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"Men give me credit for some genius. All the genius I have lies in this; when I have a subject in hand, I study it profoundly. Day and night it is before me. My mind becomes pervaded with it. Then the effort that I have made is what people are pleased to call the fruit of genius. It is the fruit of labor and thought."
-- Alexander Hamilton
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27 October, 2004 - "Autodidacticism"


Click to view Harold Holzer�s speech �Abraham Lincoln, American Hero�


I often cite that Americans today greatest failure is there failure to understand the history of the United States and the men who truly built it. How can we elect a President when the general public doesn�t have any concept of what the job of the President does and how our government works? Do we just listen to campaign propaganda and political commentators who are biased demagogues themselves? I believe this starts with each person as an individual educating themselves.

One of the most important men in American history is President Abraham Lincoln. Understanding Lincoln will lead us all to a better understanding of the United States and the way our government does and does not work. For many years I have heard the arguments about the Civil War and Lincoln. Most agree slavery is wrong but have no understanding of what the war was about other than that (some people still don't get it). Many would point out state rights and that the South had a right to leave the Union and form the Confederate States of America. But they fail to grasp the economic philosophical war that had raged since the Revolutionary War ended. Understanding Lincoln is essential to everyone understanding ourselves despite whatever differences we may have. Our nation once went through its most grave crisis and Lincoln held this nation together and his leadership must be looked upon always to pave the path toward a brighter future.

Harold Holzer is co-chairman of Lincoln Bicentennial Commission and probably knows more about Lincoln than anyone else alive. He has written many books of which I have made a reading list at the end of this entry. He along with Mario Cuomo wrote the following two books:

Click to listen to interview with Mario Cuomo about President Lincoln

On Monday, October 8, 2004 at Ford�s Theatre in Washington , DC for the National Endowment for the Humanities, Holzer gave a speech about Lincoln which everyone can read in it�s entirety or click the picture at the top to view the video:


