Lincoln Thoughts

If you must know, the politician I admire the most was nevertheless wrong about most issues: William Jennings Bryan. So sticking up for Lincoln is not something I do from ideology, or if it is ideology, it’s only in the broadest possible sense. The country we have now, if there is something to preserve, we owe it to Mr. Lincoln.

We owe it to his allies and partners, General Sherman, and General Grant, though they are by no means perfect, by any measure. We owe it to Frederick Douglass, and Harriet Beecher Stowe. We owe it to John Brown, even as we abhor violence, because he was right, and we know it now. We owe it to Walt Whitman, and William Lloyd Garrison, and numerous thinkers who basked in the sunlight of freedom later, though it always has seemed marred with clouds.

The country born from the ashes of that war was prepared to actually enact the truth that all people are created equal. Before that, those words were a vain hope, at best. The 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments created the legal structure, and the culture by which the demand for those rights makes sense. You can put women’s suffrage here, too. Without Lincoln, and the memory of Lincoln, it happens much later, if at all.

The Civil War was fought fundamentally over the equal dignity of all human beings, or whether we would accept the subservience of some relative to the others. This is true, even if many on the winning side were not prepared for the equality themselves. The civil rights movement in the 20th century won in law and in fact what the Civil War signified. Racial supremacy had been hiding, both regionally, and in the glow of the victors in that war. It still hides, and we’re not in the Promised Land, but we were a lot further away from when open racism was socially acceptable.

It might be argued that Lincoln was an imperfect abolitionist, and therefore, not any sort of hero. I answer that politics only matters insofar as it is practical. Lincoln at every moment of his public life was practical. He found his idealism as he realized the moment, and I think that is all we should reasonably expect.

He’s not a saint, and he doesn’t need to be.

Doesn’t the experiment of self-government teach us that ordinary people doing the best they can, even if we argue intensely, are being heroic, just by enacting the basic virtues of representative democracy? Isn’t the scandal of certain highly placed individuals today not per se their flaws in character, but the unwillingness to participate in the civic liturgy? Isn’t true anti-Americanism really a belief that one owes nothing to any other American?

I would say that my definition indicts the rebels in our great intra-national war, but Mr. Lincoln had no scores to settle when it ended. It’s the better part for me not to argue with President Lincoln. His Second Inaugural Address is a reminder to me that he had reasons to be vengeful, if anyone did, and he was not.

Oddly enough, I have a friend writing a novel about 2008, and it took me back there. Remember Barack Obama and John McCain? Remember when McCain was confronted with the craziest crackpot theories about Obama’s origin, and his love for our country? Remember how much time he spent defending Obama on these things? Remember when he lost, and he praised Obama, and spoke of the historical significance of our first African-American president for 10 minutes? Remember how he silenced his own booing crowd as he did it?

He’s literally the candidate for the Party of Lincoln, on one of the worst days of his life, surely, and he actually put America first. With apologies to his time in the Hanoi Hilton, and Heaven knows what else, he became an American hero that November night, and he remained one until he took his last breath.

True heroes in politics are ordinary people who do the normal things on behalf of our citizens—usually at a cost to themselves—and preserve the nation for future generations, even (or especially) when they won’t get any credit or glory for doing so.

I don’t need any of these people to be spotless; God in Christ does all that. But let’s not miss the obviously good, in a rush to avoid political hagiography.

Jason Kettinger is Associate Editor of Open for Business. He writes on politics, sports, faith and more.