, he must have felt a long way from Springfield. He was in town to speak at Cooper Union, in what amounted to his only major campaign trip in securing the Republican nomination for president. During his short stay, the gangly country lawyer was confronted with sights he would never forget: a swarm of carriages, horses and pedestrians on Broadway below 10th Street; Henry Ward Beecher’s packed church in Brooklyn; and the crippling poverty and homelessness of the notorious Five Points slum.

“Dorothy, you are not in Kansas anymore,” said Barry Lewis, the architectural historian known for his walking tours of New York on PBS. “I can’t imagine what he would have thought because he was a small-town guy. I’m not sure he could have handled New York; it was just too complicated, too many people, too many contrasts between rich and poor.”

Mr. Lewis had just joined Lincoln historian Harold Holzer at the New York Historical Society on Wednesday, Oct. 14, to discuss the 16th president’s complex relationship with America’s largest city. In front of a large, appreciative audience, the two discussed each of Lincoln’s three trips to New York.

Lincoln’s first trip is generally remembered for his defining address at Cooper Union. (Barack Obama, another rangy politician from Illinois, would give another highly touted speech there during his run for the White House in 2008.) Yet Mr. Holzer and Mr. Lewis suggest that it was Lincoln’s visit to Matthew Brady’s photography studio that may have best served his lofty ambitions. Not long after Lincoln sat for his portrait, there were more than 40,000 copies of the photo spread throughout the country.

Though he is remembered as stoic and retiring, Lincoln was a savvy manipulator of public perception, Mr. Holzer further noted. After his Cooper Union speech, Lincoln didn’t return to his hotel, but instead hurried to Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune to further tweak the version of the speech that would be sent to smaller papers across the country.

“He knew that this was the way to get his name up in lights,” Mr. Holzer said, after signing books for audience members. “Stars want to appear on Broadway; he had to appear in New York.”

When Lincoln returned a year later as president, his visit stopped traffic. Walt Whitman recalled being trapped on a side street as Lincoln moved through the city. (Anyone stranded when the Obamas shut down Sixth Avenue can surely sympathize.) But that short visit would be his last. New York was always a thorn in Lincoln’s side. The city twice voted against him, and the mayor even threatened to make New York a “free port” by seceding from the Union. Then came the Draft Riots of 1863, in which angry mobs perpetrated some of the ugliest racial violence in the nation’s history.

Following Lincoln’s assassination, however, as his cross-country funeral moved through the streets of New York, more than a hundred thousand people clamored to honor him.

“There was a sorrow that he had been so reduced physically,” Mr. Holzer said, standing in the shadow of the massive cast of Lincoln’s head that occupied the center of the foyer. “It seemed he had carried the suffering of the country in his face.”

One young New Yorker was particularly moved.

“Teddy Roosevelt was leaning out of his window to see it as a child, and he never forgot it.”

The exhibition and an accompanying catalog edited by Mr. Holzer don’t tell us anything radically new about Lincoln. Its picture of Lincoln is our picture of Lincoln—morally upright, politically shrewd, anguished over the war’s toll. The 16th president is never that far away, either from history museums or even the public’s thoughts. Lincoln is one of two communal touchstones binding our turbulent democratic society together. The other being TV, God bless it.

This year, Lincoln’s bicentennial, has shined an especially pious light on the Lincoln legend. Headed into the late months, you could be forgiven for a bit of Lincoln fatigue.

And perhaps this exhibition needs a little forgiveness for the awkward historical conjunction that provides its premise: Lincoln visited New York only five times during his life, and only once during his presidency. (Events kept him elsewhere.) But this is the New-York Historical Society, after all, and perhaps one of the great reasons to see this exhibit is the unstinting portrait of New York’s wickedness in the 1860s.

Even then the promise of New York was that here rustic talent grew best, and nowhere else.

When Lincoln arrived in New York in Feb. 27, 1860, to deliver an hour-and-a-half-long speech on the issue of the Constitution and slavery to a sellout crowd of 1,500 at Cooper Union, he was the favorite son of western Republicans (back when the West meant Illinois and Indiana). But he hadn’t won an election in more than a decade and his record in office consisted of a single, mostly undistinguished term in Congress.

Two months after the Cooper Union Speech, which ends in a double-barrel blast of “Let us have faith that right makes might,” Lincoln had won the Republican nomination for president. An overnight success, to borrow some showbiz jargon.

