The bronze man in front of you has not started talking yet.
Look at what he's doing. He's just risen from the chair behind him. Head down, one hand on his lapel, the other hanging at his side. Every other Lincoln in America is mid-speech — arm out, chin up, delivering. This one is still working out how to begin.
The sculptor was Augustus Saint-Gaudens, and he was not guessing at that face.
Back in eighteen sixty, a Chicago sculptor named Leonard Volk talked Lincoln into sitting in his studio while he smeared wet plaster over his head. Lincoln was clean-shaven then. The beard came later that year. So the face on this statue is a lawyer from Illinois, not the president on the five-dollar bill.
Volk came back for the hands a few months later, at the house in Springfield. And the right hand was swollen. Lincoln had just won the nomination and had spent days shaking hands with everyone who could reach him. He wanted something to hold, so the fingers would sit naturally. So he walked out
to the woodshed, sawed a piece off a broom handle, and whittled it smooth. Then he came back in apologizing for the fresh knife marks.
Volk told him to leave them.
They are still there. Walk up close to that right hand. You can find the cuts a president made with a pocket knife, because he was embarrassed about the state of a broom handle.
Volk kept that scrap of wood in his studio for the res
