02 February 2009
Preface
This article is excerpted from Abraham Lincoln: A Legacy of Freedom, published by the Bureau of International Information Programs. View the entire book (PDF, 5.48 MB)
By George Clack
George Clack is Director of the Office of Print Publications at the Bureau of International Information Programs.
The year 2009 marks the 200th anniversary of the birth of Abraham Lincoln, the U.S. president often considered the greatest of this country’s leaders. Americans’ reverence for Lincoln began with his tragic death by assassination in 1865, at the end of a brutal civil war in which 623,000 men died, the American Union withstood its greatest test, and slavery was banished. And his hallowed place in the iconography of America continues. More than 14,000 books have been published on Lincoln to date. Contemporary scholar Douglas L. Wilson calls Lincoln the “best known and most widely acclaimed of all Americans.”
Why add one more volume to the massive mound of Lincoln scholarship? Because we believe that Lincoln embodies fundamental American ideals that stretch from the founding of this nation down to the present.
Among the Americans embracing this vision of our 16th president is the 44th president, Barack Obama. Writing in 2005, as a newly minted U.S. senator, Obama declared it hard to imagine a less likely scenario than his own rise — “except, perhaps, for the one that allowed a child born in the backwoods of Kentucky with less than a year of formal education to end up as Illinois’ greatest citizen and our nation’s greatest president.”
In Lincoln’s biography, Obama continued, his “rise from poverty, his ultimate mastery of language and law, his capacity to overcome personal loss and remain determined in the face of repeated defeat … reminded me of a larger, fundamental element of American life — the enduring belief that we can constantly remake ourselves to fit our larger dreams.”
By bringing together leading historians and asking them to consider Lincoln from different angles, we hope to help people around the world understand the sources of the man’s greatness as well as his place in Americans’ hearts.
This volume, then, presents a sort of pointillist portrait of Lincoln. Our introduction offers a personal view of Lincoln, that of Eileen Mackevich, executive director of the Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Commission. In our opening essay, “What Lincoln Means to Americans Today,” journalist Andrew Ferguson considers the libraries of Lincoln books, the collectors of Lincoln memorabilia, the actors who present a reenacted Lincoln to the masses, and the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., for what they say about Lincoln’s enduring appeal. Next, in “Groundwork for Greatness: Abraham Lincoln to 1854,” historian Wilson recounts the story of a boy born to humble parents in a frontier cabin who wills himself to become that great archetype of this country — the self-made man. In “The Words That Moved a Nation,” Lincoln biographer Ronald C. White limns another of Lincoln’s surpassing gifts — his eloquence, a mastery of words encompassing the soaring biblical cadences that inspire a nation and, equally, the homespun wisdom of the common man.
Three essays examine Lincoln’s role as leader through the great national crisis of the Civil War. In “Path to the White House: Abraham Lincoln from 1854” and “Lincoln as Emancipator,” this book’s editor, Michael Jay Friedman, lays out the issues that led to the Civil War and the events that led Lincoln to order the 1863 Emancipation Proclamation, which freed the slaves of American South. Civil War historian Peter Cozzens, in “Lincoln as Commander-in-Chief,” considers the obstacles the president had to overcome in developing an effective Union army and a cadre of generals to command it. Finally, diplomatic historian Howard Jones, in “Lincoln as Diplomat,” describes the international pitfalls that Lincoln as a war president needed to navigate and how he did it.
Despite all the Lincoln books, articles, tributes, and conferences, a sense of a mystery remains. In the end the figure of Lincoln seems so grand, so varied, so susceptible to meaning that Americans of all stripes have often enlisted him in their causes. Perhaps Andrew Ferguson in a recent interview comes closest to getting at the power of the icon: “Lincoln also returns us to something essential in our national creed. The iconic Lincoln reminds us of the idea that the Union, by itself, is not enough. The Union has to be dedicated to a proposition: that all men are created equal.”
