Salute to Lincoln

Eloquence was his middle name as carefully crafted, eloquent words and an internalized ideology, encouraged by temperament and appreciated for generations. Abraham Lincoln. Born February 12, 1809, at his death, Edwin Stanton said, now "he belongs to the ages" to fathom, discuss, love and respect. Prior to Lincoln, 8 Presidents held the White House but no one for more than 4 years and 3 for less than 4 years. America was ready to be led and America placed its trust in Lincoln as its leader.

He was a Whig, then a Republican who liked to call the Democrats "locos." He wanted to change people’s minds by persuasion based on proper reasoning because he knew that one only hurts one’s self by his follies. Yet about his antagonists on the opposite side of the political aisle, he said, "I know that the great volcano at Washington, aroused and directed by the evil spirit that reigns there, is belching forth the lava of political corruption, in a current broad and deep, which is sweeping with frightful velocity over the whole length and breadth of the land."

When he said that human bondage was "not only the greatest question, but very nearly the sole question of the day," he was called a Black Republican, a "high priest of abolitionism," a nigger lover, and hissed and hooted by mobs. His remarks were necessary to counter the sentiments of Chief Justice Roger Taney who regarded Negroes as "beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race, either in social or political relations; and so far inferior, that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.

As a lawyer he was a furious, dedicated worker handling a 100 cases a year, ( 2 a week) regardless of the financial status of his clients, always pursuing the cause of justice under the law. He respected our Constitution, Declaration of Independence and democratic tradition. He held a "reverence for the law as "political religion" which required "sacrifice unceasingly on its altars."

Lincoln’s personality juxtaposed a sense of humor with recurring depression that made him an habitue of the morose and melancholy which he called the ‘hypo.’ His favorite poem, "Mortality," expresses his acquiescence to the unpredictable workings of fate.

"Tis the wink of an eye, ‘tis the draught of a breath,
From the blossoms of health, to the paleness of death.
From the gilded saloon, to the bier and the shroud.
Oh, why should the spirit of mortal be proud!"

One of his own poems of 13 stanzas compelled by the tragic fate of a friend, sets the tone of his alter ego that confronted the dark side of life.
"I’ve heard it oft, as if I dreamed
Far distant, sweet, and lone-
The funeral dirge, it ever seemed
Of reason dead and gone ..."

Early in the 20th century, Stephen Vincent Benet wrote about Lincoln’s "Honesty, rare as a man without self-pity, Kindness as large and plain as a prairie wind." In the same time period, John Drinkwater wrote that "When the high heart ( Lincoln’s) we magnify, And the clear vision celebrate, And worship greatness passing by," we as Americans are ourselves great. From Ralph Waldo Emerson a century earlier, soon after Lincoln’s death, we get that "His heart was a great as the world, but there was no room in it to hold the memory of a wrong." During the Civil War Carl Schurz said of him, "He possesses to a remarkable degree the characteristic, God-given trait of this people, sound common sense." And on the day after his assassination on April 15th 1865, Walt Whitman the poet said, "He leaves for America’s history and biography, so far, not only its most dramatic reminiscence - he leaves, in my opinion, the greatest, best, most characteristic, artistic, moral personality."

Enough will never be said, thought or written about, imitated or inspired by, Abraham Lincoln.