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From
Looking for Lincoln
by Jan Morris, in Planet 132 and 133:
Remotely in the Gwynedd mountains near Ysbyty Ifan, not
far from my own home, there stands a deserted farmhouse called
Bryn Gwyn with a very unexpected claim to glory. It was the
home in the late seventeenth century of John Morris and his
wife, and these long forgotten hill-farmers were, so bold
Welsh genealogists claim, maternal great-great-grandparents
of Abraham Lincoln.
I don't know if it is true or not - none of his biographers
mention it - but I do know this: that if Bryn Gwyn were in
America they would make a national shrine of it. The presiding
genius of the Great Republic is undoubtedly Father Abraham,
Honest Abe, 16th President of the United States, closer and
dearer to the American people than any of his predecessors
or successors. Only Lincoln lives so vividly in the minds
of his countrymen that to this day there is scarcely an American
citizen, give or take a Hispanic or two, I suppose, who does
not know what he looked like. Washington gave his name to
the national capital, but it is Lincoln who is honoured in
the grandest of its monuments, god-like and craggy behind
the pillars of his classical temple, sitting like the judge
of judges.
In principle Washington, Jefferson, Hamilton, Adams, Madison
and Ben Franklin are the Founding Fathers of the United States.
In practice it was Lincoln who, by winning the Civil War,
reuniting the nation and eventually liberating the slaves
of America, assured the permanence of the great republic,
and became a national father-figure more paternal by far than
those bewigged half-British intellectuals of the Revolution.
Lincoln was the seminal All-American, and ever since the day
he was assaulted at the moment of his ultimate triumph, the
American people have sanctified, if not actually deified him.
He is essential to the identity of America itself. His fabled
career from log cabin to White House is a central myth of
the American Way; even his murder spawned a perennial American
genre, the conspiracy theory…
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