Saturday, February 12, 2011
It's Abraham Lincoln's birthday.
I didn't have a "favorite" president until I learned enough about Lincoln to de-mythologize him. He was the guy on the penny, freed the slaves, etc. Knew he was great. Knew his general story, & more about his Civil War years from Bruce Catton's books & American history classes. But in my '20s I started reading more Civil War histories, then a couple of good Lincoln bios, then the main culprit in perpetuating Lincoln misinformation, Carl Sandburg's two big bios of Lincoln. They're beautifully written but essentially epic poems in prose; Sandburg accepts as fact everything good anyone ever said about Lincoln, & everything he was purported to have said whether or not it could be verified. Sandburg was a collector of folk song & folk story. Sandburg, a socialist, also was appropriating Lincoln from the left. Lincoln was a Man of the Common People. Yes, he was, & Sandburg did infuse some life into the granite statue Lincoln had become. Lincoln was also uncommon, ambitious, a successful lawyer, a corporatist, an over-achiever certainly, & a very, very shrewd, experienced politician. The latter is what I came to really enjoy about him.
Like Franklin Roosevelt later, Lincoln was able to recruit & make use of other talented, ambitious men who believed they were better & smarter than the President they served. He let them keep believing it until it was necessary to disabuse them of their notions. Until he moved to Washington to take office, perhaps the only people who really understood how Lincoln operated were some old pals & advisers from out west, & one famous opponent who had defeated Lincoln in a senate race & been defeated by him in the presidential campaign: Stephen A. "Little Giant" Douglas.
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be." Thomas Jefferson
Like Franklin Roosevelt later, Lincoln was able to recruit & make use of other talented, ambitious men who believed they were better & smarter than the President they served. He let them keep believing it until it was necessary to disabuse them of their notions. Until he moved to Washington to take office, perhaps the only people who really understood how Lincoln operated were some old pals & advisers from out west, & one famous opponent who had defeated Lincoln in a senate race & been defeated by him in the presidential campaign: Stephen A. "Little Giant" Douglas.
Labels: holidays
