Remembering Lincoln
16. Abraham Lincoln 1809-1865
The year 2009 marks the bicentennial of the birth of Abraham Lincoln, the nation’s 16th president, and the man often considered its greatest leader. As the United States endured its greatest crisis, this self-educated common man supplied the leadership and the moral force that bound Americans together and carried them to victory. His vision spanned diplomacy and military strategy, political thought and elemental justice for all Americans --- including the African-American slaves he emancipated.
The son of a Kentucky frontiersman, Lincoln had to struggle for a living and for learning. Five months before receiving his party's nomination for President, he sketched his life: “I was born Feb. 12, 1809, in Hardin County, Kentucky. My parents were both born in Virginia, of undistinguished families--second families, perhaps I should say. My mother, who died in my tenth year, was of a family of the name of Hanks.... My father ... removed from Kentucky to ... Indiana, in my eighth year.... It was a wild region, with many bears and other wild animals still in the woods. There I grew up.... Of course when I came of age I did not know much. Still somehow, I could read, write, and cipher ... but that was all.”
Lincoln made extraordinary efforts to attain knowledge while working on a farm, splitting rails for fences, and keeping store at New Salem, Illinois. He was a captain in the Black Hawk War, spent eight years in the Illinois legislature, and rode the circuit of courts for many years. He did study diligently on his own to acquire basic skills in reading, writing, and arithmetic; as a young man out on his own and working at menial jobs, he did teach himself from books such subjects as English grammar, sufficient mathematics to learn surveying, and enough law to enter the legal profession at the age of 27. He married Mary Todd, and they had four boys, only one of whom lived to maturity.
In 1860 he won the Republican nomination for President and was elected as the 16th President of the United States on November 6 of the same year. He won re-election in 1864.
As President, he built the Republican Party into a strong national organization and rallied most of the northern Democrats to the Union cause. On January 1, 1863, he issued the Emancipation Proclamation that declared forever free those slaves within the Confederacy. He was a man whose resolve was always tempered by an unswerving determination never to compromise his personal integrity; listening respectfully to Americans of different stripes, from Negro abolitionists to Quaker activists, to the talented, high-powered individuals he included in his cabinet, to his political rivals — but the important decisions always were Lincoln’s alone. The spirit that guided him was clearly that of his Second Inaugural Address, now inscribed on one wall of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D. C.: “With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation's wounds....”
On Good Friday, April 14, 1865, Lincoln was assassinated at Ford's Theatre in Washington by John Wilkes Booth, an actor.
Lincoln and Obama
In the year when the United States of America is celebrating the bicentennial of the birth of its 16th President - the leader that freed the slaves, it also swore in its 44th - and first African-American – President, Barack Obama. Mr. Obama looks up to President Lincoln as his political hero. From the start of his political career, Obama seems to have modeled himself on Lincoln. Writing in 2005, as a newly minted U.S. senator, Obama declared it hard to imagine a less likely scenario than his own rise — “except, perhaps, for the one that allowed a child born in the backwoods of Kentucky with less than a year of formal education to end up as Illinois’ greatest citizen and our nation’s greatest president.” In Lincoln’s biography, Obama continued, his “rise from poverty, his ultimate mastery of language and law, his capacity to overcome personal loss and remain determined in the face of repeated defeat … reminded me of a larger, fundamental element of American life — the enduring belief that we can constantly remake ourselves to fit our larger dreams.”
Presidential historians have pointed to some similarities between the 16th and 44th US presidents. The parallels range from the superficial - their tapered physiques, their young children living in the White House - to the serious: Lincoln freed the slaves, and Obama, the first African-American president.
Both were born in other states - Hawaii for Obama, Kentucky for Lincoln - before settling in Illinois. Each became a lawyer then served in the state legislature before serving a single term in Congress. Each rocketed onto the national political stage with powerful speeches and became commander-in-chief without any military experience.
Reference has been made to the two men’s “tremendous trust in words and the power of language.” Pulitzer Prize-winning historian James McPherson -- author of "Tried by War: Abraham Lincoln as Commander in Chief" wrote, “Lincoln had the ability to communicate ideas and communicate policy to the average person. He could make things clear, even complicated things clear, to the average person, and I think Obama has that gift, too.”
“Lincoln and Obama shared a loved of words, a belief that rhetoric and oratory could change people's minds, and the way they would express things, the confidence they would have in a debate - not by fiery oratory, but by a calming presence, a reasoned argument,” says Rice University History Professor Douglas Brinkley. “Obama has learned from Lincoln, and what he's learned is how to hold a civil debate without giving up your main position, meaning you don't have to put your finger in your enemy's face and scold him. You can have dignity and composure and still win an argument,” Brinkley adds.
Obama was the first president to use the Lincoln Bible for his inauguration since Lincoln used it in 1861. Inauguration organizers had said Obama's inaugural theme, "A New Birth of Freedom," was inspired by Lincoln's Gettysburg Address.
A comparison has also been made between Lincoln's cabinet selections and the way President Barack Obama went about forming his cabinet, using the concept "Team of Rivals" – they both included former political rivals in their administrations.
As for temperamental similarities, McPherson said Lincoln “usually managed to maintain his cool…this kind of temperament -- keeping your cool, keeping your temper, trying to base your decisions on rational thought rather than emotions or temporary explosions of temper -- I think they're similar in that respect and that was a really important factor in Lincoln's leadership qualities.”
For more interesting information on America’s 16th President, please click on the links below:
About the White House
Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum