In "Ann Rutledge in American Memory: Social Change and the Erosion of a Romantic Drama,"¹ Prof. Barry Schwartz described the history and apparent final vanishing of the story of Ann Rutledge and Abraham Lincoln as a powerful source of inspiration and symbolic meaning for writers and American society.

While Schwartz's general conclusion cannot be gainsaid, I wish to draw attention to a song entitled Ann Rutledge Blues² by the New York based singer songwriter Eric Wolfson which, if not providing a counter-example to some of Schwartz's assertions, may at least be seen as an exception which proves the rule.

While it true that Ann Rutledge "is absent from today's most popular movies, stage plays, poetry and magazines" it can no longer be said with certainty that "she no longer interests the best talents of our day,"³ at least in this one instance. Of course, the question of whether Mr. Wolfson is one of the best talents of our day is a judgment on his entire body of work. Still Ann Rutledge Blues can justly lay claim to being an extremely fine example of poetry and songwriting. It would therefore be integral to any judgment of its author’s talent.

What is more interesting is that the confrontation, for want of a better word, between Professor Schwartz's essay and Mr. Wolfson's song raises issues which may well be worthy of deeper reflection for the individual, the historian and the artist.

It is not necessarily a case where a song or poem is in conscious dialogue with the essay, as if Professor Schwartz had raised some points to which Mr. Wolfson has responded. If anything Mr. Wolfson writes in the voice of a person to whom the very phenomena which Professor finds interesting and important at a public level are equally as interesting and important at a personal level.

Professor Schwartz's essay is freely available on online⁴; Mr. Wolfson's song not so freely⁵. It may however be worth the effort for the reader to find and to listen to Ann Rutledge Blues before proceeding, lest what is written here interfere with the reader’s own immediate enjoyment of the song.

Listening to Ann Rutledge Blues

Musically, Ann Rutledge Blues, is not in what in current parlance would considered to be a blues song.⁶ It's extremely catchy and rapid fire melody and chorus as well as it's evident humor make it more amenable to a sing along, than the usual image of the blues allows, let alone that high seriousness that has attended the poetic and dramatic rendering of Ann Rutledge and Abraham Lincoln's relationship.

This is evident from the very first, so that even if we are aware of the title, the musical introduction almost instantly dispels any notion that we are going to hear a deeply sad, angry or dark blues growing out of the death of Abe Lincoln's only true love.

The singer begins:

I dreamed you in the perfect story
Folklore passed as allegory
The heavens open to reveal your glory
Alone but without you

The song suggests at first that the singer has in mind a particular person in his own life. He is dreaming of this person. It is one of those dreams where the dreamer has the sense that everything is explained. One can imagine such a dream, some bit of folklore which some how stands for this person of his dreams which instantly reveals how glorious that person really is. Alas, the beloved is not there, either in the real world, or in the dream. He has these dream insights, these dream certainties, but the real person is absent. The singer is alone.

Cause all the words that I have found
Are buried with you in the ground
You died while wearing your wedding gown
Alone but without you

Suddenly we are confronted with an image of death. But are we still in the dream? Or is this the reality that gave rise to the dream. This is the song perhaps of a man who has loved a woman, who has lost her to another, and has heard that she died just as she was to marry. Or perhaps it is the dream state interpreting this loss to another as a death. The singer's dreams are filled with these thoughts which seem to make some sense, which reveal the lost beloved after death, in a glory he never considered, but the loss is so severe he cannot give it voice. The first line implies that also that the reason for the original dream vision is precisely the inability to put it into conscious words. He is left with inchoate dreams, insights and visions — but whatever words he had, whether they be in reality or the dream world vanish in the face of death.

I searched taxi cabs and the subway trains
The grocery stores that all look the same
The late night diners with the neon names
And the skyscraper roofs and the sewage drains

We may still be in the dream. He is after all searching among, of all things, sewage drains. It may also be a rendering of the singer's waking response to the news that the beloved is dead. Even when a loved one's death is certain, the human reaction is to hope and expect to see them at any moment. Or perhaps the singer awaking from his dream, inspired by the fear of losing one so glorious, either through death or loss to another, decides he must find this woman. Is this then the song of a break-up, as in any number of romantic comedies and dramas, where after the boy loses the girl, he realizes his mistake and goes searching for her before she dons a wedding gown for another? The fact that he searches sewage drains is merely a succinct and ironic way of confirming that he has searched everywhere. But it also gives a comic touch to the complete dislocation of normal reason in such circumstances. The beloved must be somewhere. Could the world be so cruel as to deny me the possibility of attaining this happiness? Certainly not — after having disposed of all the alternatives what remains, no matter how improbable, must be the answer. So sewage drains it is.

