I’m sure there will be lots of articles and TV features about Abraham Lincoln today, and I don’t have too much to add to the supposedly 14,000 books that have already been written about the man. I’m sure we’re due for another few hundred books during this bicentennial year. If you want to learn anything about Lincoln, from any angle, there are plenty of books to find out anything you need. (This one, for example, PROVES he was gay. You’ll find plenty of others that prove he wasn’t.)
Essentially, we still live in Lincoln’s America. To travel back to the era of Washington of Jefferson would be a gigantic culture shock, but in Lincoln’s time the fundamentals of modern America were already taking root. With the exception of Alaska and Hawaii, the country had reached its present size. Railroads connected the major cities of the north, which were exploding in population. Partisan newspapers and political discussion flooded every street corner. The country was massively divided down economic, social, and sectional lines. If we haven’t quite hit that level of division today, we’re not far from it.
What Lincoln did was, effectively, to take the idea of America created by the founders, and, by the nightmare of Civil War, force it into a living, breathing nation. It was a painful process, but for good or ill we live in a country that was formed by Lincoln’s presidency.
It goes without saying in such an iconoclastic era that the man wasn’t perfect. Who is? He was a human being, after all. It took him a long time to come around to the idea of freeing the slaves, and he held on to the idea of sending them back to Africa for a long time. He threw people in jail without trial, treating much of MD as occupied territory. He spent a long time agonizing over and analyzing every decision, and while this would later do him credit, in the early stages of his presidency it left the North unprepared for the devastating war to come.
My own personal favorite book about Lincoln is the aptly named Lincoln, by Gore Vidal, actually a work of historical fiction. It actually predates the widely read Team of Rivals by twenty years and deals with similar themes, following the major members of Lincoln’s cabinet as well as the man himself. Vidal paints him as a flawed being, frustrated, embarrassed by his wife, oftentimes struggling to manage the course of the war, but one that is all the more heroic for his flaws. This is not the perfect Lincoln we learn about in elementary school—the real Lincoln was probably altogether greater, for he was a regular human being who rose to extraordinary challenges and did exceptional things.
First of all, he brought about a fifty year reign of bearded politicians. From 1860 until the trend was shamefully broken by Woodrow Wilson on his election in 1912, every single president except William McKinley had some form of facial hair, oftentimes ridiculous facial hair. Behold the glory that was Chester A. Arthur! Any country that elects someone with sideburns like that to the highest office is something I want to be a part of.
Just his accomplishments in facial hair would probably be enough to put Lincoln in our top tier of presidents, but he went far beyond that. He stuck to the ideas that the country was founded on even as they were put to their most grueling test. Beaten down by reports of thousands upon thousands of deaths, he refused to compromise his beliefs that slavery should not be extended, that all men are indeed created equal, and that The United States was just that: North and South, East and West, one indivisible nation, and not a collection of independent fiefdoms.
“As a nation,” he once wrote to his friend Joshua Speed in 1855, “we begin by declaring that ‘all men are created equal.’ We now practically read it ‘all men are created equal, except negroes.’ When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read ‘all men are created equal, except negroes, and foreigners, and Catholics.’ When it comes to this I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretence of loving liberty—to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, without the base alloy of hypocrisy.” Lincoln gave all he had to make sure America didn’t slip into any kind of despotism. His Presidency was devoted to seeing that the country live up to its best ideals, no matter the cost. It is a lesson that is absolutely relevant for us today.
Finally, and most importantly, a man who was born in a society where a great number of people thought African-Americans were property was responsible for freeing four million slaves. You can bash him all you want for any number of minor things, but there is no getting around that fact. Obviously the 13th Amendment was not a miraculous spirit that brought racial equality and acceptance to the country. But Lincoln showed that we don’t have to say one thing and mean another. It’s a long road, but it’s one we as a country have been walking down, in fits and starts, ever since.
This is probably my favorite picture of Abraham Lincoln (supposedly it was one of his, too):
It was taken in 1860 as entered the Presidential campaign, just before he grew the beard and became a myth. Here is the tough western lawyer, the teller of backwoods stories and down-to-earth jokes, the rail-splitter, the politician and husband and father.
(This kind of thing makes me very exited for the supposed Steven Spielberg Lincoln movie staring Liam Neeson that has been pushed back and pushed back. It promises to show a humanized Lincoln. An accurate and well done biopic could be fantastic; I hope it ends up getting made before too long.)
Pictures like this help us to remember that there was a human being behind Abraham Lincoln. In her book Team of Rivals (page 151), Doris Kearns Goodwin relates a story where Lincoln and some fellow lawyers, including one Henry Whitney, were having a discussion about George Washington:
“The question for debate was whether the first president was perfect, or whether, being human, he was fallible. According to Whitney, Lincoln thought there was merit in retaining the notion of a Washington without blemish that they had all been taught as children. ‘It makes human nature better to believe that one human being was perfect,’ Lincoln argued, ‘that human perfection is possible.’”
It would have probably amused Lincoln to know that one day he would be talked about in the same way. I have to disagree slightly with Old Abe on this point. Lincoln was unequivocally a hero, someone who will likely be remembered long after this country has ceased to exist. He wasn’t a person without faults, but someone who achieved something close to perfection despite numerous roadblocks, both within and without. To remember his faults makes his accomplishments that much more meaningful. Human perfection might not be possible, but every so often people like Abraham Lincoln come along to show us the way to get just a little bit closer.
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