Day 56. April 25, 1862.
56
shot through with sentiment, moonshine, and special pleading….
April Friday 25 1862
Quite a fine morning and the day was very pleasant and the mud has dryed up all the day has all appearance of summer. Nothing new in camp and no late war news at this present time
Lincoln Day by Day: A Chronology 1809-1865 Volume III: 1861-1865 C. Percy Powell P. 108
“April 25, 1862: Sec. Welles rushes to White House to share with President news that Flag Officer David G. Farragut (USN) has taken New Orleans. In evening, Sen. Browning (Ill.) spends hour and half at White House reading poetry with Lincoln. Visitors waiting when Browning left.”
Americans Remember Their Civil War Barbara A. Gannon P. 105-106
“Jenny Barrett, a scholar of film and popular culture studies, in Shooting the Civil War: Cinema, History, and American National Identity (2009) identified “the one abiding source of knowledge about the Civil War, however, is not the historical textbook, nor even the novel, but the cinema.” She cited an estimated seven hundred movies and documentaries to support this claim. Despite the significant number of movies she identified, Barrett believed that “there is no such thing as the “Civil War film.’” Instead, Civil War movies might be family melodramas, Westerns, or combat films and followed the conventions of these genres. While she rejected the idea of a Civil War movie, she analyzed common elements in these films that buttressed American national identity. She identified a theme widely espoused in many Civil War Westerns– “All threats are overcome by unity,” a common notion in Civil War combat films– “Being prepared to fight for what is right.” The message was clear. All challenges facing the United States could be overcome by national reunion based on the notion that Southerners fought and died for what they believed right. Accepting these ideas reinforced a shared national identity, remembering the Union Cause, sectional disunity, and a war against slavery, challenged American nationalism.
Civil War films might not be a distinct genre because filmmakers made fewer films on the American sectional conflict than other more popular genres. Lawrence A. Kreiser Jr. and Randal Allred in their introduction to The Civil War in Popular Culture: Memory and Meaning (2014) discussed the millions of hits the term “Civil War” gets when typed into an Internet search engine, more than double any other war of its era. Despite this interest, moviemakers produced only a few hundred Civil War movies; the vast majority of these productions completed during the silent era. A 1964 analysis of Civil War movies was telling; John Kuiper identified 495 Civil War films, 359 released between 1910 and 1919. During the 1920s, 1930s, and 1950s, moviemakers produced about thirty films in each decade. While Kuiper made this assessment by decade, he noted that during World War I and World War II, Civil War moviemaking declined; in 1917, there were 18 films, in 1919, 3. Hollywood released no Civil War films in 1943 and 1945 with only 10 Civil War movies produced in the decade of the 1940s. Real wars made the reel Civil War less popular. In contrast, one study documented over 5,000 Westerns. As Richard Aquila in The Sagebrush Trail: Western Movies and Twentieth-Century America (2015) argued, Westerns’ “reflected and reinforced American beliefs in democracy, freedom, self-reliance, morality, nationalism, and heroism.” For Americans, regardless of their Civil War memory, Westerns “offered powerful images of a mythic west, providing exhilarating tales, positive memories, and an unambiguous national identity.” In contrast, Civil War movies evoke a time when American nationality was almost destroyed.’”
Note: Kenneth E. Boulding: The only religion that still demands human sacrifice is nationalism.
White Trash. The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America Nancy Isenberg P. 255-256
“For filmmakers, the allure of redneck characters was double-edged. On the one hand, they were ready-made villains; on the other, they were men without inhibitions. Unrestrained and undomesticated, they stood in sharp contrast to the boxed-in suburbanite and could occasionally be appreciated for their earthy machismo. Sloan Wilson’s male protagonist in The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (1955), another novel made into a Hollywood film, starring Gregory Peck, was a pale imitation of the primal Cajun doing his dance to drumbeats. James Dean, Elvis Presley, Marlon Brando, and even Timothy Carey, as poor white trash, were all unreformed Americans, undomestic and unconventional. They planted a wild seed, taunting conformist male spectators who might be itching to break loose.
