Angels and Ages.

This all began on a very long plane ride, East Coast to West, when I was reading Doris Kearns Goodwin's "Team of Rivals," her book about Abraham Lincoln and his political competitors, and how, in the course of the Civil War, he turned them into a collegial Cabinet. It is a well-told, many-sided story, which attempts to give context to Lincoln without diminishing him, to place him among his peers and place him above them, too.

Coming to the end of the book, to the night of April 14, 1865, and Lincoln's assassination, I reached the words that were once engraved in every American mind. At 7:22 A.M., as Lincoln drew his last breath, all the worthies who had crowded into a little back bedroom in a boarding house across the street from Ford's Theatre turned to Edwin Stanton, Lincoln's formidable Secretary of War, for a final word. Stanton is the one with the long comic beard and the spinster's spectacles, who in the photographs looks a bit like Mr. Pickwick but was actually the iron man in the Cabinet, and who, after a difficult beginning, had come to revere Lincoln as a man and a writer and a politician--had even played something like watchful Horatio to his tragic Hamlet. Stanton stood still, sobbing, and then said, simply, "Now he belongs to the ages."

It's probably the most famous epitaph in American biography, and still perhaps the best; reading the words again, I felt a shiver. They seem perfectly chosen, in their bare and stoical evocation of a Lincoln who belongs to history alone, their invocation not of an assumption to an afterlife but of a long reign in the corridors of time, a man now part of eternity.

Overcome again by Lincoln's example--by the idea of a President who was at once an interesting mind, a tough customer, and a good writer--I decided to start reading the new Lincoln literature. It seemed to be multiplying by fission, as amoebas do, on the airport bookstore shelves. For the flight home, I picked up James L. Swanson's "Manhunt," a vivid account of the assassination and the twelve-day search for John Wilkes Booth that followed. Once again, I came to the deathbed scene, the vigil, the gathering. The Reverend Dr. Gurley, the Lincoln family minister, said, " 'Let us pray.' He summoned up . . . a stirring prayer. . . . Gurley finished and everyone murmured 'Amen.' Then, no one dared to speak. Again Stanton broke the silence. 'Now he belongs to the angels.' "

Now he belongs to the angels? Where had that come from? There was a Monty Python element here ("What was that? I think it was 'Blessed are the cheesemakers,' " the annoyed listeners too far from the Mount say to each other in "Life of Brian"), but was there something more going on? I flipped to the back of the book. In the endnotes, Swanson explained that his rendering was deliberately at variance with the scholarly consensus: "In my view, shared by Jay Winik, the most persuasive interpretation supports 'angels' and is also more consistent with Stanton's character and faith."

Well, that seemed circumspect enough. Even without having read Jay Winik, though, one could glimpse, just visible beneath the diaphanous middle of that endnote, the tracings of an ideological difference. Unlike Goodwin, a famous liberal, Swanson is a conservative legal scholar at the Heritage Foundation. And Stanton's words as they are normally quoted are (like the Lincoln Memorial) a form of American neoclassicism, at odds with the figure of Christian nobility prized by the right: Lincoln's afterlife lies not in Heaven but in his vindication by history. Does he belong to the angels or the ages? This small implicit dispute echoed, in turn, a genuine historical debate: between those historians who insist on a tough Lincoln, the Lincoln whom Edmund Wilson, in "Patriotic Gore," saw as an essentially Bismarckian figure--a cold-blooded nationalist who guaranteed the unity of the North American nation, a stoic emperor in a stovepipe hat whose essential drive was for power, his own and his country's--and those who, like Goodwin, see a tender, soulful Lincoln, a figure of almost saintly probity and patience who ended slavery, deepened in faith as the war went on, and fought hard without once succumbing to hatred. A Lincoln for the ages and a Lincoln for the angels already existed. Now the two seemed to be at war for his epitaph.

When I got back to New York, I called Harold Holzer, an old friend, whom I had known as a spokesman for the Metropolitan Museum of Art but who is also one of the country's leading independent Lincoln scholars. He suggested a longer reading list of the recent Lincoln literature, and I made my way through as much as I could. There's a lot to read. In books published in the past two years alone, you can read about Lincoln's "sword" (his writing) and about his "sanctuary" (the Soldiers' Home just outside Washington, where he spent summers throughout the war). You can read a book about Lincoln's alleged love affair with a young officer, and one about Lincoln's relations, tetchy but finally triumphant, with Frederick Douglass. There is no part of Lincoln, from manhood to death, that is not open and inscribed. You can learn that some of Lincoln's intimates believed his melancholy was rooted in extreme constipation ("He had no natural evacuation of bowels," a friend explained) and also what formula was used to embalm him, a gruesome but far from trivial point. (The formula, which gave the body the appearance of marble, was being used to keep intact the bodies of the boys whose corpses had to be shipped home to their families during the war.)