We made Lincoln look like a winner the way the folks back home in Springfield never could. One of the fascinating subplots of “Lincoln and New York” is that New Yorkers were wise in the ways of media and the power of pictures way before it was wise about anything else.

The morning of his Cooper Union speech, Lincoln stopped by photographer Mathew Brady’s studio for a photo portrait. Brady asked Lincoln to yank up his collar, so as to appear less scrawny for a potential national audience that had no idea what he looked like.

The image of a suited and stately Lincoln polished the prairie rail-splitter’s image. (The photo is included in the show, along with the actual lectern used in the shoot.) Lincoln reportedly said, “Brady and the Cooper Union speech made me president.”

You may be gratified to think that in the crucial hour of our nation’s history, this sometimes unimaginably superficial city “made” one of our most astounding statesmen.

New York was in fact a bastion of pro-slavery opinion, trailing upstate New York in progressive politics. “Lincoln and New York” includes a gallery detailing the screaming headlines, partisan rags and editorial kingmakers of the era’s press: some 174 daily and weekly newspapers in 1860. Lincoln’s famous letter to the editor addressed to Horace Greeley, the Quixote behind the pro-Union New York Tribune, is included. That, and the editorials, satire and political cartoons that ran in anti-Lincoln, pro-slavery papers like The World and The New-York Daily News.

They still carry a shock—of what? Recognition, maybe, of the directions democratic discourse often takes.

Hard as it is to imagine of our present-day city, which prides itself on its (mostly) liberal political convictions, but Cooper Union speech aside, Lincoln was deeply unpopular in New York. He lost the city in 1860 by about 25,000 votes. He also lost Brooklyn and Westchester. In 1864, facing a collation of antiwar Democrats, called Copperheads, and an Irish immigrant bloc enraged at the possibility of competing against African-Americans for jobs, he lost again. “Lincoln and New York” takes us out of the cosmopolitanism of the Bloomberg II era and reminds us of a time that was probably far worse than the cauldron of Tammany sachem and the Five Points slum combined.

Along the way, the exhibition hits a couple of blind spots of local historical knowledge. Like Fernando Wood. Don’t recognize the name? In an era of scandals big and small, but mostly big, Wood is my candidate for chief scoundrel: the mayor who, at the start of the Civil War, proposed the city ditch the Union and declare itself open to Southern trade. Read it; believe it.

The picture becomes clearer, and more complicated, with every step.New York State sent more men and suffered more casualties as a state than any other in the Union. And here the Draft Riots of July 1863 left more than 140 dead, mostly African-Americans, in the worst racial violence in American history.

With his assassination, Lincoln became an overnight sensation in New York.

On April 17, three days after the assassination, more than 150,000 people turned out on Broadway to pass Lincoln lying in state at City Hall. Profound mourning did not get in the way of the hustle: Lincoln pictures, Lincoln plates, Lincoln ribbons, Lincoln lockets, every piece of penny crapola big enough to fit the martyred president’s image.

Is it worth reflecting on at a time when, after nearly a decade-long turn as America’s City, New York, or at least Wall Street, is again nationally reviled? Some semi-corrupt strand wound deep in our cultural DNA? Beats me.

Either way, this exhibition reminds one of New York’s greatest traits: The city will not be shamed.

editorial@observer.com

"More cutbacks," Paterson quipped, having just parried my question about what a forthcoming deficit reduction package will contain. (On more fee increases: "I'd like to avoid them.)

The governor's mustache remains intact, but his chin was visible for the first time in recent memory. By my eye, Paterson lets his whiskers bloom and trims about weekly. He was looking shaggy during an interview at the State Fair, so the trim appears to have happened sometime over the weekend.

 "I tried to do it about 10 years ago, and it didn't seem to work out so I've got a new system," Paterson continued. Thoughts swirled: does this involve some Delilah-esque power play? The summer heat? The coming fall cool?

Was this inspired by Abraham Lincoln, Madore asked, who grew out his beard after his successful presidential bid at the behest of an 11-year-old girl?

All unclear.

Madore clarified: so no 11-year-old girl asked you to shave off your beard?

"Actually, my son did," Paterson replied.

Banquet at Delmonico’s:
Great Minds, the Gilded Age, and the
Triumph of Evolution in America
By Barry Werth
Random House, 362 pages, $27

“Fifty years ago no one would have chosen Darwin and Lincoln as central figures of the modern imagination,” the essayist Adam Gopnik writes in Angels and Ages, his elegant, intelligent meditation on skepticism and the making of the liberal mind. The likelier picks, he says, would have been Marx and Freud, men of the 19th century who gave us auteur visions of life in the 20th, models of human behavior so comprehensive they were not just didactic but prescriptive, so vividly rendered that they retain their grip on us even after they’ve fallen into disrepute.