“Redneck” and “white trash” were often used interchangeable, though not everyone agreed that the two were synonymous. In A Southerner Discovers the South (1938), Jonathan Daniels had insisted that not all humbly born southern men were “po’ whites.” He gave as examples Andrew Jackson and Abraham Lincoln, southern folk whose “necks were ridged and red with the sun.” He thus divided the poor into two camps: the worthy, hardworking poor who strove to move up the social ladder and the vulgar and hopeless who were trapped on its lowest rung. His worthy poor, having the “stout, earthy qualities of the redneck,” borrowed from the older class of yeoman, a category that no longer meant what it once had. That said, Daniels’s observation was not historically accurate: as we know, Jackson was vilified by his enemies as a violent, lawless cracker, and Lincoln was disparagingly termed a poor white “mudsill.” But even Daniels had to admit that many other southerners defined the redneck as one who was “raised on hate.” He despised blacks and demeaned “nigger lovers.” In the mold of Bob Ewell, he stood prepared to stick a knife in the back of any who crossed him. That, then, was the label that stuck.
And what about the hillbilly? Though redneck and hillbilly were both defined by the American Dialect Society in 1904 as “uncouth country-men,” the following regional distinction was offered: “Hill-billies came from the hills, and the rednecks from the swamps.” Like rednecks, hillbillies were seen as cruel and violent, but with most of their anger directed at neighbors, family members, and “furriners” (unwelcomed strangers). Like the legendary Hatfields and McCoys in the 1880s, they were known for feuding and explosive bouts of rage. When they weren’t fighting, they were swilling moonshine and marrying off their daughters at seven. Like the squatter of old, they were supposedly given to long periods of sloth. Stories spread of shotgun marriages, accounts of barefoot and pregnant women. In a 1933 study of an isolated community in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia, a woman being interviewed blurted out that marriage meant she was “goin’ to have her number” (of children). “I done had mine,” she explained. “Fifteen. Nine living and six dead.’”
P. 270-271
Eventually, self-identified “white trash” who had come up in the world began defending their depressed class background as a distinct (and perversely noble) heritage. Before the end of the 1980s, “white trash” was rebranded as an ethnic identity, with its own readily identifiable cultural forms: food, speech patterns, tastes, and, for some, nostalgic memories. If immigrants had foreign origins to reflect on, white trash invented a country of their own within the United States. In its most benign incarnation, this substration of the amorphous American class system was no longer to be categorized as an inferior “breed” (with undesirable genetic traits) so much as a product of cultural breeding that could easily be shed and later recovered– a tradition, or identity, that one did not have to shy away from in order to gain acceptance in mainstream society. In its worst form, however, white trash identity dredged up a person’s early traumatic experiences, repressed childhood memories. A not insignificant part of that was sexual deviance, a problem that still hovers over white trash America today. Hollywood gave the country an enduring symbol of that deviance, and the unwanted’s recourse to barbarism, in its adaptation of James Dickey’s violent thriller Deliverance (1970). Set in rural Georgia near the South Carolina border, the film, released in 1972, seared into the national imagination its devastating portrait of white trash ugliness and backwoods debauchery.
No matter whether it is cast as urban or rural, religious or secular, Anglo- or other hyphenate, the search for national belonging is never new. Despite the nasty cultural memory jarred loose by the retrogressive message in Deliverance (and especially the horrific rape of Ned Beatty’s character), the backcountry of America never completely lost its regenerative associations. Appalachia remained in the minds of many a lost island containing a purer breed of Anglo-Saxon. Here, in this imaginary country of the past, is where the best of Jefferson’s yeoman “roots” could be traced. Most of all, there was a raw masculinity to be found in the hills. A larger trend was turning America into a more ethnically conscious nation, one in which ethnicity substituted for class. The hereditary model had not been completely abandoned; instead, it was reconfigured to focus on transmitted cultural values over inbred traits.
An inherent paradox added to the confusion over the nature of cultural identity. Modern Americans’ largely blind pursuit of the authentic, stable self was taking place in a country where roots could be, and often were, discarded. In the American model, assimilation preceded social mobility, which required either adoption of a new identity or assumption of a class disguise in order to insert oneself into the desired category of middle class. Yet by the late 1960s the middle class had become the most inauthentic of places: the suburbs provided indelible images of foil-covered TV dinners, banal Babbittry, and bad sitcoms. People took part in staid dinner parties, evocatively portrayed in The Graduate, where the talk was of a career-making investment in plastics- and what better stood for inauthenticity than unnatural products invented by chemists? There was a growing awareness that middle-class comfort was an illusion. Two sociologists ironically concluded that the few authentic identities still claimable in 1970 existed in the isolated pockets of the rural poor: Appalachian hillbillies in Tennessee, marginal dirt farmers in the upper Midwest, and “swamp Yankees” in New England.”
