Editors Note: With Trump at Gettysburg, I was reminded of this, posted on the 150th Anniversary of Lincoln's Assassination.
In the Bushido code, the samurai were said to have identified
with the cherry blossom particularly because it fell at the moment of its
greatest beauty, an ideal death.
It is one of the remarkable coincidences of history that the
anniversary of Abraham Lincoln’s assassination often comes at the very peak of
the cherry blossom season. In many respects, he, too, died at the moment
of greatest beauty—right after he had delivered his “with malice towards none”
Second Inaugural Address, right after he had seen Richmond and was mobbed by
grateful freedmen, right after Lee had surrendered to Grant, right after there
were no more battles he could win.
The historian Richard Hofstadter once wrote, in his essay Abraham
Lincoln And The Self-Made Myth that “The Lincoln legend has come to have a
hold on the American imagination that defies comparison with anything else in
political mythology.”
That
legend, which Hofstadter likens to a Christ-like assumption of the sins of
mortals, followed by their redemption through his martyrdom, is one half of the
consensus historian’s construct about how we think about the Civil War.
The other half is best embodied in Robert E. Lee, graying, aristocratic scion
of a famous family, kind as a master, brave and brilliant as a reluctant
warrior.