Darwin and Lincoln, by contrast, have never been held in higher regard—they were born, miraculously, on the same day, hours apart on Feb. 12, 1809 (a coincidence Mr. Gopnik likens to the deaths of both Adams and Jefferson on July 4, 1826), and the twin bicentennial promises literally dozens of books on each this year—yet Mr. Gopnik believes they are underrated still. Both were visionary men, like Marx and Freud and many other illustrious figures of the period. But what interests Mr. Gopnik about Darwin and Lincoln, and what he says have made them heroes again in our era, is not the breadth of their vision but their common restraint in expressing it, their shared skepticism about the value of amorphous quantities such as “vision” and their commitment to relentless scrutiny and self-scrutiny as the only way to make new knowledge in the modern age.

Above all else, what fascinates Mr. Gopnik is the language. Victorian English was blustery and boastful, but in their writing and speaking, Darwin and Lincoln were austere, restrained. “Our idea of eloquence—which includes a suspicion of too much of it—begins here,” he writes, with them. They “shared logic as a form of eloquence, argument as a style of virtue, close reasoning as a form of uplift.” They argued from facts, and were empiricists with language, too, using words to sharpen ideas, rather than inflate them. “They particularized in everything, and their general vision rises from the details, their big ideas from small sightings,” Mr. Gopnik says. “Good writers have always argued from facts, but few before had taken such narrow paths of reason toward the broad road of truth. Each, using a form of technical language—the fine, detailed language of natural science for Darwin, the tedious language of legal reasoning for Lincoln—arrived at a new ideal of liberal eloquence.”

This new eloquence, characterized by skepticism and restraint, is, for Mr. Gopnik, not merely a question of rhetorical power. It’s a new language, but it’s also our language, the language of modern liberalism. It’s the very essence of free and clear thought, and “essential to liberal civilization,” he writes, suggesting, too, that in its debt to skepticism, liberalism—of the kind that’s plural and parliamentary in culture, agnostic and ameliorative in politics—may have more in common with the postmodern tradition that has so often challenged it than the modern tradition that gave birth to it.

DARWIN'S CHIEF CONTEMPORARY rival had a very different approach to rhetoric, and to reasoning. The gentleman British polymath named Herbert Spencer took issue not with the validity of Darwin’s theory but the breadth of its implications. Like many others, Spencer’s work on evolution had predated Darwin’s, but it also outflanked it—applying the model of gradual improvement through competition to economics, politics, philosophy, ethics, industry, psychology and religion. Though Spencer is usually called a Social Darwinist—even the father of Social Darwinism—it would probably be more appropriate, as the historian Steven Shapin has written, to think of Darwin as a kind of biological Spencerian.

Spencer coined the term “survival of the fittest,” which Darwin resisted, and speculated rampantly on the future of society and the course of progress, which Darwin also resisted. Spencer believed competition was natural, and that it generated progress, in all cases; Darwin believed history had no purpose, and that natural selection was amoral. Spencer was a hero to the industrial class (“Thanks to Spencer, Victorian capitalists knew that nature was on their side,” Mr. Shapin has written), and a kind of cheerleader for the go-go Gilded Age. His laissez-faire triumphalism represented the market value of Darwin’s scrupulous, rigorous work, and in that era, the market reigned supreme.

The 20th century was the American century, we’re often told. But most of those things that allowed the United States to command the world stage for any period at all happened, in fact, the century before. In the first half of the 19th century, America warred again with Britain, firmly securing independence; reached the Pacific and took most of the Southwest in a war with Mexico; turned an agrarian economy into a market economy; established corporate protections; and industrialized, urbanized and developed a genuine middle class. In the second half, we mastered the steam engine and the electric motor; replaced a continental frontier with a continent of steel by spanning the landmass with telegraph wires and railroads; began an experiment with imperialism; industrialized more, urbanized more, federalized our culture as well as our politics; and lit the new cities of the now not-so-new nation with Edison’s incandescent lamps. In between, we had a little war.

Herbert Spencer was a kind of prophet for these years, and when he traveled to the United States in 1882, he was greeted as no less than a philosopher king, cheered by an amazing array of American titans, who assembled at a banquet tribute that was unquestionably the social event of the New York season.