But the City is a Monster that can't be contained
By the lights and the bodies and the subway pulsing through its veins

Here the vast realm of possibility becomes the singer's enemy. This city where perhaps he once walked with his beloved is so huge that he cannot possibly locate her. It is not merely too big for a proper search, it becomes an objective monster. In stepping back from the narrowness of his search he suddenly realizes how utterly awful this entity is in its own right.

The singer laments thus in an almost resigned matter of fact tone:

I just don't know what to do...

(To which members of the band shout: "What to do!")

With the Ann Rutledge Blues

Here one is pulled up short. Why this name? Like a mystery novel where all the surface clues lead the reader in one direction, only to find that those same facts point in a most unexpected direction, the listener is led to wonder about the precise meaning of this.⁷

Who is the singer and what precisely are the Ann Rutledge Blues? If we had at any point, having known the title, thought that this was a song sung from the point of view of Ann Rutledge, which is precluded by the third line of the second stanza. I say the third line because one can certainly imagine an artist describing a vision that Ann Rutledge had about Abe's future and his martyrdom. But unless we are to think that this is to be some absurd take on Weekly World News-like allegations that Abraham Lincoln was a woman or a cross dresser, then the notion that the Ann Rutledge Blues are Ann Rutledge's blues is not a hypothesis that works.

The question then is whether the blues here are suffered because of Ann Rutledge, in which case the singer could be Abraham Lincoln, or even John McNamar, the man to whom she was engaged. Except for certain anachronisms, the loss and grief expressed in wandering through the city would certainly fit this character rather than Abraham Lincoln who wandered the woods after the death of his beloved. But since it certainly possible that the songwriter seeks to convey the image of the city in terms sheer size and monstrosity, it may be that he as incorporated neon lights and subways to heighten the effect — to give us the feeling that if John were in an East Coast city of his day, the contrast between that city and New Salem, where lived the girl he left behind could best be brought home to the modern listener with the image of a modern city, which after all is merely the product of a growing monster 19th century monster that couldn't be contained. One can even imagine John realizing in his grief that this city he left his love for is such a monster and the truer, better place are small towns.

And yet in listening to the song, and now knowing that the singer, whoever he may be, has the Ann Rutledge Blues, we still, particularly in the face of the apparent anachronisms, cannot shake the feeling that this is a person of our time who is suffering these blues.

The strongest thought is that the singer is merely asserting that he is suffering from a blues very much like the blues suffered through the loss of a young woman in the manner or Abraham Lincoln or someone else. Abe wandered in the wooded environs of New Salem, whereas the singer is stuck in the city. But why is the song sung in an almost party like way, with the band shouting "What to do?" This is a strange disjunction. On the page, as a poem for recitation, this could read extremely seriously and yet there is something completely contrastive about the presentation. The singing of Wolfson here seems deliberately ambiguous. On the one hand he not making light of the situation, on the other hand the band seems to be having a great time. It is almost as if the character is being subjected to these blues by a living woman. One imagines the whole thing played out on the musical stage — the despondent man who sees his love for this woman, and all the dreams she has brought into his sleep, in terms of Ann and Abe, and his friends gently mock him, try to cheer him by joining in the chorus "What to do?"

But what is really going on emotionally, the root of his blues, and who the singer is still unresolved. The mystery has deepened.

Thought I saw you in an artist's space
With a broken string and an angel's grace
The spotlight chiseled out your face
Alone but without you

Here the image of the bereft seeking his beloved everywhere, becomes an image of the grieving lover seeing his lover everywhere. The image of the spotlight chiseling out the face is certainly a marvelous turn on the play of light in a painting, while at the same time calling to mind a work of sculpture. The work of art seems in some way more concrete than the initial dream image. It cannot be said for certain that the singer has yet awaken. This may be part of the dream — he has dreamed the perfect story, he has dreamed her revealed in heavenly glory, only for his stream of conscious to take the next step and dream of her dead and in the grave; he is alone though, without her, and his dream takes him searching hither and yon through the city which becomes an ever growing monstrosity. Now is he dreaming that he sees her in a great work of art and yet she still isn't there.

By the next night I felt so divine
I was eating crackers by the turpentine
The plastic cup it held the wine
Alone but without you.

Has the scene shifted then to the night after his dream? Is he now awake? It seems probable, and that would confirm perhaps that the singer's running through the city in search of his lost love was the description of a real waking action.

The image of the turpentine gives one the impression of a general store and one imagines the young Abe Lincoln having a brief respite from his unbearable interior pain.

