Lincoln’s myth still casts a long shadow on historians

“WHAT then is the American, this new man?” This question has echoed through our history since J. Hector St. John de Crevecoeur asked it in “Letters From an American Farmer” in 1782. For decades canny Ben Franklin suited the role, with the noble Washington glancing protectively over his shoulder. Then along came Lincoln.

After a few years of stunned silence following his assassination, a potent combination of learned opinion, patriotic bombast and genuine affection placed him at the center of our national myth, our common aspirations. It is now Abraham Lincoln, not George Washington, who is first in the hearts of his countrymen. It looks as if he will never be replaced there. In his lively book “Land of Lincoln: Adventures in Abe’s America” Andrew Ferguson explains pretty well why.

A complicated man who could be maddeningly taciturn about his intentions, Lincoln seemed to sum up the virtues and the frailties of the young republic that some in the world thought could, or should, not survive. That it did, through that great and terrible war, validated both the nation and its leader. After 1865 no one in the whole world doubted the solid fact of its existence. For good and ill, the United States of America was here to stay.

Now thousands of books later, the nation, the war and the martyred president stand together as a powerful, if confused and often perplexing, touchstone to American identity. Ferguson, a senior editor at the Weekly Standard, deplores some of the popular trends in historical thinking but on the whole is a good sport about what a less fastidious writer would be tempted to call “The Dumbing Down of A. Lincoln.”

As a guide to the raucous creation of the Lincoln myth more than a century ago, Ferguson can be flat-out funny. Nineteenth century Americans were hair-snippers, figuratively and literally: Produce a fresh corpse and out come the scissors for the locks of the departed to be preserved forever. According to Ferguson, bits of the Great Emancipator’s hair were shipped around the Union. It was an aspect of piety that is less enthusiastically practiced these days.

Ferguson’s shtick for his book is that he and his wife drive their children on a trip through Lincoln country -- chiefly Kentucky, Indiana and Illinois -- that Ferguson had been taken on by his father. The conceit provides for nice contrasts in generations. The children are into their iPods; the father misses the dusty glass display cases of the Chicago Historical Society.

Past and present, old history and new history, confront each other along the way. “Land of Lincoln” is a nice encapsulation of how the passage of time, like a kaleidoscope, changes the images you see as you look backward toward the past. Ferguson, conservative by temperament, likes his past the way it used to be. He is open to modernism, though, to at least consider the Walt Disney effect on Americans’ view of our country. It comes as no surprise that, having looked, on the whole he doesn’t like it. It’s too sentimental and too unrealistic.

Evidently also a Tory by temperament, Ferguson likes his Great Men to be truly Great, and worthy of veneration. (Even if, like Lincoln, they told dirty jokes.) And who does not want them so? The extent to which Lincoln’s warm affectionate breath can animate his countrymen after all these years was manifested earlier this month in the excitement over the discovery in the National Archives of the letter from Lincoln to Maj. Gen. Henry W. Halleck urging the pursuit of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee just after the Union victory at Gettysburg. There it was, just as historians had surmised. With its unveiling, Lincoln had moved just a little bit closer to us, a whisper more within reach.

Through most of “Land of Lincoln” Ferguson keeps his cool. He is affectionately sardonic about the stylistic and emotional excesses of the Lincoln buffs who are most deeply into their subject -- the ones who dress up in period costumes and go to conventions, the ones who seem never quite able to break the bonds that tie them to this person who died 142 years ago.

At the end of the book, though, Ferguson surrenders, as so many have before, to the power of the man and his ideas and the words he used to create and express them. Ferguson tells how he met an immigrant from Czechoslovakia in Springfield, Ill., who was on a pilgrimage to Lincoln’s tomb. By the time the encounter is over, nearly everyone present has given way to tears of emotion over the simple but profound concept that all men are indeed created equal.

Anthony Day is a former editor of The Times’ editorial pages.