ABRAHAM LINCOLN, AMERICAN HERO

by Harold Holzer

Standing here tonight on this historic stage, at the scene of Abraham Lincoln's murder and martyrdom--a shrine so evocatively frozen in time--one cannot help but be poignantly and powerfully reminded of the sacrifices often made by our heroes. And we cannot help thinking, too, of the transformative impact such sacrifices have on their reputations.
Abraham Lincoln entered this building on Good Friday, 1865, as President. He left as a national myth. At widely attended worship services two days later on Easter Sunday--a day that also brought synagogue congregations together for the Jewish festival of Passover--ministers and rabbis preached sermons comparing Lincoln to both Christ and Moses.
He had died for the American sin of slavery, a sacrifice for national resurrection; as in Leviticus, he had proclaimed liberty throughout the land, leading "all the inhabitants thereof" from bondage into the promised land of freedom. To other eulogists, he was a second George Washington, until then America's undisputed secular saint; the savior of the sacred union that Washington had created. As both pictures and poems declared: "Heroes and saints with fadeless stars have crowned him-- And Washington's dear arms are clasped around him."
Here at Ford's Theatre, Abraham Lincoln not only found his last few moments of relief from the crushing burdens of the presidency; he found immortality.
There is nothing wrong with this calculus. Lincoln was the first president to be assassinated, and his murder, just a week after the Civil War ended, ignited an emotional upheaval that for half the country saw triumph spiral into tragedy overnight, and for the other half brought fears that "malice toward none" would yield to retribution. Magnified by the lost promise of what Lincoln at Gettysburg had called his "unfinished work," his death inspired a powerful outpouring of grief that vaulted Lincoln into the realm of folklore even before his funeral train reached Illinois.
From this place, America carried a slain national saint. But in a way, it lost--or at least lost sight of--the hero who had entered its doors.
I would like to propose tonight that well before April 14, 1865, Abraham Lincoln had already, decisively earned the status of American hero. And legendary modesty notwithstanding, Lincoln worked as hard as any post-assassination mythmaker to reach that pinnacle.
For years, his eyes were clearly focused on the arc of history--and on the example of earlier American heroes whose commitment to freedom he treasured, but whose defense of slavery he abhorred. Death did not make Lincoln a hero. His life did. By the time he was murdered here, Lincoln had already dominated the most society-altering four years in American history--not only testing whether the American nation would endure, but presiding over the destruction of its greatest shame: slavery.
Consider the eyewitness reports of his arrival here on April 14. Actors on stage stopped their scene in mid-sentence, the orchestra struck up "Hail to the Chief," and the audience rose and greeted the president with "deafening cheers." Before the fatal shot rang out, he already seemed to one audience member "like a father watching what interests his children, for their pleasure rather than his own."
"Father Abraham," or "Uncle Abe," as he had come to be known--like the reigning elder of the American family, albeit a dysfunctional one--had proven his appeal to his "children" just a few months before in hard numbers, handily winning re-election, and earning four out of every five votes cast by the federal soldiers risking their lives in the field.
Just days before he lost his life here, Lincoln entered the devastated Confederate capital of Richmond, not to act the conquering hero, it should be noted, but to visibly, personally "bind up the nation's wounds." He was greeted with such impassioned reverence by liberated slaves that, overcome with emotion, Lincoln had to beg them to kneel not to him, but only to God. He drew bitter criticism that day merely for placing his hand on a black man's shoulder in public. "It was the great deliverer meeting the delivered," marveled an eyewitness. Lincoln "heard the Thanksgivings" that day for himself. He knew what he had become.
We live in a cynical age today, counting more heroes in sports and entertainment than in government. Our 24-hour news cycles and relentless world wide web giddily tell us when celebrities grow feet of clay. The "gotcha" age tempts us to scrutinize the heroes of the past as well, and in recent years even Lincoln has not escaped doubts: was he a visionary or a cunning politician?
