The two weeks between the Capitol assault on our democracy and the inauguration of our 46th President roughly coincided with Sotheby’s “Americana Week.” Leaving aside the strange fact that Americana Week went on for 14 days, what drew me to the Sotheby’s ad for furniture and folk art up for virtual bid was View of Hallowell, Maine, an American School painting described in the catalog as “a mother and her son gazing upon the bustling waterfront and business district . . . from Butternut Park on the Chelsea side of the Kennebec River.”

The anonymous painting strikes all the right notes of historical nostalgia—one that, for me at least, was implanted by the historical-society reproductions in my grade school textbooks. These kinds of documents of our national past are among the few you could today deem kid-safe—the primitive full-body portraits of children as miniature adults, usually holding a flower, a butterfly, a piece of fruit, or an unfortunate kitten by the neck; landscapes with giant rectangular cows and sheep anchoring patchwork farmsteads, with rolling hills and towns across rivers like the Kennebec, enlivened by the occasional sailboat or tugboat.

Such images reinforce the Playskool idea that everything has a returnable place. There is also an implicit desire to show gentleness, harmony, and comfort even in the commercial. With these kinds of orderly primitives, I tend to focus on the squares of windows in the town, because in some sense they correlate to the different kinds of individuals living or working therein, like flickering candles. The Hallowell Americana has moved far along from colonial primitive and anticipates the Currier & Ives knockoffs of Grandma Moses, who was known to embroider pictures with yarn.

The households such paintings depict were unlikely to have the means to own and display an oil painting. Walls were adorned with samplers—exhortations to love, friendship, and fidelity, cranked out by legions of needle-workers across the former colonies, or else rows of numbers and letters, the juvenilia of a new nation obsessed with numeracy and literacy. Did Betsy Ross arrange her counted stars to mimic sewing circles or the way Quaker Friends arranged their chairs to sit in silence? This was the happy land of No Idle Hands, of Paul Revere putting aside the ewer he was hammering to hop on his horse.

For a brief time in my young life, this window of history could be envisioned as somehow separate from the toxic cloud of slavery and a devastating Civil War. This Hallowell-type imagery took root before the realization of realizations—that all roads lead to Abraham Lincoln getting shot in the head and reversion to a set point of liberty and justice being denied to Black Americans. The mental imagery that accompanied my own education about slavery and racial oppression tended toward medieval torture instruments—something from Poe’s “The Pit and the Pendulum,” with that merciless blade slicing through the very heart of America. Once you’ve seen the diagram of a Middle Passage ship or handbills for human auctions, there is little comfort in images of a “towne” square where illuminati like Ben Franklin post chatty letters describing scientific experiments to electrocute a turkey.

The Hallowell painting clearly channels a fantasy innocence associated with white New Englanders, progenitors of “coastal elites.” I grew up in south-central New York State, so you could not call me coastal. Still, I cultivated a bias toward the South, imbued it with otherness. I never wanted to have to think south of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, because that’s where you got to the war sites, the earth on which Americans in uniforms killed Americans in uniforms.

When I was in junior high and my family made a spring break trip to Myrtle Beach in South Carolina, I made myself confront my bias by requesting that we stop at Gettysburg. Given that my family had a decidedly unintellectual bent, they waited in the car while I walked on the grass. The thing that horrified me about this encounter was that you could buy Confederate memorabilia in the gift shop. There was a Union side and a Confederate side, as if this were the Yankees and the Mets. And more people were buying the Mets.

Often when observing artwork from a certain historical time, you view it as emblematic of cultural continuity when in fact it may be the culmination, the very end of a mindset or way of life. The Hallowell scene was painted in 1860. For every image like this from New England, there must have been a painted antithesis from Savannah. The other objects up for bid at Sotheby’s? Rich people’s federal-style furniture, rusty weathervanes, a carousel tiger from Georgia. It makes you wonder about other kinds of “Americana”—for instance, 400-year-old slave auction signs. I’m sure people bid avidly on those.

On the evening of January 19, when Joe Biden and Kamala Harris asked the nation to mourn 400,000 COVID deaths with 400 lights along the Capitol reflecting pool, Lincoln sat illuminated in the distance. In his inaugural address that morning, Biden had quoted the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863: “If my name ever goes down in history, it will be for this act, and my whole soul is in it.” The melancholic grandiosity of the marble Lincoln makes it seem like he’d never been human, only an imagined god, like the Great Sphinx of Giza. You can’t imagine this god arbitrarily strolling into a haberdasher on lower Broadway and coming out with a top hat, then strolling into Matthew Brady’s studio as a way to kill time before his infamous speech at Cooper Union. You can’t imagine this god codenamed “Nuts” by the Secret Service.

