The irony and myth of Abraham Lincoln

By Ian McCowan, Tenor, and Annaleigh McDonald, Soprano, Magnolia Chorale 

---

Ian McCowan

Ian: I only joined Magnolia Chorale last fall, but I’m already forming grandiose and reductive theories about recreational choral singing. One such theory is that there are two broad categories of choral pieces. Some are easy to sing (though maybe not to sing well) and easy to love. Others are a little—or a lot—more challenging both to learn and to appreciate. These are pieces you might not love on first listen; you need to find a way in.

This spring’s Abraham Lincoln Walks at Midnight—a setting of a Vachel Lindsay poem by the Black composer Florence Price—took a while to find my way into. It’s not as challenging as previous pieces the Chorale has performed: it has only brief tough passages here and there. But those passages do feel like Florence Price is trying to make my life difficult from beyond the grave.

These passages imagine the grief and despair of Abraham Lincoln’s ghost, walking the streets of Springfield, Illinois. “You,” Florence Price seems to say to me, “will also feel ‘the bitterness, the folly, and the pain’ that is burdening Lincoln’s ghost as he wanders sleepless and heartsick over the mass death of World War I.”

---

Abraham Lincoln (or his ghost) wandering sleepless and heartsick at night might seem too specific to be a category of art, but it does contain at least two works: this piece, and Lincoln in the Bardo, the experimental novel by George Saunders, which I read earlier this year and which is proving to be a helpful resource in connecting the Price composition to a wider artistic tradition. I flipped through the book again recently to refresh my memory. The connections between it and Abraham Lincoln Walks at Midnight are kind of tenuous, but stirring enough that one of my choir compatriots, soprano Annaleigh McDonald, also thought of it as we learned the piece.

In Lincoln in the Bardo, Lincoln is not a ghost but the living president of the United States, and he is having a rough time. His son Willie has just died of typhoid and America is in the throes of its first and hopefully last Civil War; and when he is not grieving for Willie, Lincoln is grieving for the thousands dead in that war, so much so that the one feels like a kind of cosmic punishment for the other. He wanders, not aimlessly as in Abraham Lincoln Walks at Midnight, but intentionally, to the mausoleum where his son’s body lies, to hold the corpse in his arms and murmur endearments and generally allow himself to be in his feelings.
​
In both Abraham Lincoln Walks at Midnight and Lincoln in the Bardo, Lincoln is portrayed as a righteous, almost saintly man, bearing the world’s suffering and his own with dignity and gravity. He’s “the quaint great figure that men love,” per Lindsay, and “the sins of war-lords burn his heart.” In Bardo, his visit to Willie is “a miracle” and has a “vivifying effect” on the assemblage of ghosts who see it and hope that they too may be remembered, but he knows himself to be one of the Civil War’s “war-lords” and thinks: “The weight of it about to kill me.” Even an entire chapter that Saunders devotes to real and fabricated quotes maligning and insulting Lincoln creates the picture of a noble martyr to the slings and arrows of his critics.
​
Annaleigh also noticed this portrayal, and mused:

Annaleigh McDonald

“Why Abraham Lincoln, specifically? There is much to be said about the lasting mythology surrounding our 16th president. Perhaps more than any other American president, he has become a symbol of peace and righteousness in our national recollection. He represents a specific form of morality, under the guise of equality, but with the undertone of the United States as victor. His symbolic presence in our American mythology is perpetuated through countless images immortalizing him—in memorials, statues, paintings and prints, even our currency. His face gazes back at us daily, even today.

​Saunders himself said that in writing Lincoln in the Bardo, he drew inspiration from the bronze statue of Lincoln outside his office at Syracuse University. This statue depicts a seated and forlorn Lincoln, accompanied by the inscription “WITH MALICE TOWARD NONE AND CHARITY FOR ALL”—quite the legacy. Lindsay’s poem also describes Lincoln as a “bronzed lank man”—as if the figure we observe is not the human Lincoln, but instead the immortal form reanimated by grief.
 