Note: See Dying of Whiteness: How the Politics of Racial Resentment is Killing America’s Heartland (2019) Jonathan M. Metzl.
Causes Won, Lost, & Forgotten: How Hollywood and Popular Art Shape What We Know About the Civil War Gary W. Gallagher P. 51-52
“Shenandoah marked a watershed in Hollywood’s relationship with the Lost Cause. Released in January 1965, six months after the congressional passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, it shuns the glorification of the plantation South and, most tellingly, places slavery at the center of the Confederate war. The film focuses on the nonslaveholding family of Charlie Anderson (Jimmy Stewart), who live on a prosperous 500-acre farm in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley during the last autumn of the war. Because of the Confederacy’s stringent conscription act passed more than two years earlier, approximately 90 percent of Virginia’s military-age white males were in the army or engaged in war-related occupations by the period covered in the film. Yet Anderson and his six sons, as well as his daughter and his daughter-in-law, have managed to remain aloof from the conflict.
The film’s anti-Lost Cause emerges early, when one of the sons remarks that as Virginians the Andersons can no longer ignore the war. Charlie responds by asking if the sons want to own slaves. No, they reply,. “Now suppose that you had a friend that owned slaves and suppose somebody was going to come and take them away from him,” continues Anderson. “Would you help him fight to keep them?” The sons say they would not, with one explaining, “I don’t see any reason to fight for something that I don’t believe is right, and I don’t think that a real friend would ask me to.” Later, Anderson rebuffs a Confederate officer seeking recruits and government purchasing agents in search of horses and mules. He built his farm “without the sweat of one slave,” he affirms, and when told that “Virginia needs all her sons,” replies: “These are my sons. They don’t belong to the state.” Unlike most white southerners in previous films dealing with the Civil War, he consistently refuses to make any sacrifice for either slaveholding Virginia or the Confederacy.”
The Mind of the South W. J. Cash (1941) P. 419
“It was the measure of something that, after fifteen years of the new spirit in Southern writing, Margaret Mitchell’s*** sentimental novel, Gone with the Wind, which had curiously begun by a little offending many Southerners, ended by becoming a sort of new confession of the Southern faith. The scene at Atlanta when the motion picture made from the romance was given its first showing in the nation was one of the most remarkable which America has seen in our time. Primarily, of course, the showing, and its accompaniment of parades and balls, represented a purely commercial scheme arranged by producers of the picture. But in the event it turned into a high ritual for the reassertion of the legend of the Old South. Atlanta became a pilgrimage for people from the entire region. The ceremonies were accompanied by great outbursts of emotion, which bore no relationship to the actual dramatic value of a somewhat dull and thin performance. And later on, when the picture was shown in the other towns of the South, attendance at the theaters took on the definite character of a patriotic act.”
Note: Gone with the Wind (the novel) was, in Japan, a best-seller in 1939, according to Ayers on page 158 in What Caused the Civil War.
Americans Remember Their Civil War Barbara A. Gannon P. xviii-xix
“People who remembered the Lost Cause have little to complain about in popular memory. Here too, the Lost Cause seemed more successful than the Union Cause for much of the twentieth century. Since many more people saw movies or television programs about the Civil War than visited battlefields, this may constitute their most vivid memory of the conflict. Partly, the success of the Lost Cause reflected its broader success in American memory; however, the Confederate cause often resonated in popular culture. Gone with the Wind’s (1939) success as a best-selling novel and one of the most popular movies of all time may have been as much about its popularity as a romantic melodrama than its portrayal of the Lost Cause version of Civil War memory. Its place in memory may be about what happened after millions of Americans saw this movie. To these men and women that became their Civil War memory. In contrast, the first movie that portrayed the African American Civil War experience, Glory (1989), debuted almost one hundred and twenty-five years after the war ended suggesting that the Lost Cause dominated popular memory long after the civil rights movement challenged the memory of the Lost Cause.”
