RAIL-SPLITER HERO
When I think of our great president Abraham Lincoln ...Number 16, was a he not?.. I, normally, think first of the image which depicted him, not as a tall, rather dour stove-pipe hatted, fully-bearded person, but as the robust, youthfully masculine and dynamic rail-splitter as shown in the John Leon Gerome Ferris' painting bearing that destructive title -”The Rail Splitter”.
I wonder how many other youngsters see Lincoln in that active role rather than as the oh-so-serious, heavily bearded oldster he became. He has dignity in either role and his eyes hold a strange, haunting hint of compassion.. It is there in either pose, of course, and those who look at the pictures come to sense an amazing of compassion and understanding in the man. It is in his eyes, or, could it be in tiny folds in his skin under the eyes toward the temple area which could well be the basic seed of a smile that is always ready to beam out to reflect inner good-will to all.
Another likeness of Abe startled me year ago, when one day in London when coming out of St. Margaret's Chapel just a few seeps from the main entrance to Westminster Abbey, I came, rather suddenly, upon a pedestaled statue of the older, bearded version of Abraham Lincoln sitting there in what happened to be a bright Brit sunlit afternoon. He seemed to be looking a bit up and away at the white clouds and blue sky and oblivious of the samplings of many nations of people passing by on either side. I think often of Abe being there in a land from which so much of our own heritage came. I have tried to make it a point to stop there a few minutes when I visit The City. I must look it up some time to find which Lord Mayor of London granted him permission the stay in that specific area.
I suppose we could say that the picture we have of Abraham Lincoln comes to us in the form of a “double feature” presentation: young and old, formative and mature, happy and sad, youth and old-enough to know better - that sort of mish-mash. I have read what people who know about arty things who insist they see in Lincoln, the rail-splitter and young man who, taking time to wipe genuine sweat from his brown with red bandanna handkerchief if :doubtless dreaming of great deeds” he must yet do, even as he pauses to rest his brown. One of those art-experts sees symbolism in the large size log Lincoln had chosen to work with saying he was a young man who was unafraid of hard work.
I have geographical ties to Abe. His immediate forebears lived just a few miles north of my present home here in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia near two small villages a-growin' called Linville and Edom. We are all located alongside the celebrated Indian Trail which came to be called, The Great Road and .more recently, U.S. Route #11 now paralleled, more or less, by Interstate #81. Depending on which way you were going -either migrating to the west territories or returning from there with produce from the wilderness to eastern tern markets, it known as “The Knoxville Road “ for those trekking westward, or, “The Philadelphia Road (or Baltimore)if you were header northeast.
The Lincolns , who had worked to build quite a spread here, decided to go the Kentucky,Tenneesee, and such like places where even greater opportunities beckoned. The Lincoln men and women must have like hard work and vigorous, hard-scrabble living. Had they stayed here Abe Lincoln may well have been a native Virginian. I don't know that any painter has ever captured on canvas the deep agony which his rugged featured mirrored a fed minutes to the midnight deadline for his signature taking away one-half of the Commonwealth of Virginia.
I think I prefer the “older” versions such as that in the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. It 's nice to know about the younger buck qualities of the tall, ruggedly handsome calmly dignified man. As with the heavy, outsize log in the Ferris painting - he was for all this life called to solve big problems others had set for him to do. His big task - well done - was to maintain our nation as one against serious divisions and to have the courage others seemed to have lacked to officially free slaves to be equal citizens.
A.L.M. September 11, 2004 [c758wds]