The most poignant similarity between both of these pieces, however, is the specificity of Lincoln walking at night. He is alone, not performing as a great leader, but as a mourner. He is accompanied only by death and grief, but observed by many—in the novel, by the hundreds of spirits living in the cemetery, and in the poem, by all of us living in the present day. He cannot commune with his observers, so we are left to wonder about him. Both novel and poem draw on our collective empathy for the tragic figure. Who else represents all that is good in American history, right?”

---

​Ian: I certainly always thought Abraham Lincoln did, but: maybe not. The lionization of Lincoln in both these works collided head-on with a quote of Lincoln’s that I recently learned about, from his debate with Democratic Senator Stephen A. Douglas in 1858:

“I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races—that I am not nor ever have been in favor of making voters or jurors of negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermingling with white people; and I will say in addition to this that there is a physical difference between the white and black races which will ever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality. And inasmuch as they cannot so live, while they do remain together, there must be the position of superior. I am as much as any other man in favor of having the superior position assigned to the white race.” From “Examining Lincoln’s Views on African Americans and Slavery," the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum 

Yikes! I mean, maybe this was just political triangulation. But still: I can’t see these as the words of a man passionately committed to civil rights, even if he did revile slavery on moral grounds. This quote complicates the image of Lincoln as “the Great Emancipator.”

Dr. Henry Louis Gates, author of Lincoln on Race and Slavery, which traces Lincoln’s stated beliefs about race, describes his model for thinking about it:

“Imagine a braid of hair. Most of us just say, ‘Lincoln freed the slaves, therefore he liked black people.’ That’s the braid, but it turns out the braid has three strands. One strand is how he felt about slavery; another is how he felt about racial equality, and the third is colonization [of Black people to other countries—preferably, but not necessarily, voluntarily]. We find contradictory impulses in Lincoln at least through 1863 when he finally begins to do the right thing, and all three strands are re-connected into a new braid.”

Lincoln’s contradictory impulses aren’t the only ones at play in and around Abraham Lincoln Walks at Midnight. Its poet Vachel Lindsay’s most (in)famous work, “The Congo,” seems to have been intended as an expression of Lindsay’s authentic pro-Black sentiment. But it frankly reads in 2026 as a nauseous mix of cultural appropriation, othering condescension, and straight-up poetic blackface. It met with extremely ambivalent reactions from the Black intellectual community at the time of its publication. But Lindsay considered himself an anti-racist and described the poem as “certainly as hopeful as any human being dare to be in regard to any race” in a somewhat defensive letter to the chairman of the NAACP.

With Lincoln: questionable values but a single unimpeachable outcome. With Lindsay: good intentions but an outcome that these days might generously be called “cringe.” I have to imagine Florence Price was aware of at least some of this complexity when she nonetheless decided to compose a cantata around Abraham Lincoln Walks at Midnight.

In some ways it is a great fit: Vachel Lindsay apparently wrote much of his poetry to be performed, with heavy rhythmic elements and onomatopoeia, often accompanied by notes bearing instructions as to how different sections should be read aloud. In notes for her composition Suite of Dances, Florence Price wrote “In all types of Negro music, rhythm is of preeminent importance,” and her cantata really draws out the rhythms in some passages. Listen to the implied ponderous footfalls in the section where Lincoln is “near the old courthouse, pacing up and down,” and the blunt percussiveness of “too many peasants fight, they know not why.” I’m even starting to appreciate what she does with that notorious line “the bitterness, the folly and the pain.”

If all this meandering has a point, it’s that this was the way into a tricky choral piece that worked for me: start with what you know about it, and learn more, until it connects with other things you knew—or thought you knew but actually understood incorrectly or incompletely. In isolation, Abraham Lincoln Walks at Midnight is an ambitious, somewhat challenging choral piece. In a wider context, it’s got all kinds of fascinating, very 21st-century stuff going on: fan fiction for an American hero! An early-20th-century poet being appropriative and problematic! And I haven’t even mentioned—because this post is way too long already—how this piece, along with many others, was saved at the last minute from the renovation of an abandoned house that Florence Price had once inhabited.
​
In short: the meandering was the point, insofar as it brought me to a deeper appreciation for Abraham Lincoln Walks at Midnight and placed it in a richer historical context. Through some inscrutable psychological alchemy, I think I even like it more musically as a result. But that might be from listening to it about three thousand times.