***Mitchell won’t learn the South lost the war, The Wind Done Gone, until she was age 10. In 1939, Gone With the Wind, run time 3h, 58m, gets screened at the White House. The flick becomes actual history & not just entertainment, their words telling on them, & Roosevelt never invites another African-American back to the very White House, & he names it just such, White House. In 2020, HBO pulls the film from rotation in order to add “historical context.”
Note: At Loew’s Grand Theatre, 12/15/39, apparently 300,000 people queued up in a seven mile line in Atlanta, & the Mayor declared the day a State holiday. In Great Depression: People and Perspectives by Hamilton Cravens (P. 221), former President Jimmy Carter is quoted as calling this premiere “The biggest event to happen in the South in my lifetime.” (What?) Black actors were not allowed in the building to watch the film they starred in; due to this, Clark Gable tried to boycott the showing, but got talked into going anyway. Probably sailed for Brookhaven the next day. Anyhoo, the film kept getting re-released, including in 1961, the war centennial, & Vivien Leigh showed up but Clark Gable not, as he died the year prior (hard sail into Brookhaven). 1939 was the same year 20k New Yorkers showed up at Madison Square Garden to shout Heil Hitler. No, really.
Note: As Rhett Butler said in “Gone With The Wind,” Rhett: “I think it’s hard winning a war with words, gentlemen.” Charles: “What do you mean, sir?” Rhett: “I mean, Mr. Hamilton, there’s not a cannon factory in the whole South.” Man: “What difference does that make, sir, to a gentleman?” Rhett: “I’m afraid it’s going to make a great deal of difference to a great many gentlemen, sir.” Charles: “Are you hinting, Mr. Butler, that the Yankees can lick us?” Rhett: “No, I’m not hinting. I’m saying very plainly that the Yankees are better equipped than we. They’ve got factories, shipyards, coalmines… and a fleet to bottle up our harbors and starve us to death. All we’ve got is cotton, and slaves and… arrogance.” Man: “That’s treacherous!” Charles: “I refuse to listen to any renegade talk!” Rhett: “Well, I’m sorry if the truth offends you.” And in her Gone With the Wind speech: “All we’ve got is cotton and slaves and arrogance.” “Look at them. All these poor tragic people sinking to their knees.” “I’m angry. Waste always makes me angry & this is sheer waste.” A protection shot was filmed as an alternate ending in case they couldn’t get the word damn past the censors & Gable’s Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn was never said. This ending was one where shit somehow worked out. In 2005, the line was voted “most memorable American movie quotation of all time” by a 1,500 member jury at the American Film Institute.
Ken Burns’s the Civil War: Historians Respond Robert Brent Toplin “The Historian, the Filmmaker, and the Civil War.” Leon F. Litwack P. 139
“Both filmmakers and historians need to engage the public in the social complexity and diversity of the past, and to do so in ways that are conceptually persuasive, using a variety of individuals, events, ideas, and cultural documents. They need to bring into historical consciousness the perceptions and experiences of people- women and men- ordinarily left outside the framework of history, many of them losers in their own time, outlaws, rebels who- individually or collectively- tried to flesh out, tried to give meaning to abstract notions** of liberty, equality, and freedom, some of whom chose to dissent from the national consensus and opted for the highest kind of patriotism and loyalty to their country- a willingness to unmask its leaders and subject its institutions and ideology to critical examination.
Whether writing history or making historical films, the object is not to replace old lies with new myths, or old omissions and distortions with a new set of heroics and romanticism. A film about the Civil War, or any other historical subject, should not simply reinforce what Americans already know of their past.”
Note: Please see Causes Won, Lost, & Forgotten: How Hollywood and Popular Art Shape What We Know About the Civil War Gary W. Gallagher P. 214 for Foote’s word count in the Burns series: “7,677 (72.3 percent of the total), while that for the rest combined was 2,944.”
Bloody Engagements: John R. Kelso’s Civil War John R. Kelso Edited by Christopher Grasso P. 189
“Nearly all the wars in which the nations of earth have engaged, have originated from trivial or accidental causes, or from the caprice or the ambition of their rulers. Unlike those, our war has been one of principles– of antagonistic principles which, from the beginning, have underlain the whole fabric of our government.”
