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About the USA is a digital collection of background resources on American society, culture, and political processes. In addition to featuring selected websites, it provides access to documents in full text format (E-Texts) on topics ranging from the history of German-American relations, government and politics to travel, holidays and sports. About the USA is maintained by the Information Resource Centers/U.S. Diplomatic Mission to Germany. usa.usembassy.de

In Focus: Abraham Lincoln - A Legacy of Freedom

President Abraham Lincoln, photographed at the White House, 1863

The year 2009 marks the bicentennial of the birth of Abraham Lincoln, the nation’s 16th president, and the man often considered its greatest leader. As the United States endured its greatest crisis, this self-educated common man supplied the leadership and the moral force that bound Americans together and carried them to victory. His vision spanned diplomacy and military strategy, political thought and elemental justice for all Americans --- including the African-American slaves he emancipated.

Among the Americans embracing this vision of our 16th president is the 44th president, Barack Obama. Writing in 2005, as a newly minted U.S. senator, Obama declared it hard to imagine a less likely scenario than his own rise — “except, perhaps, for the one that allowed a child born in the backwoods of Kentucky with less than a year of formal education to end up as Illinois’ greatest citizen and our nation’s greatest president.”

What Abraham Lincoln Means to Americans Today
By Andrew Ferguson
This article is excerpted from Abraham Lincoln: A Legacy of Freedom, published by the Bureau of International Information Programs. View the entire book (PDF, 5.48 MB).

“Ah,” said a book-writing acquaintance, when I told him that I had signed up to write a book of my own. “A book about Abraham Lincoln. Just what America needs.”

Since that unfortunate mishap at Ford’s Theatre, where an assassin’s bullet claimed his life, more than 14,000 books have been written about Abraham Lincoln, placing him second only to Jesus and Napoleon as an obsession of the world’s book writers.

I was in Lincoln’s hometown of Springfield, Illinois, one weekend, at a Lincoln conference. The audience was fairly large — roughly 100 scholars, authors, amateur historians, hobbyists, buffs, and, by the looks of it, a few vagrants in from the street. At one point, the moderator interrupted the proceedings to ask for a show of hands.

“Just out of curiosity,” he said, “how many people here are writing a book about Abraham Lincoln?”

And nearly half of the audience raised their hands.

We still learn new things about Lincoln every once in a while, but the discoveries, tiny as they are, pique the interest of only professionals and the most hollow-eyed obsessives; the recent Lincoln books that have caught the public’s attention consist in taking old facts and arranging them in new ways.

Just in recent years we’ve had a book proving Lincoln was a fundamentalist Christian — this was written by a fundamentalist Christian. Another proved that Lincoln’s greatness arose from his struggle with clinical depression; the book was written by a journalist who has struggled with clinical depression. Most notoriously, a gay activist published a book in 2005 asserting that Lincoln, though not a gay activist himself, was at least actively gay. Conservatives have written books about Lincoln’s conservatism. Liberals have claimed him in books describing the liberal Lincoln.

Agog at this exfoliation of Lincolns, you might be tempted to answer our title question — What does Abraham Lincoln mean to Americans today? — with a glib counterquestion: What doesn’t Lincoln mean to Americans today? He seems to mean all things all at once, which might lead a cynic to conclude that Lincoln has ceased to have any particular meaning at all. But that really is too glib. For there is something peculiarly American in the sheer excess and exuberance of our Lincoln infatuation. Understanding the infatuation, I came to believe, might be a way not only of understanding Lincoln but of understanding the country itself.

Expressing the American Experiment

For nearly a century, historians and sociologists have tried to explain the historical Lincoln infatuation. The reasons they’ve come up with are often clever and sometimes even plausible. Lincoln continues to fascinate his countrymen like no other historical personage, we’ve been told, because he was the first such personage to be commonly photographed: He is thus more real to us than great figures from earlier times can be. And it’s true that Lincoln was exquisitely sensitive to the ways in which he presented himself to the public, including through the use of the then-new photographic art. He seldom passed up a chance to have his likeness made. Thanks to that craftiness, we seem to know him in a way we could never know George Washington or Thomas Jefferson.

Even so, goes another argument, no matter how familiar we are with his face, with the sad eyes and tousled hair, Lincoln is tantalizingly and finally unknowable; it’s this mystery that draws us back to the melancholy, humorous, intelligent, reserved, distant, and kindly man

A beautifully illustrated text of the Emancipation Proclamation that glorifies Lincoln as the Great Emancipator

that his acquaintances described. Other historians have said our infatuation with him is rooted in the drama of his personal story: Born in abject poverty to become one of the great men of human history, Lincoln embodies the “right to rise” that Americans claim as their birthright. Still others credit his enduring fame to his assassination on Good Friday, a shock from which the country never quite recovered. The most sober-minded of our theorists say we’re obsessed with Lincoln because he presided over, and somehow exemplifies, the greatest trauma of American history, a civil war that reinvented the United States into the country we know today.

There’s truth in all these explanations, I suppose, but it’s the last one, in my opinion, that comes closest to being the comprehensive truth. I live not far from the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., that grand, photogenic temple on the banks of the Potomac River that is home to the “iconic Lincoln.” Researching my Lincoln book, spending time with scholars and collectors and obsessives and being introduced by each of them to yet another privatized Lincoln, a Lincoln pieced together from their own preoccupations, I was always glad to return home and pay the memorial a visit: to see this singular and solid Lincoln, the enduring Lincoln that every American can lay claim to.

The memorial is the most visited of our presidential monuments. The strangest thing about it, though, is the quiet that descends over the tourists who climb the wide sweeping stairway and step into the cool of the marble chamber. Before long their attention is drawn to one or both of the two Lincoln speeches etched in the walls on either side of the famous statue. After all this time I am still astonished at the number of visitors who stand still to read, on one stone panel, the Gettysburg Address, and, on the other, Lincoln’s second inaugural address.

What they’re reading is a summary of the American experiment, expressed in the finest prose any American has been capable of writing. One speech reaffirms that the country was founded upon and dedicated to a proposition — a universal truth that applies to all men everywhere. The other declares that the survival of the country is somehow bound up with the survival of the proposition — that if the country hadn’t survived, the proposition itself might have been lost. Sometimes the tourists tear up as they read; they tear up often, actually. And watching them you understand: Loving Lincoln, for Americans, is a way of loving their country.

That’s what Lincoln means to Americans today, and it’s why he means so much.

For full text see: America.gov


Last updated: February 12, 2009