The Abraham Lincoln who is my hero is not the Great Emancipator of myth. Abraham Lincoln the man, with all his faults and flaws, is my hero. And not necessarily for anything specific that he did, but for what the course of his life demonstrated: the infinite human capacity to learn, to grow, to change, and to improve--whether by birth, by conscious decision, or by confluence of circumstances.
[That last is a reference to Churchill's observation that "some men are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them."--Ed.]
I am as impatient with the people who sanctify Lincoln as I am with the people who excoriate him. To this day, I am amazed at how little even declared students of American history really know about the man. As a junior in college, I once took a 400/800 level seminar on the politics of the US Civil War. To this day I remain shocked by the shock of some of the graduate students in the class who did not know, not until the day we discussed it in 1978, that Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation did not actually free a single slave. When I search my memories of learning about Lincoln, this seems to be an unremarkable political fact I've always known. Then again, I started studying Lincoln in earnest when I was in the 4th grade--a personal quest beginning after my 4th grade teacher Mr. Arnold made my class memorize the Gettysburg Address.
I also have no truck with those who call Lincoln a white supremacist and who do everything they can to tear the man's reputation apart. Yes, Lincoln started out as a horrible, if typical, example of typical white, male, mid-19th century thinking about the races. He freely tossed around the "N" word, a word that even in a single usage makes me cringe. In his pre-presidential political career, he asserted over and over that while blacks had equal rights to freedom, they did not have equal rights with whites to participate in the civil and political process. For years, his solution to the "race problem" was to encourage blacks to (voluntarily) emigrate back to Africa.
But what makes Lincoln special is that he went from echoing the sentiments of the crowd [for how else is a politician to be elected?--Ed.] to dragging the entire country along with him as his personal enlightenment happened. By the last days of his presidency, he talked openly about giving educated black men the vote, and thus equal citizenship in the preserved Union. And it's what got him killed.
[Please don't sell him short for restricting which blacks would get the vote. Voting limitations on whites were also so limited in the mid-1860s.--Ed.]
A historian on NPR this morning said John Wilkes Booth got the idea in 1865 to kill Lincoln when he discovered on April 13th Lincoln was going to attend a performance of "Our American Cousin" at Ford's Theater the next night. That is not strictly true. Booth may have gotten the idea about where and how to kill Lincoln from that bit of information--but he'd decided on killing Lincoln days before that, when Lincoln made what turned out to be his last public statement on April 9th. Speaking from a balcony at the White House, Lincoln gave official voice to extending the franchise [that's "the vote" nowadays--Ed.] to certain blacks and to soldiers who'd fought in the Civil War.
Booth's reaction to that, according to testimony of his fellow conspirators, was to say that "that meant equal citizenship," and for that, Lincoln must die. For Booth was the real, unrepentant racist in this drama. Indeed, Booth's plan had been to kidnap Lincoln until he realized that Lincoln was serious about extending civil rights to blacks. That realization, plus his knowledge that the War was essentially over after Lee surrendered to Grant, plus his overwhelming ego and desire to be "the American Brutus" are what drove Booth to kill instead of kidnap. Booth thought he'd be welcomed everywhere as the man who struck down tyranny. He totally miscalculated the South's reaction to his heinous act. He was genuinely surprised when he learned that he was virtually universally condemned.
For Booth had forgotten the one thing that North and South had always shared: adherence to the process of the rule of law. It's why the South "came back" after Lee surrendered. It's why the Union was preserved. It vindicated Lincoln's faith in the fundamental sensibility of all Americans, mo matter the region of their birth. Heck, he himself had been born in Kentucky. Americans of every stripe officially adhere to the rule of law above all else [they just aren't always good at spotting when the rule of law has been violated--witness the entire Dubya administration--Ed.], as did Lincoln himself. His arguments against the expansion of slavery into the territories was based on law; his Cooper Union speech in February, 1860, setting forth his reasons for same, is what got him elected president.
Assassination was clearly "out-of-bounds" to the vast majority of Americans. It stunned their collective consciousness and started the transforming of Lincoln into America's secular saint. Despite all the half-truths and misconceptions that have been spewed out as "history" ever since, Lincoln's standing is undiminished. He is America's greatest president. No, he was not perfect--far from it--but he ensured that America could live up to its aspirations as expressed in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.
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