That tribute is the subject of Barry Werth’s Banquet at Delmonico’s, a well-meaning but deeply frustrating effort to fashion an intellectual history from a dinner-party seating chart. And yet, there’s a lesson in this narrowness, of the smallness of the intellectual elite as recently as the Victorian era, when so many of the nation’s leading figures found themselves in intimate correspondence with one another.

And there’s a lesson, too, in that correspondence, of the sickliness of that culture: Nearly every character in Mr. Werth’s book, each of them thrilled by Spencer’s “survival of the fittest” imperative, complains in his letters of aches, pains, colds, falls, bruises, flu, insomnia and sleepless nights, fatigue physical and mental, and countless indistinct maladies and afflictions that should probably be chalked up to unadulterated health panic. (Mr. Gopnik reminds us that his heroes were no different: “Lincoln was a depressive; Darwin, subject to anxiety attacks so severe that he wrote down one of the most formidable definitions of a panic attack that exists.”) In the company of these eminent Victorians, the feeble Spencer presides as a kind of hypochondriac in chief.

THEY HAD NOT COME to bury Spencer, of course, but to praise him. “We recognize in the breadth of your knowledge,” the former attorney general and secretary of state William Evarts told Spencer, “a greater comprehension than any living man has presented to our generation.” Oliver Wendell Holmes declared that Spencer “has come nearer to the realization of Bacon’s claim of all knowledge as his province than any philosopher of his time.” The German-born Carl Schurz, a future senator who had read Spencer by candlelight while serving in the Union army two decades before, announced that, had Southerners read the book before secession, “there would never have been any war for the preservation of slavery.” Schurz called Spencer “a hero of thought, devoting his powers and his life to the vindication of the divine right of science.” The Episcopal rector and Yale professor of political economy William Sumner continued in this vein: “I can see no boundaries to the scope of the philosophy of evolution,” he said. “That philosophy is sure to embrace all the interests of Man on this Earth. It will be one of its crowning triumphs to bring light and order into the social problems which are of universal bearing on all mankind. Mr. Spencer is breaking the path for us into this domain. We stand eager to follow him into it, and we look upon his work on sociology as a grand step in the history of science.”

But what, exactly, did these men mean by “science”? When Darwin published On the Origin of Species, the germ theory of disease was still a controversial proposition. We hadn’t yet really harnessed electricity. Nobody knew about genes, and though Gregor Mendel had developed a model for the inheritance of traits by 1865, nobody knew about Mendel until 1900. At that point, atomic theory was still not yet considered settled physical law.

Of course, not everything seemed uncertain. Phrenology was accepted science. The practice of most doctors relied on the theory of the four humors, which often demanded tremendous bloodletting. Scientific racism was, of course, terrifically popular, and often demanded a different kind of bloodletting.

To the men gathered at Delmonico’s, science was not a knowledge enterprise. It was a power enterprise. It had little to do with free inquiry and testable hypotheses; it had much more to do with methods of controlling nature through intelligence and capital, as the term “technology” implies today. It concerned the frontier, and America’s right to it, and the world’s wealth, and America’s right to it. Social Darwinism wasn’t a failed science, or a pseudoscience; it was, like the assembly line, a philosophy of technology, which seemed to confirm, and be confirmed by, the country’s long-standing faith in its own providence.

AMONG THE LAST TO speak at the Delmonico’s banquet was Henry Ward Beecher. A giant of an earlier era (Lincoln said that no one in history had “so productive a mind,” and Sinclair Lewis would later call him the “Archbishop of American liberal Protestantism”), Beecher had been humbled in the past decade by a spiraling sexual scandal. In preacherly tones, he spoke of sin—man’s propensity for it, his struggle against it and, obliquely, of his own transgressions, which had not simply diminished his celebrity as a theologian and public intellectual but had divided his congregation, turning many of his patrons against him and transforming the shape of his own faith in the process. Beecher had recently withdrawn from membership in his congregational association, saying that though he believed “without reserve” in Christ and his divinity, his more fundamental belief was now in the theory of evolution. At Delmonico’s, he was seeking absolution of a new kind, not from God but from science, and he invoked man’s animal past as a way to make sense of his own inner turmoil. He had no use for Christian doctrine anymore, he said. “It will not be twenty years before a man will be ashamed to stand up in any intelligent pulpit and mention it,” he declared.

