Pondering Abraham Lincoln's birthday in 2010

Abraham Lincoln was born February 12, 1809. Carl Sandburg wrote: “On the morning of February 12, the granny woman was at the cab in. And she and Tom Lincoln and the moaning Nancy Hanks welcomed into a world of battle and blood, of whispering dreams and wistful dust, a new child, a boy. "

Dennis Hanks, a nine year old neighbor boy asked the new Mother: “What you goin’ to name him, Nancy?” “Abraham,” was the answer, “after his grandfather.”(p. 7)

Sandburg continued: “Whatever the exact particulars, the definite event on that 12th of February, 1809, was the birth of a boy named Abraham after his grandfather who was had been killed by the Indians—born in silence and pain from a wilderness mother on a bed of perhaps cornhusks and perhaps hen feathers—with perhaps a laughing child prophecy later that he would “never come to much.”(p.8)

Lincoln was 51 years old when it was whispered that he was a candidate for President. “In Springfield and other places, something out of the ordinary seemed to connect with Abraham Lincoln’s past, his birth, a mystery of where he came from. The wedding certificate of his father and mother was not known to be on record. Whispers floated of his origin as “low-flung” of circumstances so misty and strange that political friends wished they could be cleared up and made respectable. The wedding license of Thomas Lincoln and Nancy Hanks had been moved to a new county courthouse—where no one had thought to search.”(p. 147)

At a Shelbyville rally of Democrats, he debated with a local leader, the Register of Springfield saying his three hour speech ‘was pretty and dull…all about ‘freedom,’ ‘liberty,’ and niggers. He…dodged every issue.’”(p.132)

“Lincoln’s colleague, Edwin M. Stanton, was a serious owl-eyed man, strict in language, dress, duty. When his eyes lighted on Lincoln at the Burnet House in Cincinnati, wearing heavy boots, loose clothes, farmer-looking, he used language reported as: ‘Where did that long-armed baboon come from?’” (Stanton would later be asked to join the President’s cabinet as Secretary of War—purported to be the most powerful civilian post that Lincoln could offer anyone.)(p.125)

“‘Resistance to Lincoln is Obedience to God’ flared a banner at an Alabama mass meeting; an orator swore that if need be their troops would march to the doors of the national Capital over ‘fathoms of mangled bodies.”(p.187) (Quoted in Carl Sandburg, Abraham Lincoln (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World) 1954


Doris Kearns Goodwin, in Team of Rivals writes the following words: “Exulting in Lincoln’s lack of national experience, Democratic newspapers had a field day ridiculing his biography. He is ‘a third rate Western lawyer,’ the Herald gloated. ‘the conduct of the republican party in this nomination is a remarkable indication of a small intellect, growing smaller.’ Rejecting Seward and Chase, ‘who are statesmen and able men,’ the Herald continued, ‘they take up a fourth rate lecturer, who cannot speak good grammar,’ and whose speeches are ‘illiterate compositions…interlarded with coarse and clumsy jokes.’ Not content to deride his intellect, hostile publications focused on his appearance. ‘Lincoln is the leanest, lankest, most ungainly mass of legs, arms and hatchet-face ever strung together upon a single frame. He has most unwarrantably abused the privilege which all politicians have of being ugly.’”(p. 257)

“More violent attacks appeared in the Charleston Mercury, which scornfully asked: ‘After him what decent white man would be President?’…The Richmond Enquirer would say: ‘he was an illiterate partizen…possessed only of his inveterate hatred of slavery and his openly avowed predilections for negro equality.’”(p.258)

“Hoping to organize a Lincoln Club in Kansas, Addison Proctor approached one of the state’s most respected Republicans and asked him to preside. The man vehemently refused: ‘You fellows knew at Chicago what this country is facing….You knew that it will take the very best ability we can produce to pull us through. You knew that above everything else, these times demanded a statesman and you have gone and give us a rail splitter. No, I will not preside or attend.”(p.262)(Quoted in Doris Kearns Goodwin, Team of Rivals (New York: Simon & Schuster) 2005

Maybe what we need in these strange days of 2010 is a sense of history. With the birthers holding their ugly, ugly signs about our President being a Marxist, Socialist, a closet Muslim, not even a bona fide citizen of the United States and some even demanding his impeachment—maybe it is time to remember the stormy days of Lincoln. How he weathered not only the storm of a divided country and the bloodiest war this country has ever seen but the loss of three boys and a demented wife and attacks from all sides. I hope our President has read this part of the history book.

We are in desperate need of leadership today. If we join the bandwagon of hoping President Obama fails—what happens to the country we all love? Pause and remember Abraham Lincoln and the man who sits in the White House today. Wonder if there is any connection?
(The photographs come from the new Sculpture of Abraham Lincoln found on the banks of the Ohio River in Louisville, Ky.)