Life of Lincoln resonates today

By Orville Vernon Burton

This Bicentennial birth year of America’s 16th president has witnessed an amazing flourish of Lincoln activities. Now Atlantans are invited to attend a town hall meeting tonight at The Carter Center entitled “Unfinished Work: Race, Equality, Opportunity, and Civility.”

Why is there so much hoopla about Lincoln’s 200th birthday? Why is it important for Americans of all stripes to engage in conversation? White Northerners think of Lincoln as the president who saved the Union; white Southerners as the war leader who held “malice toward none.” African-Americans once thought of Lincoln as the Great Emancipator, but increasingly perceive him as just another white racist. Whatever views, Lincoln is a truly enduring figure, one who speaks to us in our own time.

For one thing, Lincoln believed in people, in the common man (of course, at that time, only adult white men voted). He believed that the American people would make the right choices if they had the information. He did not use demagoguery, but used public speech to persuade, engaging in rational, frank dialogue to convince citizens.

After a typical three-hour speech by his opponent Stephen Douglas in 1854, Lincoln told the audience that he wanted them to hear his three-hour argument also. He advised everyone to get dinner and then return, and that, unexpectedly, he had agreed to let Douglas speak yet another hour. Lincoln was not being totally unselfish, he admitted, “for I suspected if it were understood, that the Judge was entirely done, you Democrats would leave, and not hear me; but by giving him the close, I felt confident you would stay for the fun of hearing him skin me.”

We also can learn from Lincoln’s call for unity. He understood us as one country, one people, and he did not assess blame. Lincoln tried to understand other points of view: “If I lived in the South, I would think as you do, I would act as you do.” He did not demonize even those who literally waged war on him. In contrast to our culture of celebrity and arrogance, Lincoln was a man of remarkable humility. While so many of that millennial generation were certain that they knew God’s will, Lincoln knew we can not know God’s will.

He also assembled his Cabinet with a goal of inclusion, even working with people who totally opposed his ideas. Although Samuel Chase was a constant thorn in his side, a man who attempted to undermine Lincoln so that he could replace Lincoln as the Republican presidential candidate, Lincoln appointed him as chief justice of the Supreme Court. Lincoln admitted that he “would rather have swallowed his buckhorn chair than to have nominated Chase.” But it was more important to Lincoln to appoint the best person: “To have done otherwise I should have been recreant to my convictions of my duty to the Republican Party and to the country.” Lincoln knew that Chase would be an unfaltering advocate of African-American rights.

Lincoln was open to other points of view. Today we excoriate politicians who change their minds on a subject. Yet, if new information changed what he understood, Lincoln was willing to adjust his ideas. Lincoln changed his views on race as he met and listened carefully to African- Americans like Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman and Civil War hero Robert Smalls.

Questions of race tear at the fabric of our supposedly egalitarian society. As Attorney General Eric Holder reminded us in what became a controversial statement, “In things racial we have always been, and I believe continue to be, in too many ways essentially a nation of cowards.”

But race is part of Lincoln’s “unfinished work,” discussed in his two greatest public speeches, the Gettysburg Address and the Second Inaugural Address. Some argue that the election of an African-American is the fulfillment of Lincoln, the completion of Reconstruction and the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments.

Steven Colbert, in the Colbert Report on March 16, 2009, said that rewriting history is a good thing because we can make it better. He recommends that now that an African-American is president, we can say that slavery never existed. Although done in humor, there are indications that in the court of popular opinion this is to some degree happening. The Chicago Tribune asked on March 15, “Does the election of a black president mean racism is no longer a factor in American politics? And are civil rights laws outdated in the age of Obama?”

On the other side, civil rights advocates have presented state-by-state data that shows persistent racial polarization in the Deep South and elsewhere. And remember that the former Confederate states, including Georgia, undermined the 14th and 15th Amendments after Reconstruction, and it took the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act of 1964 and 1965 to re-establish those rights. Revolutions can and do go backward.

Lincoln accepted that hard issues were facing America, and he asked arguing parties to put aside passion and talk rationally. He asked that reason prevail over political vitriol. “Fellow citizens, we cannot escape history,” wrote Abraham Lincoln. “We ... will be remembered in spite of our selves.”

Orville Vernon Burton, a Royston native, teaches at Coastal Carolina University in Conway, S.C., and is the author of “The Age of Lincoln.”