Beecher was not alone, of course, in thinking that Christian faith of the kind he inherited from his parents belonged to the past, while the scientific values cheered by the Victorian elite were the frontier of the future. So why didn’t Darwin knock out religion, once and for all? The answer is undoubtedly a complex one, but in Angels and Ages Mr. Gopnik suggests one intriguing hypothesis—that the two weren’t ever, actually, in natural conflict: The real enemy of religion isn’t science, he says, it’s history.

American religion of the 19th century, Mr. Gopnik reminds us, was no longer in the business of making materialistic truth claims; what it offered instead was an ethical structure that implied a moral orientation. That orientation, Mr. Gopnik writes, “involved what could be called a ‘vertical’ organization of life, one in which we imagine a hierarchy of species organized on earth, descending from man on down toward animals, and a judge appraising us above in heaven.” That order prevailed for a very long time, probably as long as everyday life gave the impression of moving in cycles, rather than in generations. (Modern science, which involves, essentially, scrutinizing the ground beneath our feet, could fit right in.) But the order was shaken by our sense of history, by our sense that we live in changing times and by our sense that the central and critical facts of those times are what does change. That modern orientation—reflected, Mr. Gopnik writes, when Darwin placed the human experience in the context of our extended biological history, and when Lincoln wrestled with making war to secure political progress—is a linear one, “with man looking behind only to see what had happened before, and forward to see what he could make next. On that horizontal plane,” he writes, “we are invested in our future as much as in our afterlife, and in our children more than in our ancestors.”

David Wallace-Wells is an editor at The Paris Review and the former books editor of The New York Sun. He can be reached at books@observer.com.

Of course, the resonance of Lincoln's words came from the circumstances under which he delivered them. The Civil War, at last, was over, and as they mourned their dead sons and brothers, Americans wondered if and how their country could ever be one again. There was a yearning for a confident president who could tell the people that the future would be better than the past—and who could make them believe it.

What we'll never know is how the momentum from Lincoln's historic speech, which came on the heels of a landslide reelection victory in 1864, would have shaped his second term. Lincoln had deep popular support and considerable political capital, but just over a month after the speech, he was murdered.

But maybe, in a roundabout way, we're about to find out what could have happened otherwise.

It's extremely common for politicians to end up styling themselves after one or two of their favorite leaders from history. Sometimes their choice of role model is apt; sometimes it's self-delusional. George W. Bush's Churchill complex clearly falls into the second category; John McCain's infatuation with Teddy Roosevelt, the courageous war hero who relished picking fights with a stodgy Republican establishment, seems a lot more realistic.

Mr. Obama's infatuation is with Abraham Lincoln, his fellow (non-native) Illinoisan. He launched his campaign nearly two years ago on the steps of the Old State Capitol in Springfield, where Lincoln once served in the Illinois Legislature. And, before being sworn in on Tuesday on the same Bible used for Lincoln's own 1861 inaugural, Mr. Obama stood in front of the Lincoln Memorial on Sunday afternoon to address hundreds of thousands of supporters who'd made their way to Washington for his inaugural.

As with Mr. McCain and T.R., there is more than a little something to Mr. Obama's sense of kinship with Lincoln. Neither man (as Mr. Obama and his supporters repeatedly pointed out during the campaign) had an extensive political résumé before running for president, and both catapulted to national prominence with mesmerizing oratory—Lincoln through his famous Cooper Union speech in early 1860 and Mr. Obama through his keynote address at the 2004 Democratic convention. And both believed they were on unifying missions—Lincoln to save the Union, and Mr. Obama (as he has said often in the run-up to his inaugural) to create a more perfect one.

But what makes the analogy particularly apt is that, as in 1865 and only a few other times between then and now, the public is once again hungering for a confident and clear-headed president to lead them out of dire circumstances. There's no Civil War going on, but there are two wars overseas and an economy back home whose basic foundation is threatened in a way not seen since the Great Depression. Pride and confidence are sagging, the middle class is evaporating, and there's a pervasive sense that the bad news is here to stay.

Few presidents have a chance to deliver an Inaugural Address under circumstances like this. The upside is obvious: The entire nation is watching and listening, eager to believe and open to whatever personal challenges their new leader might lay before them. Words and phrases that might fall flat or clichéd in another year take on surprising weight and significance. F.D.R.'s "nothing to fear but fear itself" line might have sounded merely clever in, say, 1920, but as the Depression bore down on America, it rallied the country around him, vesting him with an army of popular support that compelled a previously immobile Senate into the busiest 100-day stretch of legislative activity ever seen.