But there is also the irony of it all. The man feels divine while eating crackers? The Eucharistic parody of crackers and a plastic cup of wine only heightens the contrast. Yet an individual can feel joyous or peaceful in circumstances at odds with the interior emotion. Thus the singer accentuates the grace like aspect of his feeling by showing that there is no material cause for his joy or peace.

But the mention of the turpentine, which upon first hearing may strike one as a forced rhyme, pulls us back to the preceding stanza. The artist's space is the singer's space. Turpentine is used to remove paint. It evokes the image of a painter looking at work in progress, or gazing satisfied upon a successful project. Perhaps it simply the singer in the same artist's space contemplating the work of art he had discovered the night before, celebrating as it were with his feast of crackers and wine in plastic cups, a staple, it must be admitted, of most gallery openings. Maybe the artist has just erased the whole of the portrait that originally struck him with such power. Maybe the relief is from having let go temporarily of any desire to represent this woman.

I asked the guitarist busking in the subway hall
The security guard in the shopping mall
The city commissioner before his fall
And the man collapsed in a bathroom stall

Whatever the cause of his temporary relief, the singer is searching again. He is now not merely looking for his lost love; he is asking if anyone has seen his beloved. This search is represented with the same ironic thoroughness of the first. Where first he went so far as to look in sewage drains, now he will even ask a man collapsed in a bathroom stall.

But now Gatsby won't write me back at all
And Dante won't return my call

An ironic and funny line. Gatsby never existed and Dante has been dead for centuries. It is clear that the singer is trying to make sense of his love and his loss. In other words, the previous four lines were not so much the singer asking others if they have seen the beloved, they were the singer asking for help in making sense of his situation. He asks people he meets, but he also seeks answers from the works of literature, ancient and modern.

That a person suffering love and loss would seek answers in those works that have pondered precisely those questions in an imaginative frame work is perfectly normal perhaps even healthy. But the singer's attempt to find help fails once again.

I just don't know what to do
(What to do!)
With the Ann Rutledge blues

At this point the song musically and lyrically takes a turn. The song has a "bridge":

Ya' get a piece of history
Every time that I find you look at me
We always just begin as friends
'Til we go and we do it again⁸

That question perhaps being raised, the real shock of this bridge is that it all but confirms that the beloved is still alive. We have shifted to the present tense. Through the preceding part of the song we were left wondering if the woman who has caused such desire, obsession and confusion in the singer is indeed still alive. It seems almost certain now.

For some reason, the singer and woman he writes of, have tried to "just be friends" but slip into a more amorous relationship. There are of course echoes here of Abraham Lincoln and Ann Rutledge having started out as friends and ended up as lovers. But whereas in the Ann Rutledge legend this seems to have been a natural progression handled with delicacy and honor because of Ann's perceived promise to the long absent John McNamar, here the image is frankly sexual. What is stunning about this stanza, is that with all the mythologizing insistence that everything was done honorably, or for all the scholarly approaches attempting to make sense of this relationship, and particularly its loss for Abraham Lincoln's character, mental health, and place in history, these might have been two young people, no doubt falling in love, who could just not keep their hands off each other. The lovers who cannot have one another because of some societal norm but for whom the attraction and love is so overpowering that they continually, despite their best efforts, fall into one another's arms is staple of literature, going back at least to the Middle Ages. It may indeed be the source of the courtly love tradition of which the romantic ideal of marriage is a descendant.⁹ So why not portray Abe and Ann in just such a struggle with the better angels of their nature? They were, after all, sexual creatures. Their story at base is an erotic one in all the senses of that term refined or "vulgar".

If, because of the association of this singer's blues with the image of Ann Rutledge we are brought to consider the day-to-day concrete playing out of the real Ann with the real Abe, whatever that might have been, we also, conversely, see this as the singer's present day-to-day struggle with a woman he cannot have (one gets the impression by her circumstances and choice, not his) but who keeps showing up in his life at which point they "go and do it again."

For a listener who has no idea who Ann Rutledge is, which may be the majority of listeners, for whom Ann Rutledge may be a made up name, or even the actual name of the twenty-first century woman at the center of the singer's struggle, this stanza poses no problem. It is what it is. This is the type of relationship the singer has gotten himself involved in. He has described it in all sorts of crazy imagery; he has set forth his mental and emotional state in dreams and in action. This expectation of singing to or about the object of one's past or present affections in an extremely imaginative style is nothing new in poetry and since Dylan it is no longer new in popular songwriting. It may even be expected.

