Word: lincoln
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...played a central role in the formation of the Republican Party. Edward Bates was a widely respected elder statesman from Missouri, a former Congressman whose opinions on national matters were still widely sought. All three men, knowing they were better educated, more experienced and more qualified than Lincoln, were stunned when he received the Republican nomination and went on to win the election...
...fact, it was a subtlety of perception about what he needed, and a deep emotional strength, that lay behind Lincoln's move. As his secretary, John Nicolay, later wrote, Lincoln's "first decision was one of great courage and self-reliance." A less confident man might have surrounded himself with personal supporters who would never question his authority. Later Lincoln was asked why had chosen his chief rivals for his official family, knowing each of them was still smarting from his loss. Lincoln's answer was simple and shrewd: "We needed the strongest men of the party in the Cabinet...
Unusual among antislavery orators in the 1850s, Lincoln sought to comprehend the Southerners' position through empathy rather than castigate slave owners as corrupt and un-Christian men. He argued, "They are just what we would be in their situation. If slavery did not now exist amongst them, they would not introduce it. If it did now exist amongst us, we should not instantly give it up." It was useless, he explained in another address, to employ "thundering tones of anathema and denunciation," for denunciation would be met by denunciation, "anathema with anathema...
...second Inaugural when he suggested that the sin of slavery was shared by North and South. "Both read the same Bible, and pray to the same God; and each invokes His aid against the other ... let us judge not that we be not judged." In the largest sense, Lincoln's empathy allowed him to absorb the sorrows and hopes of his countrymen, to sense their shifting moods so he could shape and mold their opinion with the right words and the right deeds at the right time...
Though a strain of melancholy was part of his nature, Lincoln possessed a remarkable sense of humor and a gift for storytelling that allowed him, time and again, to defuse tensions and relax his colleagues at difficult moments. Many of his stories, taken from his seemingly limitless stock, were directly applicable to a point being argued. Many were self-deprecatory, all were hilarious. When he began one of them, his "eyes would sparkle with fun," one old-timer remembered, "and when he reached the point in his narrative which invariably evoked the laughter of the crowd, nobody's enjoyment...