result, I have yet to meet a high school graduate who has devoted any time to
thinking about the Gettysburg Address.
The strange career of the log cabin in which Abraham Lincoln was born
symbolizes in a way what textbooks have done to Lincoln. The actual cabin
fell into disrepair probably before Lincoln became president. According to
research by D. T. Pitcaithley, the new cabin, a hoax built in 1894, was leased
to two amusement park owners, went to Coney Island, where it got
commingled with the birthplace cabin of Jefferson Davis (another hoax), and
was finally shrunk to fit inside a marble pantheon in Kentucky, where,
reassembled, it still stands. The cabin also became a children’s toy: Lincoln
Logs, invented by Frank Lloyd Wright’s son John in 1920, came with
instructions on how to build both Lincoln’s log cabin and Uncle Tom’s cabin!
The cabin still makes its archetypal appearance in our textbooks, signifying the
rags-to-riches legend of Abraham Lincoln’s upward mobility. No wonder one
college student could only say of him, in a much-repeated blooper, “He was
born in a log cabin which he built with his own hands.”
Even worse is textbook treatment of Lincoln’s Second Inaugural. In this
towering speech, one of the masterpieces of American oratory, Lincoln
specifically identified differences over slavery as the primary cause of the
Civil War, then in its fourth bloody year.^40
If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those