But once one is aware of who Ann Rutledge was, this stanza seems to corroborate the perception that the singer's Ann Rutledge Blues are a way of looking at his personal experience in terms of the story that once held sway in the American public's imagination and still resonates with the singer. Perhaps all the images of death and loss merely a way of saying that the experience of grief is the constant analog to their repetitive parting. Is this relationship so unwise that it would be better that they simply stay as friends, much like the question of whether actually marrying Ann Rutledge would have prevented Lincoln from pursuing any ambition that he had. Are these the singer's Ann Rutledge Blues?

But the shift of tense and the immediate concreteness of the image, leaves us wondering if after all, the entire previous section of the song, isn't indeed a rendering in modern imagery, with full conscious use of anachronism and absurdity, the feelings of Abe Lincoln toward Ann Rutledge.

The entire song seems addressed to some woman living in the present, either the singer's present, or Abe Lincoln's present so long ago.

At this point in the song there is an instrumental break which ends with the band shouting "One two, one two three four," signaling the return to the original melody and verse structure, but also reinforcing the interesting almost problematic contrast between the words of the singer and the tone of the song. It must be that all these images of death and loss cannot refer to the actual death of a human the singer loved, they would not be singing in this tone. No, these words must be directed by the singer toward a living woman. Is this a description of Abe Lincoln as a hapless almost comic love stricken man? If one thought that Ann Rutledge was just an old flame of Abe's it might make sense. But if she is really dead, why set the words out in this musical context? The lyrics indeed admit the possibility of a truly "heavy" interpretation. These lyrics could be done in the soul searing painful way that has come to be attached to the individual blues singer songwriter, without any apparent loss of meaning. Why then this choice of musical genre. What is the meaning of this arrangement? The singer it seems cannot have truly experienced the loss through death of one so beautiful, so deeply loved.

And all the money that I never gave
I poured it in your open grave
And stood there 'til my soul got saved
Alone but without you.

Pouring money in an open grave is certainly a harsh image. If indeed this woman is still alive, then it comes as an image of the singer's final desperate attempt to exorcise the "memory and desire." But what is the meaning of standing there 'til his soul gets saved. This song has become more perplexing. There is more than a hint that in searching for this woman, or in his relationship with this woman, he has spent money better spent in good works, that in some fashion he is also exorcising his own moral collapse that the relationship brought him. Or is the singer expressing an anger that the real death of this woman has caused. Anger is one of the stages of grieving. Is he angry that in the end this woman, with whom he could not ever help but "do it again," never did commit to him fully? Did she really indeed die while wearing her wedding gown? Though she is dead and the loss be real yet he is angry at the time (which is money) she caused him to waste. That in his life which he could have given he has metaphorically poured into the open grave that was their relationship.

And yet the singer's standing there until his soul gets saved calls to mind the image of Abraham Lincoln in The Soul of Ann Rutledge¹⁰, where finally through all the struggle caused by the loss of Ann Rutledge he stands by her grave until he whispers "I believe." Once again we wonder whether this song has been in the voice of Abraham Lincoln all along.

I turned yellow pages at the library
Spoke with drunken girls about astrology
Read your fabricated history
Alone though without you

The singer is still trying to find this woman. He has lost all bearing. Is he hoping to find her in the yellow pages? Perhaps he is just trying to find out about the woman whose memory, be she alive or dead, just won't leave him alone. He ends up in a scene that perhaps would be familiar to students of any time, chatting with a drunken girl in the college library about astrology of all things. The fabricated history he reads, is this perhaps no more than the collection of the "pieces of history" referred to in the bridge. Has this woman deceived him all along? Is there no there there? The singer races through a final litany of what he has discovered:

I found your photograph but your face was blurred
A record you had made but your voice was slurred
A letter you had written in foreign words
And a lover you had loved but you never deserved

In that last line, one can hear a final cry of exasperation, impatience and finally anger at this woman who has deceived him, and yet with whom he is still obsessed. She no longer is some great and heavenly image — whatever lover she had, the one whose wedding gown she chose to die in, she didn't deserve him.

I don't know if I believe it but there's a story I heard
When you died, on your breast there lay a little small white bird

So it is finally revealed, maybe, that the beloved has died, or at least he has heard that she died, but he is not convinced that she was as saintly or good as he has been led to believe. And yet though he started the song with a dream of making some sense of it, he is still just picking up pieces of a story, a folktale, perhaps with the small white bird as the source of allegory. But all the energy and dream certainty has dissipated. He still has no idea what to make of this woman.

