Adam Gopnik’s most recent article (A Time To Kill: The last ditch effort to head off the Civil War, The New Yorker, April 28, 2025) the canvasses the latest offerings in a seemingly endless assembly line of Abraham Lincoln biographies. Of particular attention lately amongst scholars is a peace conference, prior to Lincoln’s inauguration, held at the Willard Hotel in Washington DC.

Gopnik walks again on the well-travelled ground of attempting to sort-out just how hard line Lincoln was on the abolition of slavery. In the end, Lincoln is cast as a pragmatic democratic politician trying to build a coalition based on stopping the spread of this awful practice.

The talks failed. Once the conflict begins, Lincolns use of “abolition” to replace “union” as the motivating purpose of the war, had a galvanizing effect. Gopnik (interestingly) compares this word/goal shift to the impact Donald Trump has had on Canada’s federal election of 2025:

And yet Canada, oddly, offers a clue to the peculiar appeal of Lincoln’s abstract idea of “union”. Donald Trump’s threats have, almost overnight, caused a famously divided and centrifugal nation to cohere into a single national front. (April 28, 2025 New Yorker, Pg. 52)

The little-remembered pre- Civil War peace conference was held at the Willard Hotel, located near the White House and the Capitol Building. It was also where Julia Ward Howe wrote the Battle Hymn of the Republic and where early drafts of MLK’s I have a dream speech were born.

In a less uplifting chapter of American political history, the Willard Hotel is also where J. Edgar Hoover bugged King’s suite in January of 1964. Hoover felt he had gathered enough incriminating evidence from the bugged room to destroy King’s career. However, Lyndon Johnson, on the cusp of successfully passing the Civil Rights Act wasn’t keen on that happening, neither was Attorney General Robert Kennedy.

In her fascinating and well research biography of Hoover (G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the making of the American Century, Viking Press 2022) author Beverly Gage says only a handful of federal officials have heard the recordings. That is soon to change:

After Hoover’s death, a court order placed the tapes under embargo for fifty years, set to expire in 2027. (G-Man pg. 585)

You can almost feel the history seeping out of the walls of the Willard Hotel. President Grant sat in the lobby of the Willard and heard appeals for funding and support—giving birth to the phrase lobbying. The giant state seals on the lobby ceiling are worth a visit.

But please don’t visit Washington D.C. until the current trade dispute is behind us. The city has much to offer and the people are very friendly. However currently, a boycott is in order.