Posted by
Thomas Lasher on Monday, February 12, 2007 10:08:25 PM
On February 12 we celebrate the birth of our sixteenth President. Most Americans today regard Abraham Lincoln as one of (if not the) greatest President in our nation’s history. But great men like Lincoln are often misunderstood and even rejected by their contemporaries.
In the mid-1800s our nation was polarized over the issue of slavery. Abe Lincoln’s election to the Presidency did not heal these wounds or unite political factions, but instead triggered the South’s secession which eventually precipitated the Civil War. During his watch many thousands of American soldiers died in some of the bloodiest battles this nation has ever seen as families and communities took sides against one another, brother against brother - neighbor against neighbor. Even after the war, fierce divisions remained in a country torn and tattered from years of conflict.
We call Lincoln a great leader, yet whole states left the Union rather than be led where they did not wish to go. But Lincoln did not waver. Facing overwhelming odds, and even paying with his life at the hands of an assassin, Abraham Lincoln stood firm on principles not shared by a significant percentage of the population. With the passage of more than a century, we now admire and revere the man who, in his own time, caused violent division when elected to the highest office in the land. In his day he was a controversial figure; today he is a hero for the ages.
The way history remembers a President cannot be gauged in his own time. When our nation is at war, a war so divisive that people are torn over issues of freedom and justice and the power of a President to lead with strength through such a struggle, how can we be certain what outcome awaits.
The questions before Lincoln are not so far removed from those before us today. As did Lincoln, we must ask ourselves whether it is our country’s obligation to spread liberty where once liberty had no roots; whether the God-given rights proclaimed by our Constitution apply to all peoples or only a chosen few; and whether a denial of those rights anywhere is a challenge to those rights everywhere. Abraham Lincoln knew that freedom and democratic ideals cross boundaries of race and the color of our skin. We must decide whether these same ideals we hold so dear cross the boundaries of nations to reach a people of another culture an ocean away.
This becomes the work of generations. The Civil War did not fix all of the problems that slavery had created. It brought the Union back together and ended slavery as an institution. But throughout the South’s Reconstruction, followed by years of segregation, and eventually the Civil Rights movement of the 1960’s, racial tensions continued. Real freedom for all Americans took more than one man’s lifetime. Lincoln did not succeed in solving the issues of racism and oppression, but he did have the strength and courage to stand on the moral high ground and point us on the right course. And he did so in the face of criticism and the threat of war.
Our present endeavors cannot be finally judged in our own time. That will be determined by future generations. But when the history of our present is written in stone or commemorated in solemn ceremony, those Americans not yet born will know whether we stood with men like Lincoln who sided with freedom in the face of tyranny, or retreated from the task laid out before us allowing evil to flourish in our midst.