Abraham Lincoln
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Abraham Lincoln was the President of the United States from 1861CE to 1865CE[1]. He is most remembered for presiding over the American Civil War.
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[edit] One of these is not like the other
There are two interpretations of Abraham Lincoln's presidency, depending on what historian you're talking to.
[edit] President Lincoln was one of our greatest leaders
The first, most popular one is that Lincoln was one of the greatest presidents in American history. He managed the American Civil War (perhaps not doing the best possible job but still not bad) almost singlehandedly made abolition politically palatable.
[edit] President Lincoln abused overstepped his presidential powers
The second, less popular view is that Lincoln is detestable because he grossly abused the power of the executive branch of the United States. In particular, he suspended the writ of habeas corpus, spent money without the approval of Congress, and imprisoned 18,000 suspected Confederate sympathizers without trial.
[edit] Soft on slavery!
When running for Illinois' seat in the U.S. Senate, Lincoln was tarred as a "closet abolitionist" (the political equivalent of being called "soft on terrorism" today) by his opponent Stephen Douglas. Douglas claimed Lincoln would allow such horrors as voting rights, jury duty rights, and (horror of horrors) interracial marriage rights for blacks. Lincoln got around this by expressing what would today be considered horrifying racist things. In Lincoln's own words, "I am not nor ever have been in favor of making voters or jurors of Negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people. ...and I will say in addition to this that there is a physical difference between the white and black races which I believe will forever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality." His anti-abolitionist credentials secured, he promptly turned around and stated that blacks deserved the same right to freedom, the "right to eat the bread without the leave of anybody else which his own hand earns", as he put it[2]. This was actually a very calculated political move; he knew the actual abolitionists had no one else to go with but him, and he needed to woo the moderates and conservatives of the time[3].
[edit] Modern Political Symbolism
Many modern politicians have, either directly or indirectly, drawn analogies between themselves and Abraham Lincoln. President Barack Obama, while balking at outright equivalencies, often subtly encourages surrogates and fans to do the same: he opened his bid for the presidency at the Illinois State House (Lincoln's old stomping grounds), dined on china patterned after Mary Todd Lincoln's directly after his inauguration, was sworn in on Lincoln's Bible, and openly sought to create a "team of rivals," Doris Kearns Goodwin's phrase to describe Lincoln's cabinet.
But Obama was by no means the first. Because Abraham Lincoln was America's first Republican president, some Republicans attempt to trace a "continuity of political thought and philosophy from Lincoln, the country’s first Republican president, to the era of George W. Bush."[4] However, the two men share little more than the same party name. Lincoln was a social progressive, fighting intensely for, and building his reputation on, opposition to the quite conservative institution of slavery. And Lincoln was an at least an agnostic - possibly an atheist.[5] Further, the Republican Party has reinvented itself at least three times since the 1860s - first to become the anti-Southern, freedmen's rights party after Lincoln's death, second to become the deregulation party in the 1930s, and finally to place social conservatism above fiscal conservatism in Ronald Reagan's image. Clearly, that Lincoln and modern Republicans share a party name does not mean they share anything more than that.
[edit] Awesome quotes
"In your hands, my dissatisfied fellow countrymen, and not in mine, is the momentous issue of civil war. The government will not assail you... You have no oath registered in Heaven to destroy the government, while I shall have the most solemn one to preserve, protect and defend it." —Lincoln, warning the South in his Inaugural Address.
[edit] Footnotes
- ↑ Whitehouse.gov official biography
- ↑ Smithsonian magazine's article (page 4) on the Lincoln-Douglas debates.
- ↑ There is absolutely no possible allegory in this for atheists and religious liberal presidential candidates. No, siree.
- ↑ http://zenoferox.blogspot.com/2008/07/old-school-greenberg-remembers.html
- ↑ Doris Kearns Goodwin, Team of Rivals, Ch. 3.
