Abraham Lincoln Read Online Free Page B

Klux Klan, never all those racial troubles to haunt later generations, if only Father Abraham had not died that terrible day in 1865.
    And so Lincoln comes to us in the mists of mythology. Still, I have no quarrel with this Lincoln, so long as we make a careful distinction between myth and history. Myth, after all, is not anuntrue story to be avoided like some dread disease. On the contrary, myth carries a special truth of its own—a truth, however, that is different from historical truth, from what actually happened. In the case of Lincoln, the myth is what Americans wish the man had been, not necessarily the way he was in real life. That is why Sandburg’s Lincoln has such irresistible appeal to us. He is a “baffling and completely inexplicable” hero who embodies the mystical genius of our nation. He possesses what Americans have always considered their most noble traits—honesty, unpretentiousness, tolerance, hard work, a capacity to forgive, a compassion for the underdog, a clear-sighted vision of right and wrong, a dedication to God and country, and an abiding concern for all. As I have said elsewhere, no real-life person has ever risen to such mythic proportions, to epitomize all that we have longed to be since 1776. No real-life person can ever rise to such proportions. So we have invented a Lincoln who fulfills our deepest needs as a people—a Father Abraham who in the stormy present still provides an example and shows us the way. The Lincoln of mythology carries the torch of the American dream, a dream of noble idealism, of self-sacrifice and common humanity, of liberty and equality for all.
    Our folly as a nation, though, is that we too often confuse myth with history, mistake our mythologized heroes for their real-life counterparts, regard the deified frontiersman as the actual frontiersman. As a consequence, we too often try to emulate our mythical forebears, to be as glorious, as powerful, as incapable of error, as incessantly right, as we have made them. As journalist Ronnie Dugger has reminded us, those who live by the lessons of mythology rather than the lessons of history—as Lyndon Johnson did in the Vietnam era—are apt to trap themselves in catastrophe.
    This is not to say that myths have no function in our cultural life. On the contrary, if we Americans can accept our myths as inspiring tales rather than as authentic history, then surely myths can serve us as they have traditional myth-bound societies. Like fiction and poetry, they can give us insight into ourselves, help usunderstand the spiritual needs of our country, as we cope with the complex realities of our own time. In that event, the Lincoln of mythology—the Plain and Humble Man of the People who emerged from the toiling millions to guide us through our greatest national ordeal—can have profound spiritual meaning for us.

2: A RCH V ILLAIN
    From the flames of civil war rose a countermyth of Lincoln as villain—corrupt, depraved, and diabolical. This “anti-Lincoln tradition,” as historian Don E. Fehrenbacher has termed it, has never commanded a large following in the United States, but it has persisted. In 1932, at a time when most Americans—even members of the Ku Klux Klan—were trying to “get right with Lincoln,” a prominent old Virginian was still fighting a personal war against him, condemning the martyr President as a “bad man” who brought on “an unnecessary war and conducted it with great inhumanity.”
    The countermyth of a wicked Lincoln had roots back in the Civil War, when the beleaguered President caught abuse from all sides. Northern Democrats castigated him as an abolitionist dictator, abolitionists as a dim-witted product of a slave state, and all manner of Republicans as an incompetent charlatan. In truth, Lincoln may have been one of the two or three most unpopular living Presidents in American history. Assassination, though, chastened his