Note: A comic “Stirring Appeal” from Harper’s Weekly 12/10/64 shows a White southerner with 3 weapons– bayonet fixed on one & within reach of his left hand– as he addresses a slave with a steer: “Here! you mean, inferior, degraded Chattel, jest kitch holt of one of them ‘ere muskits, and conquer my freedom for me!” states the “Chivalric Southerner.” The “Chattel” responds: “Well, dunno, Massa; guess you’d better not be free: you know, Massa, slave folks is deal happier than free folks.”
Note: In the next centuries will we come any closer to answering the questions we have asked the last two centuries? Will the questions get crisper, more to the point, closer to what we should have asked all along? Because if answers depend on the questions & what’s still in the boxes, will the questions change when the right ones, new ones, are asked? Or the answers obtained may have very little in common with the questions asked. Stories of the facts do change, meaning has a life independent of a fact’s historical documentation in the ways by which meaning follows from words & the stories of facts. Stories & facts do change depending on the century. Or you could say facts don’t change but the meanings we put to them. What will the answers be then? We have to make our own meanings as we go along. In the past they had different meanings for the same word, different shades of meaning & contexts where those shades applied and other contexts where the word had no meaning. In the future they will too. They won’t have our same meanings. Where will The Real War go then? In 3000? 4000? When we’ve washed away?
Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War Tony Horwitz P. 290
“Most other neo-Confederates I’d met were romantics. The South they revered was hot-blooded, Celtic, heedlessly courageous; their poster boy was the Scottish clansman played by Mel Gibson in the splatterfest Braveheart. In their view, rationalism and technological efficiency were suspect Yankee traits, derived from a mercantile English empire that had put down the Scots and Irish.”
The Myth of the Lost Cause and Civil War History Gary W. Gallagher and Alan T. Nolan, Editors (2000) P. 22
“Kenneth Stampp has commented on this fiction. “Fundamentally,” he writes, “the Confederacy was not the product of a genuine southern nationalism. Indeed, except for the institution of slavery, the South had little to give it national identity, and the notion of a distinct southern culture was largely the figment of the romantic imagination of a handful of intellectuals and pro-slavery propagandists.’”
The Mind of the South W. J. Cash (1941) P. 63-64
“And so, in the last analysis, it was really not difficult in the least for the nouveaux with the compulsion of the South’s need operating upon them perhaps even more potently than upon the Virginians, and with the same habitual association between plantation and aristocrat which the Yankee and the world exhibited, fixed solidly in their minds also to achieve a misnomer in the premises. In the romantic simplicity of their thought-processes, they seem to have believed for conscious purposes that in acquiring rich lands and Negroes they did somehow automatically become aristocrats.
Did it belong to aristocrats to have splendid ancestors—to come down in old line from the masters of the earth? Genealogy would at once become an obsession, informed with all the old frontier inheritance of brag. If they were of English descent, then their forebears had infallibly ridden, not only with Rupert at Naseby, but also with William at Senlac; if Scotch or Scotch-Irish, they were invariably clansmen of the chieftain’s family, and usually connections, often direct descendants, of the royal blood—of the Bruce and Kenneth McAlpin; if plain Irish, they stemmed from British Boru. As for the Germans, I quote you, with a change of names, from the actual genealogical record of a family of upcountry Carolina: “Hans Muller, who was a carpenter by trade and the son of Max Muller, who was the son of a Hamburg merchant and the daughter of a German emperor, immigrated in 1742 and settled in…’”
The Unwritten War: American Writers and the Civil War Daniel Aaron P. 227-228
“The great war novel or epic everyone was calling for or predicting during the War and thereafter ought to have been written by a Southerner. The South was the “theater” of the battle action, the mise-en-scene distinctive and romantic, its principal actors appropriate to the magnitude of the tragedy. Moreover, a story of exploded expectations and of military and social disaster lends itself to literary treatment more readily than the vulgarity of victory. In retrospect, the fall of the Confederacy seems emblematic of the human tragedy- an outraged, self-deceived, vainglorious, brave people (not without fear and apprehension) tilted against the ever replenished armies of the North and against impersonal forces that organized and equipped them.
Today it is possible to construct the ideal author of the unwritten masterpiece: a man old enough to have fought in some of the campaigns; an insider, yet sufficiently unbeguiled by Southern preconceptions of caste and race and culture to appraise the parochialism of his section; a humorist and ironist gauging without cynicism the comic disproportion between Southern claims and performance; a student of human behavior who relishes the variety of types that flourished in the eleven “countries” of the Confederacy and records with Chekhovian nostalgia the passing of a way of life.
