Abraham Lincoln was born 198 years ago today. When I was a child, we got the day off from school and the banks were closed. According to the North Carolina State Website, we aren't celebrating it this year, although we celebrate Martin Luther King's Birthday and Good Friday, two other men who were killed for being eloquent advocates of now-accepted ideas. According to the website of the U.S. Department of Personnel Management today is not a Federal holiday either. (Note that the Department of Personnel Management still refers to February 19 as Washington's Birthday. A footnote indicates while they're aware that everybody else now calls it Presidents Day, its official name is still Washington's Birthday and they're sticking with it, by God.)If you're going to have a holiday for just one of our presidents, I suppose it makes sense to pick Washington. Historians say that Washington's prestige and support made the formation of our constitutional government possible.
If we were to observe the birthday of a second president, though, it would have to be Lincoln. If Washington was necessary for the founding of our nation, Lincoln made possible its continued existence. His leadership through the Civil War, dealing with a contentious congress and a public that was not unified in its support of the war, as well as his recognition that slavery was an unconscionable institution, made deep and lasting impacts on what our country was to become in the ensuing years. I am aware that historians debate the extent to which Lincoln actually believed that all men are created equal, but to expect a historical figure to have seen the world with our sensibilities is silly. We know enough of what he thought to know that he was a remarkable and insightful man. Lincoln wrote the Emancipation Proclamation himself in ink on letter paper. His handwritten draft is still available. The Emancipation Proclamation was his idea, and he issued it during his first term, knowing he would face stiff opposition if he ran for a second term. "And upon this act, sincerely believed to be an act of justice, warranted by the Constitution, upon military necessity, I invoke the considerate judgment of mankind, and the gracious favor of Almighty God."
Lincoln was also a very adroit politician. One example: the Emancipation Proclamation states that any state that sends representatives to Congress will not be treated as a state in rebellion. This deft definition helped keep the border states from seceding. Kentucky, for example, had never seceded from the Union and continued to elect representatives to Congress, although some Kentuckians served in Confederate armies, and Kentuckians owned slaves. Defining rebellion as he did made it easier for all of the border states to stay in the Union.
Lincoln also had a canny knack for spotting talent. After frustratingly slow progress on the battlefield and the ever-increasing demands of General George McClellan and several other favorites of the military establishment, Lincoln noticed that no matter what the circumstances, Ulysses Grant could be counted on to fight. He put Grant in charge, and the whole nature of the war changed. The cat-and-mouse of the Shenandoah Valley and constant skirmishing with Lee became the grinding Overland Campaign, a brutal war of attrition that was many things, but most of all it was effective. It was Lincoln who was responsible for Grant's rise through the ranks, and it was Lincoln who left him alone to win the war. No other Union general could have been as effective.
Lincoln's story was also quintessentially American. He was born on the frontier (or something very like it), educated himself, worked hard, split rails, got trained as a lawyer, became a respected orator and debater, and eventually became president.
Then he was murdered by a fool who shot him from the back in the dark.
Lincoln was a great man.
We don't have politicians like Lincoln any more, at least not in national office. Fundraising may not be the only talent required of a presidential candidate, but without it, a serious candidacy is impossible. A man like Lincoln, with no a proven track record of accomplishment as a legislator or an executive, would find it difficult to sell his candidacy to large donors regardless of the ideas he espoused. A man who suffered from periodic bouts of depression, a man with a highly eccentric wife, would attract the attention of the press into irrelevant details about his life. He wasn't photogenic.
Do the politics of our era mark an improvement over Lincoln?
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