Thoughts on influential speakers/thinkers/leaders:

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

One thing that does interest me is that people in the United States tend to credit Abraham Lincoln as one of our all-time greatest Presidents. I will say that he was very much a leader who was there when he needed to be and US society appeared to be dissolving altogether. Not all such people step in to fill voids when they're needed, history is rife with dipshits who were there when society needed political geniuses. I should note that to me Abraham Lincoln was rather more moderate than his supporters and critics alike, then and now credit him for. He was a wonderful Deadpan snarker and in that sense was also the US analogue to Winston Churchill.

I think it's fair to say that a USA without Abraham Lincoln doing what he did when he did is pretty much unthinkable. The man was an accidental revolutionary and there's the USA before Lincoln, and the USA after it. Yet if we look at his immediate legacy his main influence was the ending of slavery by military force, the expansion of government as a positive force, and overseeing the largest war in US history until WWII. In the main slavery was pretty much dead and even the hardcore Ku Kluxers accepted that, the expansion of government regressed after Reconstruction, and the US never had an army of the sizes wielded by both sides in the Civil War until the 1940s. Lincoln's Louisiana Reconstruction also is hardly encouraging as an example of what the man actually said/did.

Lincoln's quotes about the "better angels of our nature" like many famous quotes is only partially and selectively culled from a broader quotation. The original one was:

"In your hands, my dissatisfied fellow-countrymen, and not in mine, is the momentous issue of civil war. The Government will not assail you. You can have no conflict without being yourselves the aggressors. You have no oath registered in heaven to destroy the Government, while I shall have the most solemn one to preserve, protect, and defend it.

I am loath to close. We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature."

Before the "with malice toward none, with charity for all" quotation was this one:

On the occasion corresponding to this four years ago all thoughts were anxiously directed to an impending civil war. All dreaded it, all sought to avert it. While the inaugural address was being delivered from this place, devoted altogether to saving the Union without war, urgent agents were in the city seeking to destroy it without war-seeking to dissolve the Union and divide effects by negotiation. 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.

and this:

Both read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes His aid against the other. It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God's assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men's faces, but let us judge not, that we be not judged. The prayers of both could not be answered. That of neither has been answered fully. The Almighty has His own purposes. "Woe unto the world because of offenses; for it must needs be that offenses come, but woe to that man by whom the offense cometh." If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offenses which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South this terrible war as the woe due to those by whom the offense came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to Him? Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said "the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether."

In my view Lincoln's legacies in the main were good, but this was immensely helped like JFK's reputation by his being assassinated as opposed to living to die of old age and have the chances to make more mistakes than he actually did. I consider Lincoln's legacy to be an ultimately positive one, and the man is inseparable from the rise of the modern philosophy shared by the Right and the Left alike that the United States is in fact a *state*, not a *federation* and that all people are entitled to equality of opportunity (though the former has a devil of a time actually making that viable and the latter has tended to be a part of a much broader political party and often marginalized by same). Lincoln pushed the United States from a collection of different states, one part becoming a 21st Century society, the other part wanting to stay forever in the 18th Century to all of it moving toward the 20th Century. I will note too that compared to Davis Lincoln was actually ridiculously moderate.

There's a reason he, like the current Illinois accidental revolutionary who is more moderate than his supporters or critics alike tend to recognize, is considered a great President. What do those here from the US and the non-Americans make of Lincoln? Do you see his legacies as a positive one?

Comments

[pastorlenny.livejournal.com]

Dude was a vampire hunter, man. Badass.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

Not as badass as Theodore Roosevelt defeating the Martians from War of the Worlds.

[mybodymycoffin.livejournal.com]

Let's not forget that Teddy R. was irl Batman.

[policraticus.livejournal.com]

Short of Washington, who was the indispensable man, Lincoln's legacy is the most far reaching and pervasive of any president. He added to our political consciousness not only the reality of our national Union but also the capacity of our nation to live up to the ideals that animated its establishment. In short, he made it object of America to take the ideals of the Founders and put them into practice. His was the Second American Revolution.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

Pretty much, yes. The Lincoln Administration in so doing also made what is truly exceptional about the United States possible: most countries, even utopian ones, give lip service at best to their guiding ideologies and in practice govern more pragmatically. Here, living up to those values and how to do that *is* the ideological divide. No Lincoln, that never happens.

[policraticus.livejournal.com]

I don't know if it never happens, but as it happened, Lincoln was the man.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

Well, to put it another way he ensured that the United States faced the contradiction between slavery and the Declaration of Independence's statements and that liberty won out. It's hard to see Seward or Chase doing the same thing.

[policraticus.livejournal.com]

I think it was a foregone conclusion that the contradiction would be ended. Lincoln was hardly alone or original in his opinion. You're right, most of his contemporaries were not of the same scale, but the weight of issue was tilted firmly towards liberty. Lincoln just had the moral courage to use the surgeon's saw to amputate that gangrenous limb rather than applying tourniquet and waiting for it to fall off on its own.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

The thing is, though, that the US Civil War was a conflict that *required* someone of Lincoln's scale to measure up to it. It's very possible that Seward or Chase could have led the USA to victory in that war, if only because the Confederacy's strategic position sucked and the USA had both more manpower and more options than the Confederacy did. The real-life war was horrible enough and left enough hatred. A war led by Seward or Chase would have been still moreso. To the degree that the South might well resemble a larger-scale Northern Ireland.

[geezer-also.livejournal.com]

But Seward did get us Alaska.

[mrsilence.livejournal.com]

One thing I see as an Australian looking at U.S. history is that there appears to be 2 primary views of Lincoln, divided mostly on Geographical and ideological grounds.. The most common is as the great emancipator, the other as the northern conquerer, responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands, with a legend protected by the gauze of a cause only declared post facto.

What I also see from this distance, where the trivia of adulation, accusations and recriminations fade into a solid, obscure mess, is that what is most pertinent about Lincoln, is that whatever his motives may have been, his decisions led to the freeing of the slaves. The cost was very high true, but the result was worth it. What matters is not what Lincoln thought or was claimed to have thought or is accused of thinking, but what he did. And what he and the Union forces did is to be fiercely respected. The title of Great Emancipator is well deserved.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

And it was also revolutionary regardless of where the rest of things ended up. By 1857 the Supreme Court had ruled that slavery was legal everywhere in the USA and blacks had never been US citizens (one of the major reasons the 14th Amendment mattered as it did). To go from *that* in 1857 to the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863 and the 13th Amendment in 1865 was very much impressive and a shift that was very well-handled.

[geezer-also.livejournal.com]

I think that what he is perceived to be in hindsight (with all the "legends") is probably much more important to this country than what he may actually have been. In reality all our heroes have clay feet, I for one feel it serves no real purpose in exposing them.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

This has a fair degree of truth to it.