Likewise, George H. W. Bush's emphasis on community and national service in his 1989 Inaugural Address provoked a benignly favorable response, but the speech, delivered amid strong economic times and (relative) international tranquility, was forgotten almost immediately. Mr. Obama seems poised to stress some of those same themes in his own address, but this time they surely won't go unnoticed.

In the modern age, theater also counts for a lot, and no figure in American politics today is better suited to the "big speech" moment as Mr. Obama is. This gift for oratory will render Mr. Obama's message infinitely more impactful, giving him the opportunity to enjoy the same second mandate that F.D.R. won through his own Inaugural Address.

Lincoln never had to perform for television or radio. But he was renowned as one of his generation's finest orators, too; chances are, he would have been a natural in the broadcast medium. What Lincoln did for a crowd at the Capitol in 1865, Mr. Obama has the opportunity to do for a live audience measuring in the hundreds of millions. Then he will try to bring about the more perfect Union that his role model once envisioned, but never had the chance to deliver.

The action begins in Mr. Wilentz’s introduction, where he sneers at the “picturesque costume dramas that commonly appear under the heading of popular history and biography.” Perhaps the sharpest put-down comes from Edmund Wilson, who deplores the “romantic and sentimental rubbish” written about the Great Emancipator and wonders whether “the cruelest thing that has happened to Lincoln since he was shot by Booth was to fall into the hands of Carl Sandburg.”

FRANK RICH BEGINS HIS most recent column (www.nytimes.com) with a literary allusion that’s very nearly a perfect fit. Mr. Rich compares George W. Bush to “the reckless Yalie Tom Buchanan,” Daisy’s bad boy husband in The Great Gatsby. Tom and W. are both Yalies, true, and it’s also true that both are arrogant, narcissistic hypocrites, children of privilege and victims of arrested development with zero self-awareness and a supercilious manner. It might be a stretch to call Tom “the entitled scion of one of America’s aristocratic dynasties” (all we know about his pedigree is that his family were “enormously wealthy” Midwesterners), but we can surely agree that Tom and Mr. Bush share the carelessness that smashes up things and creatures and lets other people clean up the mess. Fitzgerald’s famous condemnation of the Buchanans must be the point of the comparison. So far, so good.

But here’s what Mr. Rich actually wrote: “He’s the reckless Yalie Tom Buchanan, not Gatsby. He is smaller than life.” That last sentence spoils it. Tom may be stunted in a moral and intellectual sense (when Tom and Nick Carraway run into each other at the end of the novel, Nick feels as though he were “talking to a child”), but the image of Tom that sticks in every reader’s mind is of overpowering animal force. Fitzgerald insists on it from the first: “Not even the effeminate swank of his riding clothes could hide the enormous power of that body—he seemed to fill those glistening boots until he strained the top lacing, and you could see a great pack of muscle shifting when his shoulder moved under his thin coat. It was a body capable of enormous leverage—a cruel body.” Daisy complains that she has married “a brute of a man, a great big hulking physical specimen.” Tom protests that he hates “that word hulking,” but Daisy has nailed it. Physically, he’s larger than life, a hulk in every sense.

A QUICK GLANCE AT the contents page of Ali Smith’s disappointing new collection, The First Person (Pantheon, $23.95), is enough to confirm the suspicion aroused by the title that this is going to be a self-reflexive wallow. “True Short Story,” “The Third Person,” “The History of History,” The Second Person,” “Writ”—what are the chance of finding a good yarn in there? None.

Here’s proof, from the title story:

“You’re not the first person to spin me a yarn, I say.

“I’m pre-yarn, you say. I’m post-yarn. Yarn.

“You say the word yarn like you said the word yawn this morning. I try not to laugh.”

Yes—I think we can manage to repress our laughter.

A pity, because Ms. Smith truly is “a skilled, majestically confident writer”—that’s from a blurb on the back of The First Person attributed to The Observer. I confess that I wrote those words (about Ms. Smith’s prize-winning novel, The Accidental). Now that I’ve read her latest short stories, I’d like to amend my judgment: Ms. Smith is a skilled, majestically confident writer who must in the future work very hard to avoid solipsistic self-indulgence.