On the other hand it is finally revealed that this is indeed the singer/songwriter singing to a woman who is not there. We realize that the singer is singing about and to Ann Rutledge herself — not in the voice of Abe Lincoln or even John McNamar, but as an artist trying to create a meaningful work of art based on the real Ann Rutledge and her real relationship with Abraham Lincoln.

I just don't know what to do
(What to do)
With the Ann Rutledge Blues.

This is the story of an artist trying to make something of the Ann Rutledge legend. He dreams of her in a perfect story; later he tries to portray her through the visual arts, but he has no real person to anchor the work in. Whatever he tries, wherever he goes, whatever he thinks, it is alone, though, without the actual person of Ann Rutledge. It is here in this portrayal of an artist attempting to find something worthwhile, something artistically significant in the historical figure of Ann Rutledge that gives this song with so many images of death its comic quality. It is the story of the hapless, scholar, historian, or novelist convinced that there is something really there in the figure of Ann Rutledge — hoping against hope that there is a real photograph or a recording of her voice, despite the obvious anachronism. He is looking for anything; he gazes upon the possibilities, he senses the possibility. But the desire and the absence of anything concrete leave him utterly at a loss. These are his Ann Rutledge Blues. He wants to create something from this historical figure but the shear absence of a tangible grounding in reality makes it impossible. It is the portrait of a man obsessed, reacting to the loss of any solid ground beneath his intellectual and artistic feet, in the same manner as he might react to a human object of his affections.

The Significance of Ann Rutledge Blues

Ann Rutledge Blues turns out to be multilayered work of art in which the singer can at once be imagined as a man whose love for a woman parallels that of the legendary love of Abraham Lincoln for Ann Rutledge and perhaps even as a rendering in modern imagery of that legendary love and loss felt by Abraham Lincoln (or perhaps Ann Rutledge's fiancé away in the City). The singer may also be an historian looking for the truth about Ann Rutledge, believing that in the end history will reveal itself, but wading through endless detours and false leads. In the end it comes together as the song of an artist obsessed with the possibility of trying to produce a significant work of art from the story of Ann Rutledge and Abraham Lincoln. Here especially, yet in all its layers, it becomes an exemplar of a problem only hinted at in Schwartz's essay, namely the desire for people to have their strongest emotional feelings and needs anchored in reality. The lover wants the feeling of love to be more than just "seeking personal satisfaction and self-realization,"¹¹ just as Americans of a certain time wanted the confirmation of Abraham Lincoln's love of the common people to be anchored in a real almost eternal love for Ann Rutledge.¹² What seems to be wanting is a reality corresponding to our strongest emotional and instinctive reactions. It is this desire and confusion in the face of possibility which is at the heart of Ann Rutledge Blues, and which allows it, to test, supplement, as a 21st century work of art, several themes touched on in Professor Schwartz's essay — the waning of Ann Rutledge in the American Memory, the nature of the historian's work, the nature of the "transcendental ideal."

What Wolfson has done is set the folkloric nature of Abraham Ann Rutledge's story between two classic descriptions of the effect of romantic love on the individual — Gatsby's love for Daisy, as told in what is often considered "the perfect story," F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, and the figure of Beatrice in the great allegorical works of Dante. Beatrice for Dante was a love which was never brought to earthly fruition, indeed was never meant to be brought to earthly fruition, thus allowing her to become an image of Divine Love. Between these poles one can see the development of the Ann Rutledge legend. On the one end there is the image of a loss that Lincoln could never get beyond. He could never love another woman.¹³ His heart was buried with her.¹⁴ Lincoln's love for Ann was one in which Gatsby-like (while working to save mankind's last best hope) he was "borne back ceaselessly to the past." At the other pole she becomes Lincoln's Beatrice, even to the point of appearing to him when he lost in the dark woods of struggle¹⁵, and eventually in Edgar Lee Master's epitaph she becomes the very source for all the light and forgiveness that Lincoln gave to the nation.¹⁶

This also has the effect of placing Ann Rutledge somewhere between an actual historical person, Beatrice, whose person and loss would be a source of inspiration and soul searching for the equally historical Dante, and the entirely fictional Daisy Buchanan who became the obsession of the equally fictional Jay Gatsby in F. Scott Fitzgerald's novel.

Thus, the image of Ann Rutledge, combined with the possibility of locating her in historical reality, becomes a perfect reference point and symbol for the confusion of the individual in love, whose is drawn by the very nature of the experience toward "the transcendent ideal of love"¹⁷ and yet lives in a culture where a predominant tendency may be to reduce such an experience to "individuals seeking personal satisfaction and self-realization."¹⁸ For Gatsby is certainly set against just such a reduction. There is nothing transcendently ideal in what Gatsby seeks in Daisy, nor in Daisy herself. So we have reference to a transcendental ideal rooted in real history and a fictional description devoid of reference to such an ideal.

