by Frank James
The Chicago Tribune, which endorsed Abraham Lincoln twice for the presidency, has a worthy appreciation today of the 16th president of the U.S. on its editorial page.
It notes that Lincoln, like a lot of people, was complicated. Unlike most people, however, he was not only a man of his time but and a man for all time.
As the editorial puts it:
Modern critics proceed to indict him for hypocrisy. But while he was not free of the attitudes that suffused white America, he insisted that blacks were human beings with the same rights as anyone else.
His concessions to pacify loyal slave states were compromises necessary to keep the secessionists from winning--motivated by his conviction that if the Union survived, slavery would collapse, and if not, slavery would endure. He overstepped his constitutional limits, but only when he thought it essential to the war effort.
Looking at him from 2009, we may assume that his success was foreordained. But a less cunning president might have alienated the border states, lost control of his own party, or been defeated in 1864--any of which would have almost certainly yielded a different outcome. If he hadn't been willing to bend the Constitution to win the war, the country for which it was written might have broken apart.
We all revere Lincoln's noblest qualities. But without the willingness to do the unsavory things dictated by reality, those qualities would have been impotent. In the end, he brought to mind the biblical injunction to "be gentle as doves and wise as serpents."
When I first read Carl Sandburg's Lincoln biography, I was taken aback by how easily Sandburg says the N-word rolled off Lincoln's tongue. He indeed was a white American man of the mid 19th century.
But he was also the man who openly welcomed abolitionist and former slave Frederick Douglass to the White House, saying there was no man in the U.S. whose opinion he valued more.
Again, he was a complex man. And never was there a man whose qualities met the challenges of his time than Lincoln.
Comments
ENOUGH WITH THE CHEAP PARLOR TRICK THAT IS ABRAHAM LINCOLN STORIES!!
We are in NAZI Germany after the Fall of Hitler and we have not even discussed a Nuremburg style trial!
Leahy's call for a South African style "Truth and Reconciliation Commission" (Meaning they would be tried and if they confess--no prosecution or penalty) for what occurred the past 8 years. Even JOHN DEAN seems to favor SOMETHING being done.
From "Alternet"
In a 2006 interview with Thom Hartmann, Dean explained:
"I looked at this because I was trying to understand, how do people who work at the CIA and know that they're part of a system that is torturing people in the Eastern European secret prisons -- and they're supporting that system, they're providing information or bringing it out of it -- how they do that every day?
"How do the people who work at NSA who were turning that huge electronic apparatus of surveillance on their neighbors and their friends, where's their conscience?
"And then I realized that this is a perfect example of the Milgram experiment at work. They're under authority figures. What they are doing is, they're haven't lost their conscience -- they have given their conscience to another agent, and so they feel very comfortable in doing it."
http://www.alternet.org/rights/126492/?page=3
Posted by: TELL THE OBAMA ADMINISTRATION LAY OFF LINCOLN AND LISTEN TO LEAHY | February 12, 2009 11:58 AM