There’s a famous PSA commercial featuring Lincoln that many of us who were children in the 1970s remember. It’s for the College-Level Examination Program (CLEP), which helped people without a college degree get certification for their self-education. In his black suit and top hat, Abe enters an employment office looking for an “executive position,” and the desk guy tells him: “I know you’re a smart guy, you know you’re a smart guy, but you ain’t goin’ nowhere without that sheepskin, fella.” I distinctly remember that commercial because it was about social class. Although in his own time Lincoln was ridiculed as an uncultured bumpkin by the likes of Nathaniel Hawthorne, in the 1970s he comes off as stately and refined in comparison to the New York City-sounding recruiter eating his chicken salad sandwich at his desk. Even though he wears a tie and a pinstripe vest, he himself doesn’t seem the college type as he asks if Lincoln has a chauffeur’s license.

The 1970s seemed filled with scenarios like this that encouraged the contemplation of social class. In the interim, however, it feels like the more unequal our country has become, the less people say about how class is defined. “This is one of the few societies where we just don’t talk about class,” Noam Chomsky said in 2015. “In fact, the notion of class is very simple: who gives the orders, who follows them.” You wonder what Lincoln, a man who was admitted to the Illinois Bar after teaching himself the law, would make of the world of 2021, where his own profession churns out practitioners from a broad range of social classes. Saying someone is a lawyer is almost meaningless in showing us what that person is about.

For generations, U.S. schoolchildren were indoctrinated with an often inarticulable reverence for the phrase “the American people,” and that wasn’t a bad thing. It was the emotive shorthand for exceptionalism; it had an allure that (for a child at least) was often embarrassing in its sense of home and of comfort. Today, you can’t look at any preserved piece of Americana without asking: “Which America? Whose America?” Obviously I associated the Americana of Hallowell, Maine, with the humility of Lincoln’s upbringing, and that’s how many people of my generation were educated to think. But the look of antebellum America was equally big and grasping, like the louche ladies adorning riverboat casinos and high-end saloons.

In discussing Alexis de Tocqueville’s reflections from the 1830s, Richard Hofstadter noted in 1963 that “the democratic and businesslike character of American life put a premium upon rough and ready habits of mind, quick decision, and prompt seizure of opportunities”—all stock attributes of Donald Trump. (And all, incidentally, attributes that don’t guarantee good outcomes: they can, in fact, lead to colossal failure.) By the 1890s, as Jackson Lears writes in Something for Nothing (2003), America was all about capitalism and risk: “the rhetoric of success and failure reflected the influence of an ethos of chance taking—even of play. The words ‘winner’ and ‘loser’ become stand-ins for one’s station in life.”

I think I was caught out by the sentimental Americana of Hallowell, Maine, because I wanted to feel that we as a country still had some shared goodness that could be woken from its COVID slumber, that this land still contained scattered dustings of atoms from generations of Americans who sang the Christian hymn “We Gather Together” at family meals and religious services on Thanksgiving Day. The painting made me think of that song, and I was surprised to learn that the song hadn’t been around in 1860. Though it dates to the seventeenth century as a Dutch hymn set to a folk song, it was only given English lyrics in 1894, by an American musicologist named Theodore Baker, who lived with and studied the music of the Seneca Indians in New York State:

We gather together to ask the Lord’s blessing;
He chastens and hastens His will to make known.
The wicked oppressing now cease from distressing.
Sing praises to His Name; He forgets not His own.

Though I longed for that scene at the Capitol reflecting pool to reassure me, there was something tragic about it. There was apprehension. It wasn’t really COVID that we’d survived but Donald Trump, a stranger and more terrifying kind of threat. And there were Trump’s haters who had smashed windows with flagpoles not two weeks before. The wicked oppressing now cease from distressing. But they didn’t cease from anything. They were at large. And perhaps that’s the reason the reflecting pool seemed to have collected the tears of our great imagined god.

Once, when he was a man walking grimly toward a fading light, Lincoln knew every working part of our democracy like a watchmaker. The way he put words together has stirred emotion in generations of Americans in ways they can barely process. It used to be that both sides quoted what he said, but now it’s only one side. It’s only one side that can be touched. I am touched no matter how many times I’ve heard the words, although the quote I think of as the most Lincoln quote ever was uttered by someone else entirely, a Brit named Auden, 74 years after our emancipator’s assassination: “We must love one another or die.” §