{"id":2427,"date":"2009-02-12T20:17:35","date_gmt":"2009-02-13T01:17:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/?p=2427"},"modified":"2009-02-12T20:17:35","modified_gmt":"2009-02-13T01:17:35","slug":"thinkin-of-lincoln","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/?p=2427","title":{"rendered":"Thinkin’ of Lincoln"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Lincoln\"
\n
Today is the 200th anniversary of Abraham Lincoln\u2019s birth,<\/strong> and I\u2019d never forgive myself if I didn\u2019t say something about it.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Still can.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

I understand it, but I don\u2019t buy it. <\/p>\n

I\u2019ve 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, \u201cYou know, once you sign onto this thing, there\u2019s no getting out. Try to secede and we\u2019ll come after you with guns,\u201d the delegates would have told them what to do with their more perfect union, saddled their horses and gone home.<\/p>\n

And I\u2019m not sure that, in Lincoln\u2019s place, I\u2019d have considered 600,000 dead a reasonable price for preserving a Union that a block of states wanted out of.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m not even sure Lincoln wouldn\u2019t have made a different decision, if he\u2019d known beforehand what the butcher\u2019s bill would be.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

I know the war wasn\u2019t technically about slavery. But why did the southern states secede, if not because of Lincoln\u2019s (exaggerated) reputation as a fire-breathing abolitionist? The \u201cpeculiar institution\u201d was present in everyone\u2019s mind all the way through, and in nobody\u2019s more than those of southerners. When they spoke eloquently of property rights, everyone knew what that really meant.<\/p>\n

So in the end, Lincoln made it about slavery. And settled the issue. Settled the issue of secession too.<\/p>\n

I like Warner Todd Huston\u2019s piece<\/a> at Red State<\/i> today. Worth reading.<\/p>\n

Happy birthday, Father Abraham.
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Today is the 200th anniversary of Abraham Lincoln\u2019s birth, and I\u2019d never forgive myself if I didn\u2019t 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. … Continue reading Thinkin’ of Lincoln<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2427","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2427","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2427"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2427\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2427"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2427"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2427"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}