I’m talking about someone born 202 years ago today, someone everyone in the United States used to take notice of every year on February 12th, someone whose name probably won't even be mentioned today by what conservative radio personality Rush Limbaugh calls “the drive-by media,” who prefer to report about Lindsay Lohan and LeBron James (each of them has a Wikipedia article, but I am not going to include the links; you can make the effort yourself to look them up if you are really that interested in drug-using actresses and self-absorbed basketball players).
Give up?
I’m talking about the sixteenth President of the United States, Abraham Lincoln.
When I was a boy, everyone knew that Lincoln was born on February 12, 1809, in a log cabin in Kentucky. Everyone knew his parents were Tom Lincoln and Nancy Hanks Lincoln. Everyone knew his first love was Ann Rutledge, who died of typhoid fever. Everyone knew he married Mary Todd and had four children, Robert, Edward, Willie, and Tad. Everyone knew of the debates between Lincoln and Stephen Douglas, and the Emancipation Proclamation, and the Second Inaugural Address, and the assassination by John Wilkes Booth.
Some of the myth surrounding Lincoln’s birth and childhood is questioned today. The Wikipedia article about him does state that he was born in a one-room log cabin, but it also states that his father Thomas enjoyed considerable status in Kentucky, where he sat on juries, appraised estates, served on country patrols, and guarded prisoners. By the time his son Abraham was born, Thomas owned two 600-acre farms, several town lots, livestock and horses. He was amongst the richest men in the area. Makes you wonder why little Abe was born in a one-room log cabin, then, unless one-room log cabins were all the rage, that era’s equivalent of the McMansions we see about us today. Mostly foreclosed-on McMansions, he hastened to add. But I digress.
We were forced as students, forced I tell you, to memorize Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. The entire Gettysburg Address. All ten sentences and 271 words. Here they are:
“Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.
Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation, so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.
But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate, we can not consecrate, we can not hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion--that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain--that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom--and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”
When I was a boy, we observed Lincoln’s birthday on February 12th and George Washington’s birthday on February 22nd. Nowadays, we lump them together and have “Presidents Day,” ostensibly to remember all the presidents of the United States at once (although, to be fair, Washington and Lincoln are usually the ones mentioned most often) but really to give federal employees a three-day weekend. As Lincoln once said, it is altogether fitting and proper that we do this, and we have Lyndon Baines Johnson to thank for the change.
So forget about Abraham Lincoln as an individual. Forget about George Washington. Instead, on a Monday in the near future, spend your day thinking about Millard Fillmore, Warren G. Harding, and George W. Bush.
You might even think about Jimmy Carter.
And if you do, and you know your history, you might think about Menachem Begin. And Anwar Sadat.
And then, and only then, should you think about Hosni Mubarak.
