 Barack Obama speaks in front of Lincoln Memorial (photo: Clandestino Web) |
With the 20-foot high statue of Abraham Lincoln gazing from the Lincoln Memorial across the National Mall, I wondered, what would the Civil War president think about Barack Obama being sworn in as America’s 44th president?
Obama hasn’t hidden his homage to Abraham Lincoln. He announced his candidacy in front of the Illinois statehouse, where Lincoln warned the country about a “house divided” in 1858. He studies Lincoln’s speeches. He echoed more of Lincoln’s words during his presidential acceptance. He turned to Lincoln for advice on how to lead as president with a cabinet made up of a team of rivals. He recently took his family on a secret excursion of Lincoln’s memorial, in front of which will be the grand stand for pre-inaugural events. He replicated Lincoln’s inaugural train journey. He will take the oath of office with Lincoln’s inaugural Bible. The title of his speech, “A New Birth of Freedom,” is borrowed from the Gettysburg Address. He will eat from a Lincoln-like menu at his presidential celebrations.
There’s not much guesswork in figuring out which president is Obama’s favorite. But would America’s 16th president return the same sentiment for our 44th president?
There’s no doubt these two presidents from Illinois share some similarities. As Australia’s Herald Sun noted, “Both were derided as too young and inexperienced to be president; both wrote best-selling books before running for the White House; both were lawyers and extraordinarily gifted orators; both came to power during a national crisis; and both were tall, lanky, self-made men determined to maintain contact with the citizens they served.”
Some say every president since the 16th president has felt some sense of his legacy. Lincoln scholar and historian Harold Holzer, who wrote 31 books on the Great Emancipator, said, “They all feel it. Everyone finds something in him.” And, I would add, everyone finds their contrasts too. “I think it is time to claim Lincoln as one of our own,” Franklin Roosevelt said in the spring of 1929. “I’m a Ford, not a Lincoln,” Gerald Ford once said. Obama even recently confessed, “There is a genius to Lincoln that is not going to be matched.”
But Obama and Lincoln share one gigantic thing in common above all others – a rare and historic symmetry – one served as a catalyst to end slavery and the other demonstrates just how far that freedom has advanced in almost 150 years. There cannot be enough said about the historical magnitude of this presidential moment – a true fulfillment of the American experiment, spirit and dream (an achievement embedded long ago in the equality clauses of the Declaration of Independence).
However, I think we must avoid two extremes: Obama is neither the inheritor of Lincoln’s legacy nor can he be accused of hijacking Lincoln’s Republican presidency. The truth is probably somewhere in between. It’s superficial (at least through today’s lenses) to simply separate Obama as a Democrat and Lincoln as a Republican. We must remember the Democratic Party was once the southern pro-slavery party. It would be decades later before Democrats became the party of racial equality, fighting for civil rights.
In the end, our 16th and 44th presidents not only share some positives but negatives in common. The latter would include:
- They both believe imposing more taxes is the way to economic recovery (Lincoln was dependent upon southern taxes and initiated the first income taxes, which eventually would become law in 1913 through our 16th amendment)
- They both believe in regarding the Constitution as a living document (allowing them more flexibility and power for preferred political decisions and presidential autonomy).
- They both believe in big-government solutions. Lincoln once said, “The legitimate object of government is to do for a community of people whatever they need to have done, but cannot do at all, or cannot do so well, for themselves, in their separate and individual capacities.”
So where do these similarities and contrasts leave us in considering what Lincoln’s view of Obama’s inauguration might be? About this we can be absolutely certain – Lincoln and his contemporaries couldn’t have even imagined a day when America would elect a black man as president. Such an elevated position was simply out of sight from the social paradigm through which they viewed and lived.
Case in point: On the one hand, in August of 1858, Abraham Lincoln affirmed the equality in humanity of blacks: “I have never said anything to the contrary, but I hold that notwithstanding all this, there is no reason in the world why the negro is not entitled to all the natural rights enumerated in the Declaration of Independence, the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. I hold that he is as much entitled to these as the white man. I agree with Judge Douglas he is not my equal in many respects – certainly not in color, perhaps not in moral or intellectual endowment. But in the right to eat the bread, without leave of anybody else, which his own hand earns, he is my equal and the equal of Judge Douglas, and the equal of every living man. ”
 Lincoln Memorial |
On the other hand, just one month later, Lincoln questioned blacks’ social and political equality: “I will say then that I am not, nor ever have been in favor of bringing about in anyway the social and political equality of the white and black races – that I am not nor ever have been in favor of making voters or jurors of negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people; and I will say in addition to this that there is a physical difference between the white and black races which I believe will forever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality. And inasmuch as they cannot so live, while they do remain together there must be the position of superior and inferior, and I as much as any other man am in favor of having the superior position assigned to the white race. I say upon this occasion I do not perceive that because the white man is to have the superior position the negro should be denied everything.”
Of course, as some propose, Lincoln could have had a change of heart over the next seven years, after experiencing a Civil War and his presidency. Others say, however, that the Emancipation Proclamation was merely a wartime measure and political document with no personal reflection.
No matter what the final verdict of Lincoln’s degree of prejudicial blood, blacks were freed. And 144 years later, Obama is president. And those book ends in social history happened despite that Abraham Lincoln, like many of us, retained some biases and still had room to grow.
What’s most important now is not how Obama and Lincoln’s lives connect, but how all of ours do. Any way you look at it, triumph or travesty, Obama’s presidency is a colossal and culminating event according to any historic criteria. And all Americans would do well momentarily to drop our partisan politics and rigor, and follow the advice given by Lincoln in his Second Inaugural Address, which is also etched on his Memorial:
With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.
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Wayne Allyn Root