But this need for bedrock history and transcendental meaning, and the apparent conflict of the two, may also explain the almost inverse relationship between scholarship and art described by Prof. Schwartz. "[Lincoln scholars] could not understand the tension between their own craft, analytic history, and commemorative symbolism, which embodies history's affective and moral meanings. They championed the newly professional field of Lincoln studies, defended truth rooted in historical fact against myths rooted in social relevance."¹⁹ But it is also true that for symbol to be effective, to actually embody meaning, it must refer to something real, or perceived to be real. Once the link to some perceived reality is severed the symbol loses all power. As Leo Damrosch writes concerning Godwin's novel Caleb Williams ". . .the balance between fact and fiction tips over: Godwin sees that if experience is fictive and if consensus breaks down, the fiction is nothing but fiction."²⁰

Thus to the extent that scholarly skepticism or even dogmatism disputing the reality of Ann Rutledge's relationship to Abraham Lincoln weakened the perception of that something real was happening, it was inevitable that the symbolic power of the relationship would weaken. Such scholarly work will inevitably find its way to the public if only because it is precisely scholars who teach the rest of us, or teach our teachers, and teach the poets and writers who will use historical sources for their work.

But as Professor Schwartz's essay aptly points out, if the symbolic meaning refers to a transcendent ideal when that transcendent ideal is no longer considered to be based in reality, the effect will be the same. In both cases the relationship turns out not to have embodied "the affective and moral meaning" it once seemed to, either because the relationship was not really of the transcendent ideal type, or because there is no transcendent ideal. It is too much to expect a symbol to survive when it is thus cut off from reality at both ends.

"Only individuals possess the capacity to contemplate the past..."²¹ Here is where Ann Rutledge Blues finds its artistic strength, because it is written from the point of view of someone who is utterly confused about both the facts and the meaning of the past, whether that past is a single personal relationship or the biography of Abraham Lincoln. It is a confusion caused not simply by differing reports and interpretations; it is driven by the possibility that there are more facts as yet to be uncovered and that after all a transcendent ideal of love may correspond to some reality the experience of which may have had profound effect on the history of the world.

Leo Damrosch says of writers in the eighteenth century: "They lived in an era of epistemological crises or destabilization, but they were still close enough to a tradition of stable ontology — a "real" reality that was supposed to be independent of human minds and grounded in the order of the universe — to try to salvage the coherence and reassurance of the older view."²² Yet it cannot be denied that just such crises and destabilization takes place not only in intellectual circles, and once and for all (as if any succeeding age really solves the problems of prior ages) but that individuals still go through precisely the same process. A simple change in the "distribution throughout society of beliefs, knowledge, feelings, and moral judgments"²³ about the nature of personal romantic relationships does not mean that every person in a given age adopts wholesale at birth, nor are they exclusively taught, the entire zeitgeist. But what is a person to do when they experience something such as intense personal love for another human, which seems to point to a "real reality...grounded in the order of the universe," and yet there is no immediately available "stable ontology" in which to view it? Ann Rutledge Blues captures and epitomizes the experience, the confusion, the longing and the search of a person in just such an epistemological crisis.

The Future of Ann Rutledge in the American Consciousness

Professor Schwartz's assertion that Ann Rutledge no longer interests the best talents of the day is perhaps falsified by Ann Rutledge Blues. But does Ann Rutledge have any future at all in the collective memory? Will she continue remain "absent from today's most popular movies, stageplays, poetry and magazines?" Will any other talents be interested in her?

The artist, the singer in Ann Rutledge Blues, is driven almost mad with the search for the real Ann Rutledge in order to produce a true work of art. It might be argued then that Ann Rutledge Blues is really a sort of meta-artistic work. In light of Professor Schwartz's essay one wonders then: is this the last that can be said of Ann Rutledge? Is Ann Rutledge Blues itself confirmation from an artistic source that Ann has indeed vanished, for all intents and purposes, from the American Memory?

There is of course the possibility that Ann Rutledge Blues itself becomes a hit, which would reintroduce the figure of Ann to the wider public and re-stir interest in her relationship with Abraham Lincoln. Even if a transcendent ideal of love and marriage has been replaced by "close relationships"²⁴ this does not mean there is no yearning for such. Absent that, is there an opening for a work that will reawake Ann in the American memory, and yet be true to history? Ann Rutledge Blues, I think, may point toward a possible affirmative answer.