Was he an enthusiastic or reluctant emancipator? Were his wartime powers excessive, indeed was his war even necessary? We need to go back to the 1830s--to the culture that produced and inspired him--to really understand what he meant in his time, and should continue to mean in ours.
****
How early in life did Lincoln aspire to be a hero? At the age of 23, he proclaimed that his only "ambition" was to be "truly esteemed of my fellow men, by rendering myself worthy of their esteem." That he intended to do just that was already unmistakable. But from the start, he imagined himself building on--and perhaps cleansing inconsistencies in--the record of heroes who had preceded him. A few years later, in fact, he was emboldened to predict that new American heroes would be needed to meet the growing crisis over slavery. The old "field of glory is harvested, and the crop is already appropriated," he conceded, almost jealously recalling all the heroes and achievements already registered in American memory.
But he quickly added: "[N]ew reapers will arise, and they, too, will seek a field." Clearly, he intended--early--to reap those fields himself.
"Reaping" was an ironic metaphor for a fellow who had always hated farm work. As a youngster, he preferred reading and writing, even if his father regarded such fixations as laziness. His very first recorded words mingled boast and apology: "Abraham Lincoln/His hand and pen/He will be good but/god knows When." Probably a joke. But maybe it was no accident that while he capitalized his own name, he wrote "god" with a small "g," and the word "When" with an upper case "W"--as if he sensed his own destiny and aspired to meet it, despite the lack of encouragement, from the very first. With typical humility, Lincoln later summed up his boyhood this way: "It can all be condensed into a single sentence. . .in Gray's Elegy: 'The short and simple annals of the poor.'"
In truth, and in full, that passage--rarely quoted in full by Lincoln or his biographers--evoked the low esteem in which most people held their impoverished neighbors. The poor were the real reapers of the field, and most contemporaries condemned them to a destiny of hard labor with no chance for improvement. As the entire stanza advised:
Let not ambition mock their useful toil,
Their homely joys, and destiny obscure;
Nor grandeur hear with a disdainful smile,
The short and simple annals of the poor.
Lincoln in fact strongly disagreed with this admonition. His philosophy was different. He believed it was possible to transcend what he called "the limitations of American traditions" through "the inspiration of hope." And in that same Gray's Elegy, he likely took solace from a subsequent passage that suggested that even the "simple poor" enjoyed the heady possibility of fame through achievement. In fashioning his own version of his life for public consumption, Lincoln liked to emphasize the grinding poverty from which he sprang, not the grinding ambition that led him to escape it.
But in that later stanza from Gray's Elegy--which he surely knew but seldom quoted--even the poor might enjoy:
Th'applause of list'ning senates to command,
The threats of pain and ruin to despise.
To scatter plenty o'er a smiling land,
And read their hist'ry in a nation's eyes.
Thus the young Lincoln understood early the path toward making history before "a nation's eyes:" the path of hard work, education, and the striving for respect. It also called for "gratitude to our fathers," as he later put it--if not to his own unsympathetic father, then to the national fathers who had created an America where a "penniless beginner," as Lincoln described himself, could "toil up from poverty."
Coming of age, Lincoln counted many acquaintances but few close friends. Yet he always had heroes, like Henry Clay--who very much like Lincoln "inspired his friends, and. . .bore down all opposition," and proved that "The man who is of neither party. . .cannot be of any consequence." Clay showed Lincoln that partisan politicians could become heroes, too.
Then there was the "rough and ready" general-turned-Whig President Zachary Taylor, born in humble circumstances too, though unlike Lincoln, a military hero. Taylor, Lincoln believed, "could not be. . .scared. . . . and he pursued no man with revenge."--qualities for which observers would later praise Lincoln, too. To Lincoln, Taylor's career proved "that treading the hard path of duty. . .will be noticed."