No such writer appeared until Faulkner. Between 1861 and 1900, a number of men and women, Southern in the background and point of view, spoke for their section and their cause, but only a small amount of fiction and poetry produced during those forty years had any permanent literary value. Even less of it deeply and seriously explored the War. The literature of the embattled Confederacy was a patriotic literature, predominantly polemical and shrill, occasionally elegiac. After the War no Southern De Forest or Bierce or Crane or Frederic emerged to document and analyze the tragic experience, no Whitman or Melville to universalize the American catastrophe.
Perhaps the War was too omnipresent and too stunning for Southern writers to comprehend at the time. During Reconstruction and after, old hatreds and humiliations blurred understanding and rather than attempt to write truthful accounts of the real War, many preferred to veil hateful realities in legend and romance. A few dared to question the legend and were roughly handled by its priests. Others chose the safer course of confining their recollections to memories, diaries, and letters, a repository that would ultimately contribute to the Southern literary harvest in the next century. A high percentage of nineteenth-century Southern writing about the War (fiction and poetry especially) was shot through with sentiment, moonshine, and special pleading. A lesser amount (much of it private and personal) was down-to-earth, sharp, humorous, observant. Among the Southerners who wrote about the War unrhetorically and with some detachment and insight, three names stand out: Henry Timrod, poet; Mary Chesnut, diarist; and George Washington Cable, novelist.”
Note: I type “Faulkner” in Salt Lake Public Library Website and a film comes up instead. 2017, “It Comes at Night”. I place a hold.
Right under that suggestion: THE WIDE-MOUTHED FROG: a pop-up book by Faulkner, Keith, 1948- comes up. “A wide- mouthed frog is interested in what other animals eat- until he meets a creature that eats only wide-mouthed frogs!”
And third: Firepower by Judas Priest (Musical group) Composer, performer, copies available 1 (of 5)
Then: Underworld. Bloodwars Sony Pictures Home Entertainment “….blockbuster franchise follows vampire death dealer Selene as she fends off brutal attacks from both the Lycan Clan & the vampire faction that betrayed her.”
Last: As I Lay Dying Call Number DVD Movie copies available 2 (of 2) Current Holds 0 Millenium Entertainment (Los Angeles, Calif) (2013)
Note: Game of dueling banjos, how far has Georgia come since the filming of Deliverance a half century ago? Burt Reynolds, Jon Voight, city boys who meet hillbillies & play a dangerous game. Tappan, you want to talk about White trash, you’re going to find out what that means. Plus, The Walking Dead was filmed in Georgia. The Crazies. Halloween II. Scream II. Friday the 13th IV.
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no late war news at this present time….
Both sides meet after the war, at Gettysburg, & you see it: it’s in a flash frame there beneath the face, barely perceptible on the film, a micro expression like stitches being ripped out, & it’s breaking a pat story if you slow the speed back down & look hard; it’s like stitches being ripped out & it’s apparent what they had to stitch up to be fine with, fine to show to the other side, a startled expression running down the center of the face’s outline like a star empty of light when, 20 years later, or sometime– who cares– it’s sometime, 35, 50, 75…. langoring along, they pass a peace cigar back and forth at that town’s reunion & a Colonel from the enemy side is guest speaker, lips crookedly aligned, switches on & off like an asymmetrical manufactured smile, an off-smile, & they sit at a table on those grounds & eat those corn cobs & those pork chops & they drink that fine whiskey &c.&c.&c. Eventually the face is going to slide off. A cicada husk.
A few minutes in they’re beginning to stand & applaud, & it is the extreme point at which a thing turns into its opposite. What are we even holding onto at this point? Then they sing the national anthem. Then something about This Land is Your Land, & someone else’s land. Meantime, at a hotel nearby, a knife fight breaks out when a Rebel insults Lincoln to a Yankee’s face. Or was it a Yankee, about Lee. It’s all the same, is it not. Because he was too easy to take down, Lincoln, at Our American Cousin, sitting up in the red high velvet chair staring down one flight at the stage where an actor like John Wilkes Booth had the luck of the devil waving at him. There’s no words fit to describe the thing. https://www.thehenryford.org/explore/inside/lincoln-rocker/
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