Lincoln on the Hudson

With "Bold, Cautious, True: Walt Whitman and American Art of the Civil War" at the Katonah Museum of Art, "Lincoln and New York" at The New-York Historical Society and and "Lincoln, Life Size" coming to the Bruce Museum in Greenwich in February, I thought Arts Muse readers would be interested in Abraham Lincoln's relationship with the Hudson Valley.

So I turned to one person who was sure to know, Rye resident Harold Holzer — author, co-author and editor of 34 Lincoln books, guest historian of "Lincoln and New York" and, if that were not enough, senior veep of external affairs for The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Lincoln, Holzer says, passed through Westchester County on his tour of the North before his first inauguration. Though he made no stops, prisoners in striped outfits reportedly saluted him from the roof of Sing Sing. (Sadly, the president's body would make a reverse trip of the county after his assassination in 1865.)

Putnam County would play a more strategic role during the war.

"First, he visited his former general, Winfield Scott, who was living in retirement at West Point," Holzer writes in an e-mail to The Arts Muse. "Then Lincoln was taken to the Cold Spring foundry to see the production of new high-tech weaponry. At the testing range, he watched rifled cannon shell being fired across the Hudson River onto targets painted onto the opposite cliffs — and consistently hitting bull's-eyes. Here on this visit, I believe, Lincoln came to the realization that it would be a very different kind of war — not Winfield Scott's kind of gentleman's war but a modern, deadly war of new and damaging weaponry...."

Tellingly, Holzer says that the Hudson Valley was actually more important than New York City in Lincoln's election, even though Lincoln always said that the speech he gave in Manhattan in 1859 made him president — a subject Holzer explores in his book "Lincoln at Cooper Union."

"In New York City, he got exposure, audience, and attention," Holzer says. "But on Election Day, more than 60 percent of New York City voters voted against Lincoln....He won the electoral vote of New York state only because he did well north of what is now 287 — solidly Republican (as I guess it is again!)."

Image of David Gilmour Blythe's "Lincoln Crushing the Dragon of Rebellion" (1862) courtesy of the Katonah Museum's "Bold, Cautious, True" show.