Celebrating the Lincoln bicentennial – personal-professional reflections

This is the first half of my newspaper column for this week, adapted and expanded.

Hundreds of millions of Americans, and other people around the world, are celebrating the historic milestone of the Abraham Lincoln birth bicentennial today. Especially with the connections between Lincoln’s role in ending slavery and Barack Obama’s recent inauguration as the nation’s first African-American president – not to mention both of them being from Illinois – the celebrations take on an additional historic depth.

But, for Americans in the know, there’s a second birth bicentennial to be celebrated on the same day. The person in question isn’t American, but has just as much importance as does Lincoln.

In one of those quirks or twists that make history so interesting, Charles Darwin was also born Feb. 12, 1809. I will have more on him in a second post.

First, Lincoln.

It is true that he was not an abolitionist, or even close to it, at the start of the Civil War. In terms of white population from the free states in 1861, Lincoln would best be characterized as a moderate on the issue. He wanted attempts to expand slavery halted for good. But, as for reversing slavery, he believed it could only be done with a Constitutional amendment.

It is true that he said, in an open letter to Horace Greeley, when announcing the Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation in August 1862,:

“If I could save the Union without freeing any slave, I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves, I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that.”

But, he then added this:

“I have here stated my purpose according to my view of ‘official’ duty; I intend no modification of my oft-expressed ‘personal’ wish that all men everywhere could be free.”

Yes, it is true that Lincoln pushed long and hard for resettling freed slaves in Africa. But, that was primarily because he thought much of white America might do what actually happened in the South – and a fair amount of the North – after the end of slavery, and that was adopting some degree of segregation, if not full-blown Jim Crow laws. (Remember that Brown vs. Board of Education involved the schools in Topeka, Kan.; note also that many lynchings by the “second” Ku Klux Klan after World War I happened north of the old Mason-Dixon Line.)

That said, Lincoln grew, admitted when he was wrong – and admitted it to blacks, not just whites.

His assassination, far more than John F. Kennedy’s, was the greatest tragedy in American history. After Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson used Kennedy’s death to push civil rights legislation forward. After Lincoln, Andrew Johnson, named vice president as part of a “Union” fusion ticket in 1864, showed openly racist behavior in gutting much Reconstruction legislation. By the time Ulysses S. Grant became president, the original Klan, and the first Jim Crow laws, had already gained traction.

But, today, even though the spirit of Lincoln’s dream – equality after freedom – hasn’t been fully realized, we continue to progress toward the goal of America’s greatest president. And, behind that is Lincoln’s spirit of perseverance.