Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial

Today is the two-hundredth anniversary of the birth of Abraham Lincoln, 16th president of the United States of America.

Since childhood, he has been a hero of mine. I revere his determination to save the Union, and I am inspired by his hatred of slavery. I have no doubt that if he were alive today, he would hate abortion, too.

My favorite book on Lincoln is Carl Sandburg's combined edition of his 6-volumes' work, The Prairie Years and The War Years.

An interesting detail: Lincoln's grandfather, also named Abraham Lincoln, was a captain of militia in Virginia. In 1782, he moved his family into Kentucky, where his grandson, our 16th president, was to be born. He made this move on the advice of his good friend, Daniel Boone, who had explored the area extensively.

A few lines from Lincoln's career as a lawyer in Springfield, as recounted by Sandburg:

They had their fun and stories on the circuit. Once in Champaign County Court Judge Davis absent-mindedly sentenced a young fellow to seven years in the legislature of the State of Illinois. Prosecutor Lamon whispered to the judge, who then changed legislature to penitentiary. Lincoln, one morning in Bloomington, meeting a young lawyer whose case had gone to the jury late the night before, asked what had become of his case; the young layer bemoned, "It's gone to hell," and Lincoln, "Oh, well, then you'll see it again."

...A rich newcomer to Springfield wanted Lincon to bring suit against an unlucky, crackbrained lawyer who owed him $2.50; Lincoln advised the man to hold off; he said he would go to some other lawyer who was more willing. So Lincoln took the case, collected a $10 fee in advance, entered suit, hunted up the defendant and handed him half of the $10 and told him to show up in court and pay the debt. Which was done. All litgants and the lawyer were satisfied...

At a meeting of Replublican editors in Decatur, he said he was a sort of interloper, and told of a woman on horseback meeting a man on a horse on a narrow trail. The woman stopped her horse, looked the man over: "Well for the land's sake, you are the homeliest man I ever saw!" The man excused himself, "Yes, Ma'am, but I can't help that," and the woman: "No I suppose not, but you might stay at home."

And there's this from Sandburg:

Lincoln was 51 years old. With each year since he had become a grown man, his name and ways, and stories about him, had been spreading among plain people and their children. So tall and so bony, with so peculiar a slouch and so easy a saunter, so sad and so haunted-looking, so quizzical and comic, as if hiding a lantern that lighted and went out and that he lighted again -- he was the Strange Friend and the Friendly Stranger. Like something out of a picture book for children -- he was. His form of slumping arches and his face of gaunt sockets were a shape a Great Artist had scrawled from careless clay.

He looked like an original plan for an extra-long horse or a lean tawny buffalo, that a Changer had suddenly whisked into a man-shape. Or he met the eye as a clumsy, mystical giant that had walked out a Chinese or Russian fairy story , or a boy who had sumbled out of an ancient Saxon myth with a handkerchief full of presents he wanted to divide among all the children in the world.

He didn't wear clothes. Rather, clothes hung upon him as if on a rack to dry, or on a loose ladder up a windswept chimney. His clothes, to keep the chill or the sun off, seemed to whisper, "He put us on when he was thinking about something else."

Lincoln gained nationwide -- and even worldwide -- fame in the Lincoln-Douglas debates in 1858 (not 1860, as many people mistakenly think -- it was a U.S. Senate race, not the presidential race) when Senator Stephen A. Douglas -- another lawyer whom Lincoln had tried cases against and with and (when Douglas was serving as a judge) before, and whom he had previously debated politics on many occasions -- condescended to seven meetings with Lincoln. The format of those debates would test any modern political candidate: the first man would speak for an hour, then the second would rebut for an hour and a half, and then the first would speak again for half an hour.

I recently read the full text of these debates, and they are amazing, in particular as an argument, on Lincoln's part, against slavery. But Douglas, interestingly, was not defending slavery. Douglas was simply arguing that it was the right of any state to choose for itself whether slavery would be legal there. I think Douglas would have been outraged to be called pro-slavery. In modern parlance, Douglas was "pro-choice" on the slavery question -- Douglas' term was "states' rights." (I'm currently reading a biography of Douglas, and hope soon to have some cogent commentary about him, and his modern-day successor to Illinois' U.S. Senate seat and the Democratic Presidential nomination.)

Of course as everyone knows, Lincoln was elected president in 1860, whereupon many of the southern states seceded from the union. As anyone who had read Lincoln's speeches on the topic for several years prior could have predicted, Lincoln employed the military to amend the separation. It was the darkest period in American history, but Lincoln had a clarity of vision that allowed him to see the nation through.

Finally, I offer my favorite quotation from Lincoln, part of his second inaugural address:

It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God's assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men's faces; but let us judge not that we be not judged. The prayers of both could not be answered; that of neither has been answered fully. The Almighty has his own purposes. "Woe unto the world because of offenses! for it must needs be that offenses come; but woe to that man by whom the offense cometh!" If we shall suppose that American Slavery is one of those offenses which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South, this terrible war, as the woe due to those by whom the offense came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a Living God always ascribe to Him? Fondly do we hope--fervently do we pray--that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue, until all the wealth piled by the bond-man's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash, shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said "the judgments of the Lord, are true and righteous altogether"

Over at American Catholic, my fellow Illinoisan Donald R. McClarey has been posting some good stuff about Lincoln for a week or more. Check him out!

(Cross-posted at Southern Appeal.)