THE ABRAHAM LINCOLN BICENTENNIAL IN THE AGE OF OBAMA

Delivered at the Taunton Rotary Club, February 12, 2009 by Jordan H. F. Fiore

Two hundred years ago today Nancy Hanks Lincoln, the wife of Thomas Lincoln, gave birth to a baby boy in a dirt floored rickety log cabin outside Hodgenville, Kentucky. They named the boy Abraham, after Thomas’ father, and he grew to be one of the most famous people in the history of the world. For the past one hundred fifty years he has served as a source of inspiration, pride, controversy and conscience to billions of people. Being the son of a professional historian and being trained as one myself, and having experienced my elementary school years during the centennial of the Civil War, I have certainly had a lifelong fascination and relationship with Lincoln and that has brought me to the chairmanship of our city’s special commission to celebrate this bicentennial. To help invoke Taunton community pride and to provide a local angle to the celebration, in September we dedicated the square next to Reed and Barton, adjacent to a site where Lincoln spoke in 1848 as “Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Square” with an audience of about ninety people and three color guards. In October a number of us, including several Rotarians and Rotary family members, read portions of the Lincoln-Douglas Debates on the steps of First Parish Church. In November, on the anniversary of the Gettysburg Address, we dedicated a plaque on Wayne Berube’s law office, which was the home of General Darius Nash Couch, who commanded the honor guard at the Gettysburg dedication ceremony in 1863. In January and February, the African-American Club at Taunton High School has been at work on a project covering the Emancipation Proclamation and tonight at 7 o’clock at the Old Colony Historical Society, we are having a birthday party for Abe. The program will feature a performance by the African-American Club and a presentation by Dr. Charles Thayer on Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address. We will also have a display of probably about a thousand dollars worth of Lincoln pennies, which have been raised by school children and others to provide gifts cards to grocery and department stores for families of veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts, the cards to be distributed by the city’s office of veterans’ services. We will also be handing out vouchers for the new Lincoln Bicentennial pennies which the mint will release later this month. You are all invited to come and swap pennies with us this evening.
With the coming of the Lincoln Bicentennial year, our new President geared a Lincoln-based theme to his Inauguration. Of course, both Barack Obama and Abraham Lincoln were products of the Illinois legislature and it was the actions of Lincoln that made possible the candidacy and service of the African-American Obama. While Lincoln was antislavery from the time that he visited the New Orleans slave markets in his early twenties, he was slow to suggest any political rights for Negroes, particularly campaigning in Illinois, which bordered on the slave states of Kentucky and Missouri and which had areas of a Southern orientation. However, Lincoln’s observation of the exploits of black soldiers in the Civil War, such as the 54th Massachusetts Regiment, brought him to the conclusion that the Negro was as much a stakeholder in America as the white man and, when the federal government was trying to formulate a state constitution for Louisiana in 1864 after it was brought under Union occupation, Lincoln insisted that the constitution contain a provision allowing African-Americans to vote. He also advocated for the Fifteenth Amendment to the U. S. Constitution, which was ratified after his death.
This congruence between the two men has opened an invitation to compare and contrast. I will admit to the prejudice of being a lifelong Republican and also, as one who has held elective office himself for nineteen years, I have had grave concerns over Mr. Obama’s level of relevant experience, just about the least of any incoming President in history. Because Mr. Obama is so bright, articulate, and hopeful, people have tended to overlook this fact, but we really have nothing in this man’s history on which to base an expectation of his leadership. That being said, I find amazing similarities and some unexpected contrasts between the two men.
Both men came from unconventional family backgrounds with problematical relationships with their fathers and with step- or half siblings. Lincoln’s father, Thomas, was a poor, illiterate dirt farmer, who had no sympathy or understanding for Abraham’s desire for “book learning” or for his ambitions beyond the family farm. Lincoln’s mother, Nancy Hanks, died when he was nine years old and his only sister died as a teenager. It is known that Nancy was nurturing of Abraham and of his reading and learning of stories. Thomas Lincoln remarried the widow Sarah Bush Johnston, who brought with her several children from her first marriage. Abraham and his stepmother adored each other and Sarah was always encouraging of Abraham’s aspirations. However, some of her children were ne’er do well. From Lincoln’s later correspondence, it is known that he regularly sent money to help his stepmother and he corresponded regularly with his step siblings. However, after being hit up for money on several occasions after becoming successful in the law and in business, Lincoln began replacing financial aid to his step siblings with advice. Lincoln and his father apparently resented each other and Abraham never visited his father, nor did he attend his funeral. However, on his way to Washington to assume the Presidency in 1861, Lincoln did go to visit his stepmother. Mrs. Lincoln survived her stepson by about four years.
