Abe Lincoln at 200

And now for the long awaited final installment of my two part series on famous people who were born in 1809 and turn 200 this year:

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.

Inaugural Thoughts: There's Hope Yet

This is the first time in my lifetime I can remember people being this excited about an inauguration. As the Obamas walked down Pennsylvania Avenue, the sound of cheers from the huge crowd drowned out almost everything else. Even the news talking heads were forced into silence. It’s incredibly exciting to be here to witness this moment. My mind, like many others', falls back to the generations that have gone before—to the struggles of the Revolution and the Civil War and the Civil Rights Movement—generations of people that were willing to put everything they had on the line to expand the ideals that America stands for.

It’s easy to get caught up in the spirit of the moment, and today is rightfully a day of joy and excitement for most of America. But we don’t know what lies ahead. Obama could be another Jimmy Carter (a.k.a. history’s greatest monster.) Let’s not discount that possibility, or we may be setting ourselves up for disappointment. Things might stay exactly the same. They could get better. They might get worse. But today, what he represents is the ability of this country to reach for and achieve its own most deeply held beliefs.

Unlike many of the other countries in the world, America is not so much a set of boundaries or a specific culture or language as it is a set of ideas. The Declaration of Independence begins by spelling out those values, and the subsequent history of our country has been the struggle to attain and perfect those values. In the words of Martin Luther King, Jr., “When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir.”

It has been a long, unending struggle to fulfill those lofty words, and it will continue to be a struggle. Because America is a set of ideas before it is a place, any violation of those ideas is a danger to the dream of this country. Every time we torture someone, every time we withhold their rights, every time we throw our power around and invade a country without reason, no matter the rhetoric used to justify such actions, we are turning our backs on everything that being an American means. Bush will tell you that he has kept America safe from another attack, but the utter abandonment and disregard for our founding principles he and his cronies have showcased is nothing if not an idealogical attack on the very existence of the United States. When the founders met in Philadelphia, they pledged their lives to protect the ideas put down in that Declaration. During the last eight years we watched those ideas slip away one by one by one, violating the very principles of our country in exchange for the promise of safety. Today Obama echoed the words of Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin when he said

As for our common defense, we reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals. Our Founding Fathers, faced with perils we can scarcely imagine, drafted a charter to assure the rule of law and the rights of man, a charter expanded by the blood of generations. Those ideals still light the world, and we will not give them up for expedience's sake.

For me, what being a participant in this country boils down to is that freedom and liberty are worth more than safety. Those ideas are America. Let them go, and we’re just a bunch of McDonaldses and Taco Bells.

So I’m sorry, Sarah Palin, but reading dangerous terrorists their rights is what being a "real American" is all about. Jefferson was always afraid that we would lose our revolutionary spirit, lose the drive to risk our lives, our fortunes and our sacred honor for the values of humanity, equality, and liberty. It’s taken 230 years, but when you hear speeches like Sarah’s it looks as though that’s exactly what has happened for some.

During the winter of 1777, during some of the worst months of the Revolution, John Adams wrote Abigail from Baltimore about the behavior of the British soldiers.

These incarnate Daemons say in great Composure, “Humanity is a Yankey Virtue. -- But that they [are] governed by Policy." -- Is there any Policy on this side of Hell, that is inconsistent with Humanity? I have no Idea of it. I know of no Policy, God is my Witness but this -- Piety, Humanity and Honesty are the best Policy.

Blasphemy, Cruelty, and Villany have prevailed and may again. But they won’t prevail against America, in this Contest, because I find the more of them are employed the less they succeed.

Giving in to fear and cruelty are always dangers in a free society, but what the election of Barack Obama symbolizes is that in American, we have reason to hope that “piety, humanity, and honesty” will still guide our actions. Obama’s speech today seemed to echo those hopes.

The time has come to reaffirm our enduring spirit; to choose our better history; to carry forward that precious gift, that noble idea, passed on from generation to generation: the God-given promise that all are equal, all are free, and all deserve a chance to pursue their full measure of happiness.

It has taken generations and generations to fight for that dream and to expand it. During the Civil War, Lincoln effectively rededicated our country to the pursuit of those ideals that spurred on the Revolution. Our country, he said, was formed on the “proposition that all men are created equal.” Even in 2009, we all must do our part to see “whether any nation so conceived and so dedicated can long endure.” The election of Barack Obama shows that we are continuing the work of showing that those ideas can and will endure.

The last eight years have been a struggle, and there were times when I certainly felt like giving up on our country. The excitement and optimism of the Revolutionary generation seemed worlds away. Our country had become just like any other. It’s easy to dip into hyperbole about the Bush administration’s failings. There’s plenty to say about it, and most of us could go on and on, but that’s not what today is about. Today is a chance for each of us to reaffirm our commitment to our country’s values. In Obama’s words:

What is required of us now is a new era of responsibility - a recognition, on the part of every American, that we have duties to ourselves, our nation, and the world, duties that we do not grudgingly accept but rather seize gladly, firm in the knowledge that there is nothing so satisfying to the spirit, so defining of our character, than giving our all to a difficult task.

This is a sentiment the Founding Fathers would certainly have agreed with as they put their names on a document that effectively identified them as traitors. Americans today have to be willing to fight for those ideas, even at the expense of our own safety.

In reality, we have never been that shining city on the hill that we hope to be. Perhaps such a goal is impossible. But it is not impossible to work each day towards the perfection of that ideal. There will always be debates about the minutiae of government, over how much responsibility the government has to help the common man, over where our taxpayers’ dollars are best spent, or just how much tax we should be paying. These arguments will go on and on.

What matters is that every day each of us has to do what we can in the efforts of perfecting our union, of spreading our values to the world not by force but by example. It’s impossible to see where we are headed from here, but I have reason to hope that our country will reaffirm the better angels of our collective nature. A job was begun in 1776 that must continue for each of us, day in and day out, to insure that “this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government, of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”