Remembering Abraham Lincoln

February 12th used to be celebrated as Lincoln's Birthday. Which it was. February 12, 1809 was the date. Because it's Black History Month, the only holiday Americans get now is Martin Luther King Day. Washington, Lincoln and other nobodies have to make do with "Presidents Day". That's one of the fruits of the triumph of freedom and equality begun by President Lincoln and completed by... wait for it... President LBJ.

Since President Lincoln and others are gradually being consigned to the Memory Hole, I thought it might be appropriate to share a few opinions of Honest Abe, as penned by his contemporaries, drawn from Civil War Curiosities, by Webb Garrison (Rutledge Hill Press, Nashville, 1994).

No other war maker was so widely vilified as was Abraham Lincoln. Contemptuous of the president's announced policies, the abolitionist Benjamin F. Wade announced that Lincoln's views on slaver "could only come of one who was born of 'poor white trash' and educated in a slave State." Secretary of the Treasury Salmon P. Chase, who had his own eyes on the White House, characterized his leader as "greatly wanting in will and decision, in comprehensiveness, in self-reliance, and clear, well-definted purpose."

Henry Ward Beecher, the nation's most famous clergyman in 1861, denounced the president from the pulpit. According to Beecher, the chief executive lacked any spark of genius and possessed "not an element of leadership, not one particle of heroic enthusiasm." Fellow abolitionist Wendell Phillips described Lincoln as "a second-rate man" and charged his "slackness" with "doing more than the malice of Confederates to break up the Union."

Governor John A. Andrew of Massachusetts, who was among the first to commit himself fully to the war effort, castigated the man for whom he raised regiments of volunteers. "Besides doing my proper work," wrote Andrews, "I amsadly but firmly tr5ying to help organize some movement, if possible to save the President from the infamy of ruining his country."

Soon the Massachusetts leader sent one of his top aides to confer with Lincoln. Reporting about this visit, Henry Lee said just what Andrew wanted to hear. As he sat waiting, Lee recalled, "I grew more and more cross to think that this Western mummy of a rail splitter should sit in Washington's chair."

Congressman Frank Blair of Missouri urged that the primary obligation of every Unionist was "to stop fighting Jeff Davis and turn in on our own Government and make something of it," According to the lawmaker, soon to become a Federal brigadier, all Confederate leaders taken together had not harmed the4 nation has as much as "the cowardice, ignorance, and stupidity of Lincoln's administration."

I'll leave for another day the quotation of President Lincoln's thoughts about "African-Americans" (as they are now called) and their place in American society. Suffice it to say that General Robert E. Lee's views, quoted in Walt's profile, were much the same as those of the Great Emancipator. And we know that they were both wrong, as evidenced by the contribution of people of colour to making America what it is today. Right?