Lincoln: The Biography of a Writer
By Fred Kaplan
Harper, 416 pages, $27.95

Tried By War: Abraham Lincoln as Commander In Chief
By James M. McPherson
Penguin, 384 pages, $35

Looking for Lincoln: The Making of an American Icon
By Philip B. Kunhardt III, Peter W. Kunhardt, and Peter W. Kunhardt Jr.
Alfred A. Knopf, 512 pages, $50

The Lincoln Anthology: Great Writers on His Life and
Legacy from 1860 to Now
Edited by Harold Holzer
Library of America, 964 pages, $40

Lincoln looms large this Thanksgiving. He always resurfaces in November, the month of the Gettysburg Address and the holiday he helped to create (it was in 1863 that he invited his fellow citizens “to set apart and observe the last Thursday of November next, as a day of Thanksgiving and Praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the Heavens”). He also tends to reappear when we’re in trouble: in the 1960s, and the 1930s, when F.D.R. visited his memorial every year on his birthday, and tried overtly to claim Lincoln for the Democratic party. Such a realignment seems to be in the cards again, judging from Barack Obama’s recent words and deeds. It will drive the Republicans crazy, but that’s half the fun of it. In fact, they left Lincoln a long time before he left them.

Why do we love Lincoln? One simple answer is the tidal pull of marketing—a force Lincoln, the most photographed politician of his era, understood well. Next Feb.12 marks the bicentennial of his birth in that famous log cabin, and entire forests are being wiped out to keep up with what is expected to be a healthy demand for the latest in Lincoln biography. (Dwight Macdonald divided all American writing into three categories: fiction, nonfiction and Civil War.)

It’s been said that no book with Lincoln on the cover has ever lost money, and publishers will subject that hypothesis to a robust test in 2009, with books ranging from exhibit companions (the Library of Congress is planning a retrospective) to compilations of his writings to essays about him to scholarly treatises. At present, a search for “Lincoln” on Amazon yields nearly a quarter million results (241,858 and counting)—almost half the number of soldiers who fell in the Civil War. That would suggest that for all our searching, we still haven’t found him.

The new flood of books will allow us to reacquaint ourselves with a president so familiar that we sometimes forget how elusive he can be. Fifty years ago, in an address to Congress, Carl Sandburg put it well when he called him “as hard as rock and soft as drifting fog.” In one of his eerie final dreams, Lincoln felt himself to be “in a singular and indescribable vessel moving with great rapidity toward a dark and indescribable shore.” So he continues to float, a little out of control, like an untethered balloon at the Macy’s parade, leading us once again to parts unknown.

BUT THERE'S MORE to it than a birthday—one also feels something new, what Seamus Heaney once called the “rhyme” between hope and history. We’re about to inaugurate a 44th president with more than a passing resemblance to the 16th. Barack Obama’s supporters have compared him at various moments to John F. Kennedy and Franklin Roosevelt, with varying degrees of plausibility, but the media has generally ignored the historical comparison that the candidate himself has always promoted. Mr. Obama launched his campaign on February 10, 2007 (an eternity ago), in Springfield, Ill., and cited exactly one historic figure—Lincoln. All Illinois politicians talk about Lincoln—it comes with the license plate—but Mr. Obama does so with feeling. He announced his VP pick in Springfield. His victory speech quoted Lincoln’s first inaugural (“We are not enemies, but friends”). His farewell letter to the people of Illinois two weeks ago cited Lincoln’s farewell to Springfield. The theme of his inaugural will be “A New Birth of Freedom,” a phrase from the Gettysburg Address that he used at the very beginning, in his speech launching his candidacy.

It’s the perfect theme, both patriotic and corrective, implying that we’re in need of a new definition of “freedom,” perhaps the most important word in the American language, and yet one that we have grown a little tired of hearing about, in the wake of Guantánamo and other shortcomings. Lincoln argued against exactly this problem, furious that defenders of slavery tried to claim “freedom” as a reason to invade sovereign nations, and eager to give it a new meaning, closer to what the founders intended—a word meant to connote human rights, tolerance and the unfettered potential of the individual, not secrecy, war and the untrammeled power of the executive. He put it well in 1864: “The world has never had a good definition of the word liberty, and the American people, just now, are much in want of one. We all declare for liberty; but in using the same word we do not all mean the same thing.” It will be a great pleasure to see the word brought back to its proper coordinates.