Lincoln was even capable of admiring Democrats. "All honor to Jefferson," he proclaimed a year before his own election. Ever the politician, Lincoln also reminded Democrats that Jefferson had also trembled for his country over the issue of slavery.
The sublime writer who consecrated the notion that all men are created equal, stubbornly exempted his ownership of slaves from that aspiration, and symbolized an American schizophrenia that Lincoln would emerge to heal.
High above all these figures from the past towered George Washington. Once, listening to a group of fellow lawyers discussing Washington's shortcomings, Lincoln shut down the conversation by insisting: "Let us believe, as in the days of our youth, that Washington was spotless. . . ." Lincoln insisted "it makes human nature better to believe that one human being was perfect. . . ."
In one of the most meaningful incidents of his early life, young Abe had borrowed from an Indiana neighbor a copy of Mason Locke Weems' Life of Washington, the simplistic, reverential biography that introduced the fable that little George cut down a cherry tree.
Parenthetically, I have always found it amusing that Lincoln, a boy who was often scolded by his father for not cutting down enough trees, was so besotted by a book that celebrated a hero who proved his virtue by cutting down one tree by mistake, and then confessing his sin to his father.
There can be no doubt that the book profoundly influenced him. It not only gave Lincoln his first American hero to worship, but led to an incident in Lincoln's own boyhood that became nearly as legendary as the cherry-tree fiction in Washington's. In those hardscrabble days, Lincoln slept in a little loft tucked beneath the eaves of a log cabin roof, and when it rained it really did pour--not only outside, but in.
One such storm sent water flooding into the cabin, drenching the precious book he had on loan. To pay for it, "Honest Abe" toiled at its owner's farm "pulling Corn Blades at 25 cts a Day."
To future biographers, he had proven his own Washington-like integrity by working off his debt--even if one acquaintance later insisted that it was the angry neighbor, not the shamed boy, who decided that the price of the book had to be redeemed in hard labor.
The most significant result was that the young man got to keep the damaged volume for himself. He never forgot it. Nearly 40 years later, speaking just days before taking office as President, Lincoln could still recall the "small book" from "away back in my Childhood" during an emotional visit to Trenton. There the President-elect suggested to an audience of legislators who, like him, had "all been boys," and knew that "these early impressions last longer than any others," that the founders and their ideas might yet steel America for the approaching battle to save democracy.
"I am exceedingly anxious," he said that day, "that that thing which they struggled for; that. . .held out a great promise to all the people of the world to all time to come. . .this Union, the Constitution, and the liberties of the people be perpetuated in accordance with the original idea for which that struggle was made, and I shall be most happy if I shall be an humble instrument in the hands of the Almighty, and of this, his almost chosen people, for perpetuating the object of that great struggle."