One other factor should be noted as well. Professor Schwartz links the demise of Ann Rutledge, to the demise of Lincoln in the American memory, in recent decades. A smaller percentage of American's considered him a great president; a smaller percentage thought of him as the frontier-reared, self made man of the people; and "Lincoln the emancipator replaced Lincoln as the Savior of the Union."²⁵

It is this last which as the "overwhelmingly salient aspect of his historical reputation," i.e. "as a morally driven leader intent on eliminating slavery and racial injustice," which makes the Ann Rutledge story seem "superfluous, if not downright distracting."²⁶

And yet as I write, a man has been elected President who professes to be a student of Lincoln, not merely the Emancipator, but the Lincoln who guided the country through a time of crisis and war. The prevailing image of Lincoln may very well be returning to the "Savior of the Union."²⁷

If the particular story of Ann Rutledge has faded there is, ironically, a new type of character that in recent years has occupied the imagination of the public — the lone historical scholar on a quest for evidence that reveals that there is a reality underlying what the mainstream has dismissed as myth and legend. The Da Vinci Code is perhaps the most successful example of this, but the movies National Treasure I and National Treasure II which deal precisely with American history have also been extremely popular. National Treasure II deals with the missing pages of John Wilkes Booth's diary in an imaginative way; one can easily imagine just such a fictional narrative revolving around the quest for the historical Ann Rutledge.

Such of course must await the work of novelists and moviemakers, but it may be that the almost inverse and at time antagonistic relationship that occurs between scholarly historical research and public consciousness, exemplified in the question of Ann Rutledge,²⁸ is being resolved in a way, which while not necessarily favorable to the spread of the historical facts, reasserts the presence of the name of a historical character in the public's mind. Such was the redoing of the image of Mary Magdalene in public awareness, even though that image may owe much to poetic and theological license that occurred over fifteen hundred years ago. It may be that there is a need for people not merely to accept what has been handed on by tradition, but to see it grounded in historical scholarship (be it good or bad) that lays at the base of this trend. In a world where science has undercut the historicity of stories that previously spoke to the mind and heart in a powerful way, people feel a need for this division between reality and imagination healed.

This division, which certainly forms the source of anxiety in the religious sphere, and can be felt in debates over creationism and Darwinian evolution, or in the perceived assaults of revisionist history on the underlying truth about the American experiment, is also felt at the personal level. There seems to be an innate human need not merely to consider our lives as self-created narratives, but to root the emotional and deeply felt psychological and spiritual aspects or our lives in an objective reality. Failing this, one is left staring at the possibility that there is no way to attribute meaning, in the sense of a referent existing in the real world, to any experience or feeling no matter how strong. It all becomes poetic reflection, which bears with it the feeling of fiction. Such may or may not be the case, but it surely places stress on the individual.

The story of the lone scholar's quest, a scholar much like the protagonist of Ann Rutledge Blues for documentary or other evidence that reveals in fact that the love of Ann Rutledge stayed with Abraham Lincoln and affected the way he governed, the fictional revelation as it were that the legend after all was a true story, certainly is a possible vehicle for the reintroduction of Ann Rutledge to the American Memory.

Such a work about Ann Rutledge though would inevitably lean toward being precisely what the singer of Ann Rutledge Blues is not looking for. It would not be rooted in real history. It might reintroduce her name to the populace, but who she was and what effect she had on Abraham Lincoln would at most be raised to the level of a new myth, entailing all the same conflicts with the science of history that the old myth underwent.

And yet it is also imaginable that such a piece of art, cinematic or otherwise could be successful, and it need not be false, nor rest on invented history. Rather it could quite easily raise and resolve questions about the historian as historian and as individual in manner that is true to the historical Ann Rutledge and true, though challenging to the historical profession.

The historian's quest for the unvarnished factual truth does not preclude what might be called poetic inspiration — a certain intuitive grasp that helps the historian or, indeed, any scientist. As Peter Gay wrote of Theodore Mommsen:

On contemplating the intersection of Professor Schwartz's essay and Eric Wolfson's song there is revealed a certain lacuna in the study of history itself. To see this we must call into question something which may seem obvious to most us but which Ann Rutledge Blues draws such attention to that it should be addressed. We will find paradoxically that what Professor Schwartz calls the strongest version of the Ann Rutledge legend, "a product of poets, not historians,"³⁰ the one summed up by Edgar Lee Master's epitaph, has the potential of being the truest to history.