As we all now know, President Obama is the result of a college romance between a teenager from Kansas and a student from Kenya about a dozen years her senior. Barack Obama, Sr. returned to his native land around the time that his namesake son was born and only returned to America to visit the boy once, when young Barack was about ten. The senior Barack married several more times and fathered several more children, all of whom were raised in Africa (one of the sons now lives in China). His father, the President’s grandfather, also married several times and the African “grandmother” with whom the President is seen in some photographs is his grandfather’s fourth wife and widow. The President did not meet most of his siblings until he traveled to Kenya after his father’s death in an automobile accident in 1982. He is, however, close to his half sister, who is his mother’s daughter by her second husband, an Indonesian. He apparently maintains contact with his African family, but it must be remembered that their relationship began as adults and that there are no childhood bonds among them.
Although Lincoln’s image is of being a much older man than Obama, in fact he was only four and a half years older when assuming the White House. Furthermore, although Lincoln’s son Robert was already a student at Harvard when his father became President, Lincoln’s younger sons, Willie and Tad, were about the same ages as the Obama daughters are now. Lincoln and Obama were both taller than average and of lanky build. They both rose to the fore based upon their ability as speechmakers, though in a much different way. Mr. Obama is very handsome and has the voice of a radio announcer. His inflections, his movement, his eye contact, and his fairly upbeat subject matter and approach to it have created the public presence that sends a tingle up Chris Matthews’ leg. However, there are few great quotations from Obama’s speeches; they have to be heard. Lincoln, on the other hand, make an awkward and sometimes slovenly appearance and is said to have had an irritating high-pitched voice. However, his self-deprecating humor allowed regular people to identify with him and his language was poetic and passionate. “Our free country was founded eighty-seven years ago” became “Fourscore and seven years ago our Fathers brought forth on this Continent a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” “No hard feelings” became “With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us bind up our nation‘s wounds.” In addition, Lincoln‘s secretary John Hay, was a poet and journalist and contributed much to Lincoln literature.
Both men came to greatness from humble origins by different paths. Lincoln was born to a poor dirt farmer in a socioeconomic class not much above that of the African-American slaves and became a wealthy lawyer and a respected statesman. Barack Obama‘s family often faced economic difficulty and he traveled an interesting and noble route. He was raised in a lower middle class white family and lived most of his childhood in multiracial environments in Hawaii and Indonesia. However, as an adult, he made a decision to go to work as a community organizer in the African-American ghettos of Chicago, exposing himself to more prejudice and social hardship than he had ever known in his life. Then he moved on to an elite law school and moved in and out of elite law firms to enjoy the more modest life of a law professor and a state legislator.
Both men experienced critical development in unsuccessful races for lower office. Lincoln’s 1855 Senate loss to Lyman Trumbull resulted in Trumbull’s commitment to support Lincoln in 1858 for Illinois’ other Senate seat, setting up the Lincoln-Douglas Debates that made Lincoln a national figure. Lincoln’s unsuccessful bid for the Vice Presidential nomination at the first Republican National Convention in 1856 helped him establish contacts that aided him in winning the Presidential nomination four years later, a development similar to what John F. Kennedy would experience with the Democrats a hundred years later. Obama broke out of the pack in the Illinois Senate with an unsuccessful primary challenge to Congressman Bobby Rush. Obama bucked the Daley machine in Chicago in that election and lost, but won their respect and future support as a result.
Both Lincoln and Obama had beautiful and fashion conscious wives. Mary Todd Lincoln came from Kentucky society and helped to fire Lincoln’s social and political ambitions. Mrs. Lincoln also suffered from mental instability which often manifested itself with lavish New York shopping sprees in which she would buy dozens of pairs of gloves and expensive hats, dresses, and home furnishings, the bills for which the President quietly paid. Much of the 2009 press is agog at Michele Obama’s J. Crew fashion accessorizing and her choice of modern emerging designers for her custom formal wear.