Here was reverence for God, for the power of ideas, and for the bravery of heroes. But here, too, was an emerging hero identifying himself directly with the "original idea" and "great promise" of the American Revolution.
Its perpetuation, he was declaring in advance of civil war, was already a "great struggle" that called for men who were "more than common."
Perhaps in true vindication of the American dream, it even required common men who were more than common. In case his meaning was too veiled, he had made it abundantly clear on the day he departed his hometown for the inaugural journey to Washington.
Bidding farewell to his neighbors, with that unique blend of modesty and self-confidence for which he grew famous, Lincoln humbly confessed that he required "divine aid" to ensure his success. "Without the assistance of that Divine Being," he said, "I cannot succeed." But that was because, he added, he had "a task before me greater than that which rested upon Washington." It was not unusual for a new president to invoke the blessings of God. But it was astonishing to hear one suggest that his job would be more difficult than George Washington's.
This was no slip of the tongue. Two days later, he reiterated the thought--though again couching it with self-effacement: "without a name, perhaps without a reason why I should have a name, there has fallen upon me a task such as did not rest even upon the Father of his country. . . ." There was no mistaking Lincoln's sense of his inevitable place within what he would soon call the "mystic chords of memory." If Lincoln really still believed that he was a "humble instrument" who had "no name," and that his generation were merely "almost chosen people," he seemed convinced, too, that he had been selected not only by the people but by heaven to save the world's most noble experiment in self-government; to resurrect and cleanse the "original idea" derived from natural law and calibrated for America, however imperfectly, by Lincoln's heroes.
Facing down the secession crisis during his first days in office, Washington remained for Lincoln a useful inspiration to gird the country for war--at least for a while. To allow the Union to disintegrate, he insisted, was unacceptable because there was "no Washington in that." But Lincoln also knew when to emerge from that giant shadow. By the time Mary Lincoln got her husband to steam down the Potomac River to see Mount Vernon a year later, Lincoln was so indifferent he stayed on board his ship. Mary visited the house and grave, even purchased souvenir photos. Lincoln never set foot on shore. He seldom invoked the name of Washington again--not because he lacked respect for old heroes, but because I think he sensed that the crisis of his own age called for new heroes; that it was time, as he put it, to "think anew, and act anew."
The fact that this history-minded chief executive--whose highest previous post had been as a one-term member of Congress, who had held no office at all for 10 years--could so quickly unshackle himself from the role model who once awed him firmly demonstrates his own breathtaking self-confidence. Lincoln often prayed to God, but he seldom doubted himself.
So the urbane Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner noticed. On his first visit to the new President, he expected to find a country bumpkin he would dominate. By the time he walked out the door, he realized he had himself been dominated. He confessed that he had never met anyone in his life so sure of his own intellectual superiority.
Lincoln's accomplished new secretary of state, William H. Seward, came in for a similar shock. Perhaps still resentful that Lincoln had beaten him for the presidential nomination, Seward aspired to "help" the inexperienced new chief executive by nominating himself as his unofficial Prime Minister. In response, Lincoln coolly made it clear that no one was in charge but him: when it came to running the show, he told his ambitious counselor, "I must do it."
In an odd way, no show of self-confidence approached the epic certainty with which Lincoln fulfilled his role as commander-in-chief, about which much has been written. Some historians describe his endless shuffling of field generals as evidence of inexperience and weakness; but his willingness to make such choices also showed he was secure enough to learn from his mistakes in the full glare of public scrutiny. Lincoln paraded commanders through a revolving door of high expectations, mastering military strategy on the job.
Few who knew him years earlier would have predicted it. Back during his one term in the House, he had scuttled his slim chances for re-election by opposing the Mexican War-- denouncing the commander-in-chief as "a bewildered, confounded, and miserably perplexed man." To some, that was heroic; to others, suicidal.
But Lincoln was no less critical of himself--and it immunized him from permanent political harm. Humor saved him. In rare form, he took to the House floor to mock his own brief, uneventful service as a soldier years earlier, reminiscing: "Did you know I am a military hero? I had a good many bloody struggles against the mosquitoes; and, although I never fainted from loss of blood, I can truly say I was often very hungry."
*****
He was hungriest of all for public office--his ambition a "little engine that knew no rest," in the words of his law partner. Aroused back into politics in 1854 by the specter of slavery spreading nationwide, he began giving powerful voice to the hope of freedom, in a state--and nation--still deeply racist, and more bitterly divided than ever. It is perhaps no accident that in 1860, Republican strategists sensed they would win more votes by stressing their presidential candidate's personal virtues than by focusing on his controversial views.
The party platform might threaten white working people with the prospect of black freedom. But Lincoln's life story inspired the same constituency by stressing opportunity. The log cabin, flatboat oar, and the railsplitter's axe and maul became the ubiquitous emblems of the campaign, and while the candidate himself stayed home and stayed silent, the symbols of his rise testified to the limitless possibilities of America.
By this time, Lincoln was at least a co-architect of his own image, but his remarkable life story required little embellishment. The rail-splitter really had split rails. "Honest Abe" had earned his nickname through decades of spotless probity. Then there were the tales of awesome strength: of the frontier giant who beat back marauders on the river, and fended off a gang of bullies in one of the most famous wrestling matches in history. Few could compete against such a resume.
He wasn't perfect. Soon after his election, Lincoln came perilously close to unraveling his own emerging legend. En route to his inauguration, advisors convinced him to discard his familiar stovepipe hat in favor of a soft wool cap to escape recognition by would-be assassins in unfriendly Baltimore. Within days, journalists and cartoonists were taunting him as a shivering coward in clownish disguise. Lincoln ranked it the worst mistake of his life, so it was surely no accident that when Confederate troops menaced the defenseless capital a few weeks later, he never let the public glimpse his anguish. Even though troops failed to arrive quickly--and Lincoln privately stood at a White House window moaning, "Why don't they come! Why don't they come!"--publicly he stood firm, refusing to abandon Washington--either the city or the demigod in whose symbolic shoes he now stood.
By war's end, his Baltimore image was forgotten. Jefferson Davis, for example, would veto the idea of kidnapping his Union counterpart by conceding: "Lincoln is a man of courage. . .he would undoubtedly resist being captured. . . ." As if to prove the point, Lincoln soon turned up on the ramparts of Fort Stevens to observe a Confederate attack on the capital's suburbs--and there became the first and only president to come under enemy fire in war. By one account, he had to be urged to take cover before he finally crouched out of harm's way.
Something more than bravery propelled him: Lincoln's indifference to danger originated from a kind of positive fatalism, a sure sense of his own destiny. In most men, Lincoln's private secretaries believed, the pressures he faced "would have brought [out]. . .either overpowering personal fear, or overweening bravado. But Lincoln, almost a giant in physical stature and strength, combined in his intellectual nature a masculine courage and. . .a sentimental tenderness as delicate as a woman's. The Presidential trust. . .was to him not a mere regalia of rank and honor. Its terrible duties and responsibilities seemed rather a coat of steel armor, heavy to bear, and cutting remorselessly into the quick flesh."
But even as he seemed to suffer for a nation's sins, the most heroic aspect of Lincoln's life remained the very idea of it: the hope that if he could rise from obscurity to the presidency, the door was open to anyone who came after. So he told a regiment of Union soldiers one day, "not merely for my sake," as he put it, "but for yours."

