January 2011

The face stares at us across time, a haunting patina of sadness clinging to its outsized features. It is a strong, young face—surely innocent of, yet somehow foreshadowing, the bloody future that lay ahead for America.

Its owners say it is the very first photographic portrait of Abraham Lincoln, a precious, hitherto unknown sixth-plate daguerreotype made in Springfield at the time Lincoln had risen no higher in politics than the Illinois legislature. Its detractors argue that it is merely a look-alike. Although collectors uncover so-called new and unknown Lincoln photographs with numbing regularity—images invariably proven spurious—this portrait is different. It comes with a pedigree, having descended from the family of the sixteenth President’s own private secretary.

Feature by feature, the subject is uncannily Lincolnesque—even if the overall impression fails to mesh with his known photographs (not surprising, since all but one were taken at least fourteen years later).

As soon as he moved to Illinois in 1830, Abraham Lincoln found himself on the opposite side of the political fence from Peter Cartwright, a well-known Methodist preacher and politician. They crossed paths in the Illinois legislature, but their best-known confrontation was as opponents in the 1846 congressional election, which Lincoln won handily. Late in that campaign Lincoln found himself having to combat a rumor that he was an “infidel,” or unbeliever, a charge uncomfortably close to the truth. If Cartwright had anything to do with that rumor, he may have regarded Lincoln’s discomfort as the evening of an old score, for what follows is the story of a stinging satirical attack on Cartwright, written a dozen years earlier, but hitherto unknown in Lincoln biography.

The canvas upon which I wielded my brush with history has grown to epic proportions and shows no sign, at all, of diminishing in size.

In the 1950s I ventured into the not-for-profit health-agency field, and in 1962 I became Senior Public Health Advisor and Program Coordinator of the United States Public Health Service-sponsored Immunization Program with the City of New York, Department of Health and Hospitals.

The ultimate goal of the program was to determine the immunization levels of all pre-school-age children in the five boroughs of New York City and then to increase those levels to a standard acceptable to both the City of New York and to the U.S. Public Health Service.

As the immunization levels for diphtheria, whooping cough, tetanus, and polio rose in New York City, the Public Health Service decided to include a measles vaccine in the program.

The American Canadian Caribbean Line offers a variety of interesting trips to places larger cruise ships often can’t negotiate. The atmosphere is friendly and low-key, the accommodations comfortable but modest. Their three ships have retractable bow ramps that allow for landings directly onto the beach. These performances depend on just the right conditions of weather and tide. Both were perfect at Sanibel Island, where we strode to shore through thigh-high wavelets to the astonishment of a throng of onlookers, sunbathers and fishermen diverted for the moment from their purposes.

At dinner on the first full day aboard the New Shoreham II, Nancy Heslin, the cheerful and inexhaustible cruise director, asked how many passengers had traveled with the line before. Every person raised a hand but one. I was the lone newcomer. For one couple, this was the third trip aboard an American Canadian Caribbean Line ship in a year. The company’s unwieldy name reflects the territory its three small vessels cover, and my fifty-three fellow travelers seemed to have sailed through most of it, requiring the ACCL to devise new itineraries regularly. On this early February evening, we were trying a brand-new route that would bring the passengers from West Palm Beach to New Orleans at the height of Mardi Gras.

The explicit premise behind this column, it should be clear to regular readers, is borrowed from Ecclesiastes (or Koheleth) and declares that “there is no new thing under the sun.” It is sometimes hard to justify; I am not sure what Ecclesiastes would have made of DNA or computers. But, at times, the message virtually ( cries aloud to whoever will listen. In the autumn of last year, President Clinton and Vice President Gore unveiled a mighty plan to shrink the bloated and wasteful federal bureaucracy and thereby in effect “reinvent government.”

At a well-staged press conference on the White House lawn Clinton and Gore promised to cut out at least a quarter of a million redundant jobs and infuse federal jobholders with a new, “consumer-oriented” spirit in which cost efficiency and customer satisfaction would become cherished values.

The Victorians regarded their times, quite correctly, as a great age of reform. They abolished slavery. They spread public education throughout the country. They began the march down the road to women’s rights.

But there is one great nineteenth-century reform that, uniquely, is being rapidly and wholly reversed at the end of the twentieth: the crusade against gambling. Legal gambling was nearly extinguished in this country before the First World War. But in 1992, Americans paid about thirty billion dollars to gambling concerns for the privilege of betting, more than was spent on movie tickets, recorded music, amusement parks, and books combined.

Casinos, not legal even in Nevada until 1931, are now found in New Jersey and, thanks to a quirk in federal law, on a rapidly growing number of Indian reservations as well. New York City has been running a string of bookie joints (decorously called off-track betting parlors) for more than twenty years.

On the road again

As spring returns and with it the old urge to get moving, American Heritage once again provides a nationful of fascinating destinations for the historically minded traveler. Among them:

Grand hotels

Surely no form of historic travel can be more seductive than that offered by the survivors of the great age of the American hotel. It dawned in 1829 when Boston’s Tremont House opened its doors, and although the Tremont is long gone, J. M. Fenster hears its echoes in the public spaces of a score of splendid hostelries.

Seattle

It grew in a cacophony of violence and squalor—and promptly became one of the most civilized places on earth. Andrew Ward is one of thousands of settlers beguiled by the city’s charm; he celebrates it with a bracing trace of lingering East Coast skepticism.

Paddling through the past

It was a legend of myth and fear, this bloodied gown visited by ghosts. It had formed the subject of a short book. It had witnessed supreme tragedy and brought new tragedy—madness, murder, they said; and, finally, the bricked-in closet where it had hung unworn for decades was broken into, and it was taken off its clothes hanger and burned to ashes. The son of its long-dead owner said he destroyed it to end a bloody curse. Such was the disposition of the dress that Clara Harris wore on the night of Abraham Lincoln’s assassination.