Today is the 200th anniversary of Abraham Lincoln’s birth, and I’d never forgive myself if I didn’t say something about it.

Lincoln was always an important figure to me, even as a kid. All the books about young Lincoln told how he was forever getting in trouble with his father for reading instead of working. I could always identify with that.

Still can.

There’s a strong revisionist movement today, especially among conservatives, to re-define Lincoln as a tyrant, the arch-conspirator who laid the foundations of the imperial federal government, a godless, syphilitic bigot who tromped on civil rights and wasted 600,000 lives in an unconstitutional war.

I understand it, but I don’t buy it.

I’ve been willing to admit for a number of years now that (in my opinion) Jefferson Davis had a stronger constitutional argument than Lincoln did. It seems to me unquestionable that, if the framers of the Constitution had told the convention, “You know, once you sign onto this thing, there’s no getting out. Try to secede and we’ll come after you with guns,” the delegates would have told them what to do with their more perfect union, saddled their horses and gone home.

And I’m not sure that, in Lincoln’s place, I’d have considered 600,000 dead a reasonable price for preserving a Union that a block of states wanted out of.

I’m not even sure Lincoln wouldn’t have made a different decision, if he’d known beforehand what the butcher’s bill would be.

But it seems to me the whole thing might have been fated. America, like the hero of a Greek tragedy, was (and is, I suppose, in other ways today) a great character with a fatal flaw, one that led inevitably to a river crossing where the current ran red.

From the very beginning, America was ambivalent about slavery. Jefferson and Washington, both slave owners, felt the profound shame that honorable men had to feel over participating in such an institution, and feared what the end might be.

I know the war wasn’t technically about slavery. But why did the southern states secede, if not because of Lincoln’s (exaggerated) reputation as a fire-breathing abolitionist? The “peculiar institution” was present in everyone’s mind all the way through, and in nobody’s more than those of southerners. When they spoke eloquently of property rights, everyone knew what that really meant.

So in the end, Lincoln made it about slavery. And settled the issue. Settled the issue of secession too.

I like Warner Todd Huston’s piece at Red State today. Worth reading.

Happy birthday, Father Abraham.