I happen temporarily to occupy this big White House. I am a living witness that any one of your children may look to come here as my father's child has. It is in order that each of you may have through this free government which we have enjoyed, an open field and a fair chance for your industry, enterprise and intelligence; that you may all have equal privileges in the race of life, with all its desirable human aspirations. . . . The nation is worth fighting for, to secure such an inestimable jewel.
Of course, he did not look heroic. "He was a long, gawky, ugly, shapeless man"--these were the words of the best friend he ever had! Almost in self-defense, Lincoln developed corollary virtues--like the disarming ability to make fun of himself. Accused once by an opponent of being two-faced, he shot back: "If I had another face, do you think I would wear this one?" And when an artist asked him to assume a natural pose, Lincoln sheepishly replied: "That is what I would like to avoid."
The elegant author Nathaniel Hawthorne was at first disappointed to find on a visit that Lincoln failed to measure up to his handsome predecessors. But Hawthorne quickly found Lincoln "redeemed, illuminated, softened, and brightened by a kindly though serious look of the eyes and an expression of homely sagacity, that seems weighted with rich results of village experience." Hawthorne "took it in," he admitted, "with delighted eagerness."
Eventually, the Northern public "took it in," too. Lincoln's face came to reflect our suffering, as if he was a national Dorian Gray, slowly, painfully fading away so the nation might live. All of this is not meant to argue that enemies did not continue to vilify him, one opposition newspaper complaining he was "too ugly in phiz, too weak in intellect, and too tyrannical in the exercise of power to be allowed to 'run the machine'. . . ." In fact, few Presidents have been subjected to so many personal attacks.
Yet, in a way, it is easy to comprehend the passion, pro and con: Lincoln profoundly changed the social order even as he maintained his insistence on saving the Union, "honorable alike," he emphasized, "in what we give, and what we preserve."
This second American Revolution etched him in national memory--both positively and negatively. Never vindictive, he sadly conceded that every one of his campaigns had been "marked for their bitterness." A lover of jokes, he was as often their butt as their narrator, leading him once to confess wistfully: "I have endured a great deal of ridicule without much malice; and have received a great deal of kindness, not quite free from ridicule." Still, the myth that Lincoln lacked for praise until his death is simply wrong. He always believed that the "plain people" understood and supported him. And time validated his faith--while he lived.
But strength, modesty, humor, wisdom--these are personal attributes--and none of them would have mattered to history had Lincoln allowed the Union to die or slavery to live. It was emancipation that cemented Lincoln's reputation as a genuine American hero--and it is nothing less than tragic that emancipation has been at the centerpiece of recent debates that so undeservedly call his greatest achievement into question.
We cannot settle that debate tonight. But make no mistake about it: however long it took Abraham Lincoln to act on slavery, however limited the immediate practical impact of his Emancipation Proclamation--for, like the Declaration of Independence four score and seven years earlier, its promise could only be kept through victory on the battlefield--the proclamation transformed America, and transformed Lincoln, too--instantly and indelibly--into an American hero.
He knew it. Signing it in the White House on New Year's Day, 1863, Lincoln whispered: "If my name ever goes into history it will be for this act." Yet when first issued, it alarmed the racist white majority in the North, worried colonial powers in Europe, took its toll on the stock market, triggered military desertions, threatened Union control over slave-holding border states, and cost Lincoln's party dearly in mid-year elections. Lincoln held firm, drawing comfort from the applause of Missouri supporters who wrote: "God bless you for the word you have spoken! All good men upon the earth will glorify you, and all the angels of Heaven will hold jubilee." Three years earlier, he had visited an orphanage in the worst slum in New York to offer encouragement to poor boys living the urban equivalent of his own dirt-floor boyhood. Now 118 of the boys signed a letter calling Lincoln nothing less than God's "instrument in liberating a race" and "leading your countrymen. . .to righteousness, peace, and prosperity." The plain people were speaking louder than ever.
There was no more credible witness to Lincoln's heroism on slavery than the great African-American leader, Frederick Douglass. In his judgment, Lincoln was "the first great man that I talked with in the United States freely, who in no single interview reminded me of the difference between himself and myself, or the difference of color. . . . [T]here was safety in his atmosphere."
Beyond the visceral, the strongest evidence that Lincoln earned Douglass's trust--and of Lincoln's bravery in pursuing the destruction of slavery--was the little-known plan they hatched together in late 1864. Convinced he was about to lose his bid for a second term, and that his replacement would abrogate the Proclamation--it was, after all, just an executive order--Lincoln and Douglass plotted to enlist an unofficial army of black volunteers to head south into Confederate territory and inform as many slaves there as possible that, under the terms of Lincoln's proclamation, they were "forever free."
Lincoln's re-election made the improbable scheme unnecessary. But the very fact that Lincoln was prepared to pursue it--that he was so determined to free as many slaves as possible before his successor could rescind the proclamation--shows precisely how heroic Lincoln had become on the issue of freedom.

