Posted Wednesday morning, March 3, 2021.
President-elect Abraham Lincoln saying farewell to his hometown of Springfield, Illinois from the rear platform of the train that would take him on the perilous journey to Washington, D.C. for his inauguration. February 11, 1861.
Doesn’t matter how insightful, vividly descriptive, narratively compelling, thematically appealing, dramatically realistic in its portrayals of the characters who move in and out of the story, and in all other ways well-written it is, sometimes my favorite passages in a work of nonfiction turn out to be the more mundane, workaday, just-the-facts, ma’am, paragraphs that simply tell me something I hadn’t known until I came across them in the course of reading the book in hand. Tim Widmer’s “Lincoln on the Verge”, his chronicle of President-elect Abraham Lincoln’s fraught, dangerous, sometimes comic, often harrowing, but ultimately triumphant two-week journey by train in February 1861 from his hometown in Springfield, Illinois to Washington, D.C. for his first inauguration, is insightful, vivid, compelling, thematically appealing, dramatic, and very well-written, and there are many passages I could quote from the 209 pages I’ve read so far illustrating these facts, and no doubt I’ll get around to doing that over the next couple of weeks as I chug along. But this morning this paragraph, which almost reads like an index card Widmer made notes on as he did his research, is making my day, because I didn’t know this about the Bush family history:
Euclid defined a circle as a shape with a center, from which all lines can be drawn equally. [Columbus, Ohio, through which Lincoln’s train passed on February 13] did its best to live up to that idea, open to all the young strivers who found their way into the gear mechanisms of a busy state capital. A generation later, an ambitious young mechanic named Samuel Bush [born in 1863] would rise quickly through the ranks to become a superintendent of motive power for a local railroad, then general manager of the Buckeye Steel Castings Company, which specialized in railroad couplers. Following new lines of energy, his children and grandchildren would move toward Connecticut, then Texas. In the fullness of time, the Bush family would supply the United States with two presidents, the forty-first and the forty-third.
---from “Lincoln on the Verge: Thirteen Days to Washington” by Ted Widmer.
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