What makes lincoln a great president

Both political parties claim to represent his values and never hesitate to invoke his name to bolster their image. Over statues of Lincoln stand, more than two dozen of them in foreign countries.

Lincoln is recognized internationally as a symbol of freedom and all that America stands for. Yet now, he finds himself a target of those who would pull down those statues. Some claim he hated his father , found himself in a marriage made in hell, suffered from Marfan Syndrome , Multiple Endocrine Neoplasia, even syphilis.

Had John Wilkes Booth not assassinated Lincoln, some assert, he would have died in office during his second term from one or all of those diseases. Scholars are not the only ones reevaluating Lincoln. The renaming process was suspended this month. Historical revision in itself is not bad, but it must be based on facts. Truth, after all, is the stock-in-trade of all historians. But getting to the truth is seldom easy.

In the case of Lincoln, this is particularly true. One can find documentation of an unending number of people who were eager to give personal testimony to their relationship and knowledge of the great man.

Many exaggerated, a few lied. Twenty-six people claim they carried him from the theater to the Petersen House where he died. Out of respect to the man, we should at least try to recover a sense of both the grandeur and the contingency of the history that he lived through, and helped to shape. To see a statesman in full, and thereby learn something about the nature of statesmanship, one needs to see him not only in the overly clear light of retrospection, but in the shadowy and inconclusive light of the conditions he faced as they were unfolding.

Few great leaders have been more comprehensively disdained or loathed—or underestimated. The low Southern view of him, of course, was to be expected, but it was widely shared north of the Mason-Dixon line. There was little or no applause for him as he concluded his two-minute speech and sat down.

We need to remember that this is often how history happens. Background music does not swell at the crucial moment, and trumpets do not sound, when the events of history are actually taking place. The orator or the soldier has to wonder whether he is acting in vain, whether the criticisms of others are in fact warranted, whether time will judge him harshly. Few great men have felt this burden more completely than Lincoln. We also need to remember how likely it seemed to Lincoln and others that he would lose the election, and thereby experience ignominious defeat and see the disintegration of the Union cause as he had fought for it.

Beyond these immediate problems were unstated but widely shared worries about the inherent fragility of the Union. These grew out of what historian Robert V. A fear of anarchy and disunion was indeed endemic in early national and antebellum America, a fact that should remind us of the fluidity and relative weakness of national identity in the decentralized early Republic, and of the degree to which the real operative authority and meaning of the Constitution had to be established through a long series of intensely contested political acts and policies.

Similar premonitions ran through the signal events of early American political history: through the Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions, the Hartford Convention, the Missouri Compromise, the nullification controversy, and so on to Fort Sumter. Lincoln firmly took his stand against all of these accumulated fears, in defense of the transcendent ideal of the Union as the sine qua non for the success of the American experiment in republican government.

In its waging as well as its results, the Civil War was a great crucible of American national identity.

This is why the literary critic Edmund Wilson called Lincoln the American Bismarck, thereby placing the American Civil War in the context of the other great worldwide movements of national unification and state-building that came in the middle years of the nineteenth century.

In so doing, Wilson also made the melancholy but inescapable point that war has proved the most effective agent of national cohesion in modern history. We should remember too that, with events controlling him, Lincoln had to do things as president that he was not equipped to do, either by experience or temperament.

He had not only opposed the aggression of the Mexican War but was something of an antimilitarist who abhorred violence. How then to account for the fact that he became such a remarkably effective war leader, indeed the quintessential war president—the only president in our history whose entire term of office was defined by the conditions of war, and the employer and enabler of such legendarily destructive warriors as Grant and Sherman? It is surely one of the many mysteries about this man.

He also excelled in understanding the larger political dimensions of the war, in riding the flow of events and changing Northern public opinion with a consummate sense of timing. Slow to realize no peaceful solution or wartime compromise possible, he stumbled in his choice of strategies, mostly because he misjudged the South, partly because of his ameliorative personality.

Lincoln had no specific plan for postwar reconstruction and national reunification. Whatever he may have attempted if he had lived was likely to have been no more successful, however, than what followed his death.

Southern racism was too deeply entrenched ever to have acquiesced in civil rights for blacks without bitter resistance. Early in the 19th century, John Quincy Adams, our sixth president, had become convinced that slavery would destroy the Union. Slavery would be ended, he came to believe, only through a civil war.

The emancipation schemes his contemporaries proposed, including voluntary immigration of free blacks and emancipated slaves to a nation of their own, seemed to him impractical and unjust.

He refused to support the American Colonization Society. Lincoln, who also abhorred slavery as a moral crime, put all his hopes in the Colonization Society. Adams thought it absurd to suppose that free blacks would immigrate voluntarily to Africa or that slave owners would ever cooperate in emancipation.

Convinced that slavery would not be the rock against which the nation split, Lincoln believed the South would not succumb to the folly of secession. Adams knew the Southern mind better, having observed its uncompromising, quasi-violent character day after day in Congress from to Over time, slavery would be eliminated peacefully. Adams never believed that possible. As political philosophers, these two presidents, our most literate, forward-looking statesmen of the 19th century, held similar views about how to guide America toward a prosperous future.

Both belonged to the Whig Party that existed from to At first a Federalist, then a National Republican, Adams, after , aligned himself with the segment of the National Republicans that morphed into the Whig Party.

Yet he always kept his distance from whatever party he had an association with. At heart, he detested parties and party politics. Adams worked mostly from the outside, by personality outspoken and a radical; Lincoln from inside, a consensus politician who met his destiny when conciliation was no longer possible. On matters of policy a national bank, paper money, trade, education, infrastructure, manufacturing, and the proper balance between federal and state power , they were, with the exception of how to deal with slavery, entirely in agreement.

The why and how of that exception illuminate much about Lincoln and the crosscurrents of his life and times. Both Adams and Lincoln were antislavery moralists. Lincoln, unlike Adams, never became an antislavery activist, even when a brutal civil war forced him to take action against slavery.

Adams envisioned a multiracial America as inevitable. Long before his death he became deeply sympathetic to abolitionists and abolitionism. Lincoln distrusted abolitionism. Though he believed slavery a moral abomination incompatible with American principles, and looked toward its eventual elimination, he desired that all blacks residing in the United States immigrate to a land of their own.

He worried that the attempt of the two races to occupy the same country would lead to a century or more of racial conflict. Different as they were by background and temperament, Lincoln and Adams had much in common. Both were masters of English prose, Adams in the classical style of the late 18th century into which he had been born, Lincoln in the colloquial style of common speech that became the hallmark of modern American prose.