The other remarkable aspect of the Douglass anecdote is that, parenthetically but crucially, it also portrays a president fully prepared to turn over power in the midst of Civil War. Lincoln deserves enormous credit simply for allowing the 1864 presidential election to proceed in the first place. Never before in the history of the world had a nation embroiled in a revolution staged a vote of the people.
But Lincoln insisted that the election "was a necessity," arguing: "We can not have free government without elections; and if the rebellion could force us to forego, or postpone a national election, it might fairly claim to have already conquered and ruined us."
Free elections, he reminded America, might divide the electorate as bitterly as they had split four years earlier--if not into blue and red states, then blue and gray--but more importantly, they also showed "how sound, and how strong we still are."
"Every one likes a compliment," Lincoln admitted a month before his death. He had already enjoyed his share. He already knew that he had become a living hero to many Americans. "You cant [sic] tell about it in Washington, where they make a noise on the slightest provocation," one small-town admirer wrote to him on the day of his second inauguration. ". . .But if you had been in this little speck of a village this morning and heard the soft sweet music of unseen bells rippling through the morning silence from every quarter of the far-off horison [sic] you would have better known what your name is to this nation."
Now there was agreement among the elite as well. That same inaugural day, Charles Francis Adams, Jr., descendant of two American presidents--as close as we had to American royalty--wrote to his father: "That rail-splitting lawyer is one of the wonders of the day. Once at Gettysburg and now again on a greater occasion he has shown a capacity for rising to the demands of the hour which we should not expect from orators or men of the schools. . . . Not a prince or minister in all Europe would have risen to such an equality with the occasion."
Lincoln told Congress in his annual message of 1862: "we cannot escape history." Lincoln escaped neither its crippling demands nor its ample rewards. He had been inspired by the heroes of the American past, animated by the American dream, but determined to eradicate the hypocrisy that tarnished the "original idea." Humbled by God but determined to make his mark on God's earth, Lincoln made history by creating his own idea of himself and then surpassing his most robust ambitions. He not only kept faith with what he called "the ultimate justice of the people," he kept abiding faith in himself. Lincoln once predicted that if America followed a "plain, peaceful, generous, just" path to preserving freedom and democracy, "the world will forever applaud." The record shows he earned that ovation in life, not just after death. He was not the modest man of myth, but the epochal man of history; the hero-worshipper who became a worshipped hero.
As I conceded at the start tonight, political heroes are out of fashion these days. Modern Americans have been disappointed more than they have been inspired. But the Lincoln story still offers the promise that any "child of America," as historian George Bancroft described him after his death, can emerge to lead the nation Lincoln saved and re-made. Lincoln proved that poverty was no obstacle, and partisanship born of conviction no barrier, to ambition or success.
In doing so he emerged the quintessential American--one of us, but also the best of us--at once eternally approachable and majestically grand; the silhouette on the copper penny every child can grasp in his hands and the god enthroned in his Memorial on the Mall. As the poet Richard Henry Stoddard observed of this "uncommon common man," Abraham Lincoln was:
One of the People! Born to be
Their curious epitome
To share yet rise above
Their shifting hate and love.
Five years before coming to this theater for the last time, that "curious epitome" had spoken in New York to declare his faith that "right makes might." But in 1865, hours after he killed him here, his assassin--aroused to murder after hearing a president suggest for the first time that America owed African Americans the right to vote--turned that belief on end by boasting instead that "might makes right."
"Might makes right" vs. "Right makes might." There, in a phrase, is what separates ordinary villains from American heroes. � Harold Holzer


