Happy Birthday, Abe

It has always bothered me that we don’t have a holiday hon­oring Abraham Lincoln.

 

Not that we need more gov­ernment holidays, or that little February should get two of them. It’s just that Lincoln deserves one. We all know that he saved the union and freed the slaves. That’s enough for our gratitude.

 But I find most of the little things about Lincoln attractive, too.

His sense of humor is infec­tious. In college, one of my fa­vorite courses was devoted to the writings of Abraham Lincoln, some of which can make you laugh out loud.

The sincerity and sympathy that comes through his corre­spondence is affecting, too. Not just in cursory circumstances, ei­ther. I’m thinking now of a short letter he wrote as president to a man condemned to be hanged for trying to illegally smuggle slaves into the country. Lincoln had been informed that friends of the man were pressing for a commu­tation or a pardon, and Lincoln wanted to let the man that no such help was on the way.

That had to be a disappoint­ing message for the man to get, but Lincoln did it in such a tender and solicitous way that I wonder if the man actually felt a little better on his way to the rope.

Having spent much of my adult life around politicians, I’ve come to the conclusion that poli­tics is a disease. It weakens char­acter and judgment, and leaves the sufferer pining for more.

A worldly wise friend of the family likes to say of politicians, including state reps and lower, “They all think they can be presi­dent of the United States.”

 So it’s a useful corrective to see an example of a fairly lowly man who did become president and who did make good. (Not necessarily the same thing.)

Nowadays we all think Lin­coln was brilliant, and most of us think he was good and kind and wise. That wasn’t the judgment of many of his contemporaries. When he arrived in Washington in 1861 as president-elect, much of Washington society couldn’t figure out how such an unedu­cated buffoon had gotten elected to the highest office of the land. His own Cabinet members, for the most part, thought of them­selves as much smarter and more capable.

That’s largely because Lin­coln refused to be anybody other than himself — and he was a little awkward socially — and because he was genuinely humble. He also always took responsibility. You know how people in the work­place are constantly trying to blame other people for mistakes? Lincoln never did that, and even took the rap for mishaps that weren’t altogether his fault.

Some observers concluded Lincoln had no principles be­cause he wouldn’t bend far enough to their wise counsel. That’s perhaps the hard­est thing to judge, because it’s such a fine line between discre­tion and cowardice. It’s easy to fool ourselves into thinking that not taking things to their logical conclusion is the wise thing to do, when many times it’s just the easy thing to do.

But in Lincoln’s case, at a dis­tance, nobody nowadays would say that Lincoln didn’t make hard decisions, that he didn’t believe in anything, or that he didn’t ac­complish anything.

One of his sharpest critics (in private) was stopped short part­way through the Civil War when an acquaintance said he thought Lincoln was a genius because he never allowed himself to go too far in any particular direction but managed to keep the whole machinery moving forward in the direction of saving the union and standing for basic principles he believed in.

Will that be the judgment of history? the critic wondered in his diary, as if astonished at the thought.