Of course, freedom is also a word with special relevance to the African-American story. For all his imperfections, Lincoln remains essential to that story. On Easter Sunday 1939, after being barred from Constitution Hall by the Daughters of the American Revolution, Marian Anderson sang from the comforting shade of the Lincoln Memorial. In 1963, Martin Luther King Jr., gave the culminating address of the Civil Rights movement in front of Lincoln’s statue. On election night 2008, an alert photographer, Matt Mendelsohn, went to the memorial and captured the spontaneous eruptions of joy there (he described them in a New York Times Op-Ed the next day). The inaugural, three weeks before the bicentennial, will only deepen the connection: Thanks to the fact that presidents now speak on the west side of the Capitol, Barack Obama will be in direct dialogue with Abraham Lincoln, as they face each other across the Mall and all of American history.

AMAZINGLY, SOME OF THIS season’s books actually bring news. It’s hard to believe that any fresh discoveries are possible, but as historians plow these well-tilled fields, they continue to unearth new facts and artifacts. It was only this year that a curator found new images of the second inaugural at the Library of Congress. And it was not too long ago—1976—that the contents of his pocket the night he was killed were made available for the first time: two pairs of eyeglasses (one repaired with twine), a penknife, a watch fob, a cuff link, a handkerchief and a wallet with a Confederate $5 bill. The two eyeglasses had different prescriptions—perfect for a president coming in and out of focus all the time.

In the last few years, we’ve had Depressed Lincoln (compelling); Gay Lincoln (unpersuasive); and Machiavellian Lincoln (the master manipulator of his Team of Rivals). Among the new Lincolns now being offered up are Lincoln the Commander (a gripping study of Lincoln’s military leadership by James McPherson, the Civil War historian); Lincoln the Writer (an elegant portrait of his literary sensibility from Fred Kaplan); and Lincoln the God (a fascinating coffee-table book that describes how Americans became obsessed by Lincoln from his death in 1865 to the dedication of the Lincoln Memorial in 1922). That last book comes from the Kunhardt family, who not only recount this story, but inhabit it, for it was their ancestor, Frederick Meserve, who began the large collection of Lincoln photographs they continue to create books from.

Even the Library of America is joining the frenzy. It has already published three books of Lincoln’s writings, but now adds a fourth, essays about Lincoln, among them some works that were long hard to find. A number of foreign perspectives are included: Tolstoy was a strong Lincoln man; and with this volume, Karl Marx at last makes a cameo appearance in the Library of America, a fact that will brighten the day of conspiracy theorists everywhere.

Perhaps the most topical new book is Harold Holzer’s study of “the Great Secession Winter” that elapsed from Lincoln’s election to his assumption of power. It’s a moving portrait of a politician still feeling his way forward on the national stage, but beginning to find his strength. Mr. Holzer uncovers arresting kernels of information (the night Lincoln passed through Albany on his way to Washington, John Wilkes Booth, acting in the same city, stabbed himself badly when he fell on his dagger onstage). Nearly every detail evokes the present as well as the past, describing an outsider preparing to save the republic from years of misrule. Lincoln is besieged by visitors both friendly and unfriendly; he negotiates delicately with cabinet appointees; he gives more than 100 speeches, some better than others. Finally, he travels to inherit the prize, passing through a New York City that is not entirely responsive (its mayor threatened to secede, and P. T. Barnum put on display “The Great Lincoln Turkey”) before moving on to Philadelphia, Baltimore (where he was nearly killed) and finally Washington itself, where he was derided for avoiding assassination. It’s sobering to see the obstacles this outsider had to overcome to become Lincoln. Not only did most of the South secede before he took office, he also had the worst secret service nickname in history (“Nuts”).

Reading through this logjam of books, I was reminded of an observation made by Lincoln’s personal aide, John Nicolay. “Lincoln’s features were the despair of every artist who undertook his portrait. … Graphic art was powerless before a face that moved through a thousand delicate gradations of line and contour, light and shade, sparkle of the eye and curve of the lip, in the long gamut of expression from grave to gay. … There are many pictures of Lincoln; there is no portrait of him.” But that elusiveness does not discourage—on the contrary, it makes the hunt all the more exciting. “We cannot escape history,” Lincoln told us, and this holiday season the sheer number of references to him seems to prove it. But as he also reminded us, we have it eternally in our power to think anew. At this terribly important juncture in the saga of the United States, with Lincoln near the helm, we begin to do just that.

Ted Widmer, who directs the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University, was a speechwriter for President Clinton. His latest book is Ark of the Liberties: America and the World (Hill and Wang). He can be reached at books@observer.com.