Harry Holzer with President Bush *click to hear an interview with Holzer*


"The dogmas of the quiet past, are inadequate to the stormy present�As our case is new, so we must think anew, and act anew�we cannot escape history. We, of this Congress and this administration, will be remembered in spite of ourselves�The fiery trial through which we pass, will light us down, in honor or dishonor, to the latest generation�In giving freedom to the slave, we assure freedom to the free�We shall nobly save, or meanly lose, the last best hope of earth."�President Abraham Lincoln


�That nation has not lived in vain which has given the world Washington and Lincoln, the best great men and the greatest good men whom history can show. . . . You cry out in the words of Bunyan, "So Valiant-for-Truth passed over, and all the trumpets sounded for him on the other side."�Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, addressing the Massachusetts Legislature, Feb. 12, 1909

"We the people are the rightful masters of both Congress and the courts, not to overthrow the Constitution but to overthrow the men who pervert the Constitution"--President Abraham Lincoln

"A martyr to the cause of man,
His blood is freedom's eucharist,
And in the world's great hero list
His name shall lead the van."
--Charles Graham Halpine (used pseudonym Miles O'Reilly), Death of Lincoln

"America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves."--President Abraham Lincoln

"Thanks to the founders and Lincoln, America�s great power status can be justified on the basis of something beyond mere necessity. Because of Lincoln�s uncompromising commitment to equality as America�s "central idea," the Union was not only saved, but saved so "as to make, and to keep it, forever worthy of the saving...."--Mackubin Thomas Owens, professor of strategy and force planning at the Naval War College in Newport, RI, and an adjunct fellow of the Ashbrook Center.


"Abraham Lincoln was, in my judgement, in many respects, the grandest man ever President of the United Sates. Upon his monument these words should be written: 'Here sleeps the only man in the history of the world, who, having been clothed with almost absolute power, never abused it, except upon the side of mercy.��-- Robert G. Ingersoll

"I leave you, hoping that the lamp of liberty will burn in your bosoms until there shall no longer be a doubt that all men are created free and equal."�President Abraham Lincoln


Click to listen to interview with Mario Cuomo


Here is a reading list in studying President Abraham Lincoln:


*Why Lincoln Matters : Today More Than Ever By Mario Cuomo and Harold Holzer

*Lincoln at Cooper Union : The Speech That Made Abraham Lincoln President by Harold Holzer

*Selected Speeches and Writings : Abraham Lincoln (The Library of America)by ABRAHAM LINCOLN

*Lincoln by Richard J. Carwardine

*LINCOLN by David Herbert Donald

*LINCOLN AT GETTYSBURG: THE WORDS THAT REMADE AMERICA by Garry Wills

*OUR SECRET CONSTITUTION: How Lincoln Redefined American Democracy. By George P. Fletcher

*Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation : The End of Slavery in America by Allen C. Guelzo

*Lincoln Seen and Heard
by Harold Holzer

*An Oral History of Abraham Lincoln: John G. Nicolay's Interviews and Essays
by John G. Nicolay, Michael Burlingame

*Abraham Lincoln the Writer: A Treasury of His Greatest Speeches and Letters by Abraham Lincoln, Harold Holzer

*Lincoln as I Knew Him: Gossip, Tributes and Revelations from His Best Friends and Worst Enemies by Harold Holzer

*Lincoln's Constitution by Daniel Farber

*ON HALLOWED GROUND: Abraham Lincoln and the Foundations of American History. By John Patrick Diggins


*Henry Clay: Statesman for the Union by Robert V. Remini

*THE WORDS WE LIVE BY: Your Annotated Guide to the Constitution. By Linda R. Monk

*THE LINCOLN NO ONE KNOWS: The Mysterious Man Who Ran the Civil War . By Webb Garrison

*THE LANGUAGE OF LIBERTY: The Political Speeches and Writings of Abraham Lincoln . Edited By Joseph R. Fornieri

*Lincoln's Greatest Speech : The Second Inaugural
by Ronald C. White Jr.

*Abraham Lincoln and the Second American Revolution by James M. McPherson

*100 Essential Lincoln Books by Michael Burkhimer

I recently wrote how Abraham Lincoln's life journey and triumph over adversity had inspired my own life. That entry can be viewed by Clicking here.

This entry is dedicated to VIKINGMAIDEN who says �We could all use a little Lincoln�,, and I do agree.Btw, the South Was WRONG.. though I do like the book "the South Was Right" by the Kennedy brothers.


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