Monday marks Abraham Lincoln’s 215th birthday, and as always, it prompts some of the most profound questions of civics and citizenship: Do I get the day off from work? Do my kids have to go to school? Is the drive-thru at the bank open?
Indeed, the former president doesn’t even have his own federal holiday, it being celebrated in the catch-all concept of Presidents Day on Feb. 19.
Rarely, it seems, does the date prompt reflection on who this man was, what he accomplished and why his image — as opposed to others — is one of those carved into stone at Mount Rushmore. Think about it. When we stop at a red light, what comes to mind when we see the slogan “Land of Lincoln” on the license plate of the car in front of us?
Many of us think of a tall, grim figure with a scraggly beard and a stovepipe hat, dressed in all black. For others, it’s a barefoot kid walking miles to a one-room schoolhouse. And for still others, it’s the guy who couldn’t negotiate well enough to avoid the Civil War.
But for all too few, it is the image of one of the most consequential presidents in history. And that is a national embarrassment, especially in an election year when so many basic elements of democracy and principles of the Constitution are at stake. For Lincoln is the president who overcame some of the most profound challenges ever presented to the American experiment. He’s not just a ticket to a three-day weekend.
Indeed, he made the courageous decision to take the nation to war in order to preserve the Union. He viewed secession to be an illegal act under the Constitution and was prepared to use military means, not merely negotiation and compromise, in order to enforce federal law. He described the challenge with which he was confronted: Both parties deprecated war, but one of them would make war rather than let the nation survive, and the other would accept war rather than let it perish. And the war came.
While prosecuting the war, he wagered the future of the nation on the cause of ending slavery. And in so doing, he signed the Emancipation Proclamation, which granted freedom to enslaved people in rebelling states and allowed Black people to join the Union Army. From a purely military perspective, the resulting influx of Black soldiers into the Union Army helped provide the additional forces necessary to secure the North’s victory. From a social justice perspective, it associated emancipation in the public mindset with the restoration of the Union. This created the public support for the 1865 adoption of the 13th Amendment, which formally abolished slavery.
“In giving freedom to the slave, we assure freedom to the free — honorable alike in what we give, and what we preserve. We shall nobly save, or meanly lose, the last best hope of earth,” Lincoln said in an 1862 message to Congress.
This hope was, of course, the fledgling American democracy.
He governed with a leadership style that emphasized magnanimity and charity, as opposed to retribution and malice. He included in his Cabinet many of his political opponents — the “Team of Rivals” — in order to learn from their views and facilitate policy collaboration. Critically, he provided the forgiving framework by which the defeated South would ultimately return to the Union, thus helping to “bind up the wounds” of the once-divided nation.
As the historian Doris Kearns Goodwin observed, Lincoln possessed the ability to “inspire followers to identify with something larger than themselves — the organization, the community, the region, the country; to call for sacrifice in the pursuit of moral principles and higher goals.”
Another American president, Ronald Reagan, famously warned in his farewell address to the nation of an eradication of the American memory that could result, ultimately, in an erosion of the American spirit: “If we forget what we did, we won’t know who we are.”
Reagan may well have been thinking of Lincoln when he spoke those words. And when you think about it, giving Lincoln the credit he is due isn’t too tough a task. It can be recalled in the few seconds it takes for the traffic light to turn from red to green. He fought the Civil War. He saved the Union. He freed enslaved people.
There you go. The light’s changing now. It’s OK to put your foot on the gas. The drive-thru bank’s probably still open. But you might never look at an Illinois license plate in the same way again.
Michael Peregrine is a Chicago attorney and a proud 1967 graduate of Lincoln School in River Forest.