Abraham Lincoln: Great American Writer

Abraham Lincoln’s birthday was on Saturday, and as an Illinoisan by rearing, like him, and as someone with some affection towards the United States, that day does mean something to me.

Lincoln, I would offer, gets too much credit for ending slavery. Yes, he successfully navigated the country through a civil war, and that civil war resulted in the end of slavery, but ascribing him anything near to sole responsibility for the feat is both a disservice to the hundreds of thousands who wrote and thought and bled and fought for this nation to climb that much closer to its professed ideals and, likewise, a disservice to Lincoln, who was more than an emancipator. To focus on one of those many things the man was:

Having never heard Lincoln speak, I can’t give him credit as an orator, but the writing behind his speeches is breathtaking. So, the four most famous of his speakings—links and thoughts:

• The Gettysburg Address is the cornerstone of all American patriotic literature, and of patriotism itself in this country. It is not a functional document, like the Constitution or the Declaration of Independence. It is a piece of writing speaking to the heart of the notion of patriotism, and to the notion of American patriotism in particular, the notion of dedicating one’s very life not to a tribe, but to a nation built on moral ideas. America cannot aspire to anything higher than the patriotism Lincoln described in this address.
• Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address—“malice toward none…charity for all”—is, like the Gettysburg Address, short. Not quite that short. But short, and brief, and perhaps most impressive in how it navigates the thin line between condemnation of wrong and grace towards the guilty. Moral certitude without vindictiveness. Moral certitude with only a glance of judgment (a necessary one, the basic judging between right and wrong).
• Lincoln’s First Inaugural Address—“better angels of our nature”—is a bit striking in how directly it approaches the terror of the moment. It was necessary, of course. Secession was in progress. But contrast it to the speaking-around of things we do today, especially in politics. The address is trepidatious. It promises, directly, to not interfere with slavery—a promise Lincoln would, cannon-fire at Fort Sumter and hundreds of thousands of lives later, rescind. It is, at the end, a lyrical speech—“I am loath to close. We are not enemies, but friends…” Most of all, though, it’s a speech of great seriousness, outlining, in a sense, the entirety of Lincoln’s understanding of American governance. Lincoln’s conception of the constitution, outlined with clarity ahead of the war that would kill so many, himself ultimately included.
• Finally, the “House Divided” speech, the closing address of the 1858 Republican State Convention in Springfield, is not extraordinarily poetic, but, much like the first inaugural, shows a clarity of thinking and a clarity of understanding beyond our evident present political capacity. It is a takedown of Lincoln’s electoral opponent (and eventual defeater), Stephen Douglas, and while it may not be especially masterful (if one had disagreed with Lincoln on the substance of the issue, this would likely not have changed one’s mind), it’s indicative again of the comprehensive nature of Lincoln’s thinking in the realm of government. Plenty of politicians are lawyers. Lincoln took that lawyerly approach to the populace.

Lincoln was, to be sure, many things. But a writer was one of them. Happy birthday, Abe. Thank God for you.