Why Lincoln matters
Two hundred years after his birth, Lincoln remains the greatest of our presidents. America's foremost historian lists the reasons why.
By Michael Beschloss
Cover: Lincoln
From Lincoln's death in 1865, when the American flag had only 36 stars, to today, his honesty, courage and intellect still inspire.
1. Scholars and the public recognize that he was the best president.
Historians and other Americans don't always agree about presidential greatness. The general public, for example, typically has a much higher opinion of John F. Kennedy than scholars do. But both groups almost consistently put Lincoln at the pinnacle. It's no accident, after all, that President Barack Obama was sworn in with the same Bible that Lincoln used at his inauguration. He understands what many of us realize: that had the president in the early 1860s been someone lesser than Lincoln, there is a good chance that the United States would have fractured into two or more countries.
2. He represents the best of the American Dream.
One of the oldest American notions is that any of our children can grow up to become whatever they want. Whose life embodies this idea more than Lincoln's? This was no George Washington or Thomas Jefferson, boosted by birth among the Virginia gentry. Son of Thomas Lincoln, a poor, illiterate frontiersman, young Abraham lost his mother as a child and enjoyed no more than 18 months of anything remotely approaching a formal education. Nevertheless, through hard work (he read his eyes out on Euclid, military history, Shakespeare, the Bible), good character, political talent and leadership skills, Lincoln made himself into a world figure. Such a compelling story serves as a modern inspiration for presidents such as Bill Clinton, who overcame significant challenges in his early life.
3. His character held strong.
Franklin Roosevelt, who guided the nation through the Great Depression and helped win World War II, was almost as great a president as Lincoln. But few Americans would urge their children to model their character on that of Roosevelt, known even to his champions for his Machiavellian deviousness. Not so "Honest Abe," as so many Americans have come to know him. He was a leader who made it to the top in American politics and waged a four-year war without lying or cheating. We know that Lincoln was almost uniformly kind even to his enemies, maintained his sense of humor amid disaster, loved his children and his volatile wife, and near the war's end, in 1865, "with malice toward none," showed not a trace of vindictiveness as he welcomed the Southern states back into the Union.
4. He helped pioneer modern race relations.
For almost a century after Lincoln's death, African-Americans celebrated Lincoln as "the Great Emancipator." As the 1960s civil rights revolution gained strength, however, the romance between Lincoln and American blacks began to cool. People paid more attention to black Civil War-era firebrands such as Frederick Douglass, who had pressed President Lincoln to understand that the struggle must not be just to reunite the Union but also to abolish slavery. And many scholars began to focus on what seemed by then to be Lincoln's shockingly retrograde views on black social equality and intermarriage, as well as the limitations of his Emancipation Proclamation. But history is always an argument without end. With the passage of time, while regretting some of Lincoln's words and actions, many scholars emphasize his growth and his political dexterity in galvanizing public opinion to give African-Americans legal equality.
5. He remains a pop culture favorite.
Lincoln has lived on at the center of American popular culture. On TV right now, a bank commercial portrays a President Lincoln complaining that no one seems to save his pennies anymore. Even those Americans most ignorant of presidential history will encounter Lincoln cars, Lincoln Logs, companies, schools and cities named for Lincoln. A formidable engine of the Lincoln legend is the fact that in many states, especially Illinois ("Land of Lincoln"), Lincoln's birthday has been celebrated as a holiday, and schoolchildren are annually taught to understand and respect the Great Emancipator. Sadly, that holiday was supplanted in 1971 by the amorphous "President's Day," which places Lincoln on equal footing with leaders such as the pedestrian Millard Fillmore.
6. His life story still contains many intriguing mysteries.
Countless books have been written on Lincoln. Yet, as we approach his bicentennial, the mysteries remain, making him more compelling than ever. Was his marriage a love match? Or was it a hell on Earth, as his final law partner, William Herndon, portrayed it? How would American history have changed had Lincoln survived that fatal night at Ford's Theatre? Lincoln's most lyrical biographer, Carl Sandburg, captured the lingering paradoxes when he spoke before Congress in 1959, on Lincoln's sesquicentennial: "Not often in the story of mankind does a man arrive on Earth who is both steel and velvet, who is as hard as rock and soft as drifting fog, who holds in his heart and mind the paradox of terrible storm and peace unspeakable and perfect."
7. He understood the power of words.
It's amazing how often the public language uttered by this self-taught man was poetry -- the call for a "new birth of freedom" on the Gettysburg, Pa., battlefield and to "bind up the nation's wounds" at the bloody conflict's end. His Gettysburg Address remains among the greatest speeches that any president has ever given. And in his first debate against Richard Nixon, Kennedy borrowed Lincoln's words to describe the nation's challenge in the Cold War: "In the election of 1860, Abraham Lincoln said the question was whether this nation could exist half-slave or half-free. In the election of 1960, and with the world around us, the question is whether the world will exist half-slave or half-free."
Presidential historian Michael Beschloss is author, most recently, of "Presidential Courage" and serves on the Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Commission, a federally appointed commission in charge of recognizing Lincoln's 200th birthday on Feb. 12.
Cover photograph by David Baratz for USA WEEKEND
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