The comparison of experience I believe is a little misleading. The Obama campaign and its allies pointed out that Lincoln and Obama spent about the same amount of time in equivalent public offices and that Obama was older than John F. Kennedy. This overlooks two crucial factors. By the time he was forty-three years old, Jack Kennedy had had fourteen years in both houses of Congress. It is true that Lincoln had the same level of experience as Obama in public office. However, Lincoln had been a major political player for about twenty-five years by the time he reached the White House. He was elected to the legislature at twenty-five and even during his years out of office, particularly in the period 1854-1860, Lincoln was a major spokesman for the Republican Party and played a key role in formulating its policies and strategies. In the Lincoln-Douglas debates, Douglas quoted from a number of Lincoln speeches given over the course of at least a dozen years.. Furthermore, Lincoln had a very sophisticated law practice and a diverse investment portfolio and had a much more highly developed business and managerial philosophy than Obama. In fact, Obama’s professional and political background does not even stack up against our so-called “moron” Presidents. Millard Fillmore had critical administrative and economic experience as the state comptroller of New York. Warren Harding had been a newspaper publisher and the lieutenant governor of Ohio before spending twice as long as Obama in the U. S. Senate. Chester Arthur had fifteen years as the Collector of the Port of New York.
Both Lincoln and Obama arrived in office with great intensity of feeling, but the feelings were very different. President Obama has come into office with a large residue of good will from breaking the racial barrier and being so personable and mediagenic. Since he comes into office in such hard times and succeeds the much despised George W. Bush, many of his supporters see him as a savior and messiah. His much smaller font of critics jealously view him as the Antichrist. There is very little casual feeling or indifference. On the other hand, Lincoln’s support was not all that enthusiastic. He was relatively unknown nationally, his nomination was “inside baseball” rather than a popular movement, and he won with only 39% as a result of a split between Northern and Southern factions in the Democratic Party and a strong bid by John Bell of the Constitution Party. However, the election of a President from the antislavery Republican Party, which Stephen A. Douglas had rightly scored as being only a regional party because its platform could not be carried in the South, was anathema to the South and resulted in secession of states from the Union. Much of the North and even more established Republicans were skeptical, as well. Lincoln’s political life, even within his own party, was turbulent to say the least for most of his time in office. His 1864 reelection only came about as a result of some last minute victories by Generals Grant and Sherman. Obama will encounter no such strife during his term. The Congressional Republican Party has been totally inept and unprincipled since its replacement of professional leaders such as Newt Gingrich, Bob Dole, and Trent Lott with rank amateurs and the party’s recent Presidential candidates have espoused controversial foreign policies and domestic policies that rank somewhere between nonexistent and ridiculous. While Obama spent hundreds of millions of dollars on television advertising, it was completely unnecessary: All of the broadcast news outlets except for Fox, whose conservative owner Rupert Murdoch essentially endorsed Obama himself, have become essentially commercials or cheerleaders for Obama. The Democrats are poised to gain at least four or five and probably more seats in the Senate in 2010 and the Republican Presidential candidates in 2012 will be ridiculed during the primary season and ignored or written off during the general election campaign. The election of the Obama-like Michael Steele as Republican National Chairman is a closing of the barn door after the horses have left the stable. Only a wide open Presidential election in 2016 may restore some semblance of two-party democracy to America. However, if the 22nd Amendment is repealed to allow Obama a third term or a 74-year old Vice President Biden becomes a candidate, the Republican Party will remain in the wilderness for a generation, if it survives at all. It will be 2020 at least before the Senate is no longer filibusterproof.
When Jacob Riis did his groundbreaking study of urban America over a hundred years ago, he commented that virtually all Negro households had a “Massa Linkum” hanging on their walls. In that regard, Lincoln was largely replaced by Malcolm X or Martin Luther King years ago, but now the permanent icon will be Barack Obama. The disdain of the African-American community for the Republican party has become so deep that Lincoln’s efforts toward freedom are now being written off as acts of war or political expediency. However, Obama himself has expressed appreciation that the efforts of Abraham Lincoln in the nineteenth century and our own Edward Brooke in the twentieth century made him and his ascendancy possible. Let us hope that the world never forgets the lessons and achievements of both Abraham Lincoln and Barack Obama.