Lincoln’s Legend and Legacy (PBS special)

PRESS RELEASE

Legend & Legacy

Actor Sam Waterston and Historian Harold Holzer in Special Performance Edition of BILL MOYERS JOURNAL on PBS

Friday, April 10th at 9 p.m. (Check local listings)

Honoring the 200th Anniversary Year of Lincoln’s

Birth BILL MOYERS JOURNAL brings television viewers a deeply moving and intimate performance by award-winning actor Sam Waterston and eminent historian Harold Holzer. Lincoln’s Legend and Legacy features the spoken poetry and prose of American writers as different as Walt Whitman, Frederick Douglass, Allen Ginsburg, Langston Hughes, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and many others who have struggled to find words that adequately describe this tall, plain and gangling man and the transcendent significance of his presidency. Responding to the arc of ideas, language and history included in excerpts of their writings, Bill Moyers says, “Lincoln changes as we hear these words, and so does the country.”

This special performance edition of BILL MOYERS JOURNAL will be broadcast on PBS at 9 p.m. on April 10th, which is also Good Friday, the tragic day on which Lincoln was shot just as the Civil War was coming to a close. Lincoln’s martyrdom catapulted him from president to icon, from mortal man to enduring myth, and each American generation has subsequently approached his towering legend through the prism of its own perceptions. While writers over 150 years have compared him to Washington, Jesus, and Moses, other more critical contrasting voices have cast him as Hamlet, too slow to pick up the mantle of Emancipator. Interpreting his political legacy for their own contemporary purposes, Republicans and Democrats, blacks and whites have shaped an evolving portrait of Lincoln that adds nuance and dimension to the marble hero. Well-known as the star of television’s LAW & ORDER, Sam Waterston has inhabited the role of Lincoln on many stages and is a self-made scholar of the 16th president. Harold Holzer, a prolific author on the subject of Lincoln, is co-chairman of the U.S. Lincoln Bicentennial Commission underway this year and recently edited THE LINCOLN ANTHOLOGY: GREAT WRITERS ON HIS LIFE AND LEGACY FROM 1860 TO NOW, published by the Library of America. This anthology is the source for excerpts included in this performance, from first hand observations by Lincoln’s contemporaries to the words of Barack Obama, the most recent American president to lay claim to Lincoln’s legacy.

Check local listings

Left to right: Sam Waterston, Harold Holzer, Waterston, Holzer and Bill Moyers on set. All photos copyright Robin Holland.

Funders for Bill Moyers Journal include: the Partridge Foundation, a John and Polly Guth Charitable Fund; Park Foundation; The Kohlberg Foundation; The Herb Alpert Foundation; the Marilyn and Bob Clements and The Clements Foundation; Bernard and Audre Rapoport and The Bernard and Audre Rapoport Foundation; the Fetzer Institute; The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation; the Orfalea Family Foundation; and the Public Welfare Foundation, and our sole corporate sponsor Mutual of America Life Insurance Company. Bill Moyers Journal is a production of Public Affairs Television, Inc. and a national presentation of Thirteen/WNET New York.

Mary Edwards Walker: only woman to ever win the Medal of Honor

Dr. Mary Edwards Walker

Mary Edwards Walker was born in 1832 to Oswego, NY. She was an ardent abolitionist, a surgeon, spy, prisoner of war, and the ONLY woman to receive the Medal of Honor. In 1855 she graduated from medical school as a doctor.

When the Civil War broke out in 1861 Walker volunteered for Union Army as a civilian, first practicing as a nurse.  She served at First Manassas, Fredericksburg, Chattanooga and Chickamauga.

In September 1863 she was awarded a “Contract Acting Assistant Surgeon (civilian)” by the Army of the Cumberland. A first-ever female U.S. Army Surgeon.

Captured on April 10, 1864 as a spy, she was sent to Richmond and was exchanged four months later.

She also served in the Battle for Atlanta (1864). Walker served as a supervisor of female prison in Louisville, KY; and headed an orphanage in Tennessee.

On November 11, 1865 she was awarded the Medal of Honor – the only woman ever to have received the award.

For more information on Mary Edwards Walker:

• Civil War Doctor: The Story of Mary Walker (2007) by Carla Johnson.
• A Woman of Honor: Dr. Walker and the Civil War (2001) by Mercedes Graf.
• National Library of Medicine biography of Dr. Walker.

April 10th in the Civil War?

What happened on this day during the Civil War – April 10th?

1. Slavery was abolished in Washington, D.C. – April 10, 1862
2. Fort Pulaski, Georgia, which guarded the Savannah River, fell to the Union after a constant bombardment from artillery. – April 10, 1862
3. Confederate cavalry attack in Franklin, Tennessee. – April 10, 1863
4. The only U.S. female surgeon – Mary Edwards Walker – is captured by Confederates south of the Tennessee-Georgia border. – April 10, 1864.
5. General Robert E. Lee issues General Orders #9, a farewell to his beloved Army of Northern Virginia. – April 10, 1865.
6. The Union celebrates the end of the war. A crowd gathers at the Whitehouse and Lincoln has the bland play Dixie. – April 10, 1865.

For a complete timeline of the American Civil War, click here.