It is not uncommon for those with a particularly scientific approach to feel that certain things are best left to the novelists or theologians. Such a passing off certainly brings a certain relief for, by rendering the legend in literary form only, one may avoid the harsh possibilities of any transcendent reality and focus solely on the particular pleasures of fiction. The question is whether this is a kind of evasion. Like the singer we prefer the divine feeling of eating crackers by the turpentine and drinking wine from a plastic cup rather than having to deal with same food and drink in sacramental setting where they refer to or are part of much deeper realities. We would rather enjoy Fitzgerald's fictional creations and his commentary on America, than have to contemplate whether Dante's allegorical representations might be true and require some sort of choice on our part. This implies no moral criticism whatsoever, since there are a thousand different versions of transcendent reality calling on us and demanding our assent everyday. What reasonable person would even want to deal with it? Yet all things being equal, it is a fact that we are more comfortable taking simple pleasure in art, than in being existentially challenged by the possibility of a transcendence in the world that demands a response. This may lead to a certain overcompensation, not warranted by a strictly scientific epistemology in ruling out, as beyond the purview of science, any and all consideration of the possibilities of an objective transcendence within a particular historical event.

As historians began to take a more consciously scientific approach to their discipline the question of the divine intervention, of providence, of miracles naturally became problematic. As Marc Bloch wrote:

Professor Schwartz's article is an example of precisely the scientific approach recommended by Bloch. It may be impossible to ever figure out the truth of what went on between Abraham Lincoln and Ann Rutledge, but how "so many of our fellow humans" came to believe in the legend, and why it suddenly disappeared are important aspects of the history of the nation and should be studied and discussed. Schwartz himself draws attention to this. The intensity of professional historians’ criticism of the Ann Rutledge story, he writes:

Now this may be true, but it tends to elide two distinct problems with the result that an important possibility that may indeed be subject to scientific historical investigation is overlooked. For between the science of ascertaining the hard historical facts and the science of studying commemoration on its own terms lies the possibility of something real in history that might be called transcendent if that term did not bring with it such a grandiose set of associations. The string between the hard facts of Ann and Abe's life and the phenomena of their commemoration is in some way broken, but it allows the possibility of an "angel's grace."

There was something unique in Abraham Lincoln in the manner in which he governed, related to people, and viewed the world. Perhaps there was something uniquely good and virtuous in Ann Rutledge. That she epitomized, in her legend, a certain set of communally held virtues should not obscure the fact that one, they may indeed be virtues, and two, that she may indeed have possessed them.

Here then we find the possibility of a storyline, fictional but true to the facts nonetheless. Romantic drama and romantic comedy has not lessened its hold on the public as one can readily see all around us. So either as a separate story, or one told in a sort of National Treasure III type of adventure, one can imagine the hero, as hapless in his way as the protagonist of Ann Rutledge Blues, being accompanied by a woman, named Annie perhaps, which would be ironic and highlight the cluelessness of the hero who fails to immediately make the connection. He begins to reflect not so much on the possibilities of either art or history in legend of Ann and Abe, but rather on the historical person Ann Rutledge. In her he finds something unique, something which despite the controversies, false leads and dead ends, cannot be denied. The audience of course becomes aware over the course of the story of something that escapes the protagonist — namely that his Annie possesses the very same virtues, expressed in modern life, that Ann Rutledge possessed. And perhaps as he sits speaking about the historical Ann Rutledge and whether she did affect Abe in some way all but inarticulable, he takes the same imaginative question that the narrator of the The Great Gatsby does, and wonders what Lincoln was thinking in the moments before he was shot. His thoughts perhaps went not the great and open landscapes of "this last and greatest of human dreams" but to the people who populated it, and his thoughts turn to the memory a young woman who seemed to embody the virtues that in their obscurity, homeliness and gentleness that are the incarnation of the better angels of human nature — that what he saw and felt with Ann corresponded to something real in the world and yet transcendent. And as he says what he thinking it begins to dawn on him that the mystery of Ann Rutledge has been fact right in front of him, in his own life, but he had never noticed it. Perhaps he must now run through the city to find her, to prevent her from marrying another. And should in an epilogue there appear on their mantle the artifact he had been searching for, the photograph of a likeness of Ann Rutledge, it will not so much stand for historical confirmation (for indeed the authenticity of it need not be established) but as the reminder that what may have been the source of a historical mystery, a gentle but objectively real transcendence, has in fact happened in his own life.

The question of whether this story or one like it will ever be written and whether it will gain hold and leave an impression of Ann Rutledge on the public's mind, is beyond the power of prediction. So although Ann Rutledge Blues may end up being the final artistic word on Ann Rutledge, the song itself challenges the notion that Ann Rutledge no longer produces significant art, and also points the way for future artists and historians to contemplate just what may have happened then, and what may be happening now in their own lives.