02 February 2009
What Lincoln Means to Me
This article is excerpted from Abraham Lincoln: A Legacy of Freedom, published by the Bureau of International Information Programs. View the entire book (PDF, 5.48 MB).
By: Eileen Mackevich
Eileen Mackevich is executive director of the Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Commission. She is the co-founder of the Chicago Humanities Festival and was its president from 1989 to 2005. She has been a broadcast journalist at the Chicago affiliate of National Public Radio and was deputy director of the Illinois Humanities Council.
Among history’s heroes, Abraham Lincoln stands out as THE American original. Born to unaspiring parents on the hard-scrabble frontier, his meteoric rise was never less than inspiring. Lincoln continued to grow and remake himself anew throughout his lifetime. Even 200 years later, we seek his guidance. In truth, we can do no better than to emulate our 16th president: a man of dogged, so very American, ambition, but also one whose resolve was always tempered by an unswerving determination never to compromise his personal integrity.
Never boring, our Lincoln. He is a simple man, a complex man, a roustabout, a jokester, a recluse, a man of action, a visionary. Just when we think we understand him, he eludes us. He is not a man to be pigeon-holed. There is a Lincoln for all seasons and all reasons.
Scholars find rich soil in Lincoln’s many manifestations. They debate the substance of his life and the larger meaning of his tragic death. How did his views on race evolve? Why did he move so cautiously on emancipation? Was he moved only by the imperative of battlefield success and the consequent need to gather support from abroad? When did he embrace the idea of full citizenship for the former slaves? Would his Reconstruction plan have successfully reunited North and South while ensuring the former slaves their full legal equality?
Only Lincoln could have steered us from the tragic course of race relations that followed his death. As John Hope Franklin, the African-American scholar often called the dean of American historians, put it, “Of all the American presidents, only Lincoln stayed up nights worried about the fate of my people.”
While Lincoln today enjoys the near-universal esteem of his countrymen, during his lifetime he was hardly a man for all seasons and all reasons. Many southerners and abolitionists disliked him. Frederick Douglass, the former slave turned abolitionist author, editor, and political reformer (also the most admired man in England), faulted Lincoln for failing to act swiftly on emancipation. Douglass felt that Lincoln was too solicitous of the slave-holding border states that refrained from joining the southern rebellion. Only later did Douglass perceive Lincoln’s political artistry: The president, he came to understand, was a masterfully pragmatic politician who knew just how fast and how far he could push the American people toward abolition.
Ever anxious to learn, Lincoln invited outspoken people to the White House. He respected their honesty. Douglass was one. Another was Anna Dickinson, a Quaker activist abolitionist, women’s rights advocate, and intense Lincoln admirer. But she turned against Lincoln because he would not support her charge of treason against the pompous, politically scheming General George B. McClellan. Lincoln listened respectfully to Americans of different stripes, from Negro abolitionists to Quaker activists, to the talented, high-powered individuals he included in his cabinet, to his political rivals — but the important decisions always were Lincoln’s alone. As a leader, Lincoln moved deliberately, always testing the prevailing political winds. He changed his mind often. He was, in the modern jargon of the distinguished historian James Horton, the ultimate “flip-flopper.” But the great social scientist W.E.B. Du Bois may have reached the essential truth when he called Lincoln “big enough to be inconsistent.”
My great attraction to Lincoln rests on his nobility of character, his “self-making” in the larger 19th-century sense described by historian John Stauffer. Because his thought was deeply grounded in a belief in equality and in the ideals of freedom, we can imagine all things from Lincoln. He might have solved the race problem; he might have extended female suffrage. He is, more than any other, the American hero.
On a sunny spring day shortly before his assassination, Abraham and his wife, Mary Todd Lincoln, took a carriage ride. The war was over. Optimism reigned. Abe contemplated the future. After his presidency, Lincoln told his wife, he hoped they would travel to Europe and beyond. That was not to be. But in the larger sense, Abraham Lincoln has traveled the world — his belief that the common man can make himself anew is inspiration enough for us all.
