Word: lincolnisms
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...days, historians--at least some of them--were patriotic and moralistic. No longer. We live in what Andrew Ferguson, in his brilliant new book, Land of Lincoln: Adventures in Abe's America, calls "a wised-up era." Now, Ferguson explains, "skepticism about the country, its heroes and its history" is "a mark of worldliness and sophistication." Ferguson is himself a worldly and sophisticated observer of contemporary America. (Full disclosure: he also happens to be a colleague of mine at the Weekly Standard.) But his guided tour of the often amusing, sometimes bizarre ways we remember Lincoln today leads us gently...
...Lincoln expected that America would become a nation doubtful about its heroes and its history. In his astonishing address to the Young Men's Lyceum of Springfield, Ill., on Jan. 27, 1838, on "the perpetuation of our political institutions," the 28-year-old Lincoln foresaw the inevitable rise in a modern democracy like ours of skepticism and worldliness. Indeed, he worried about the fate of free institutions in a maturing nation no longer shaped by a youthful, instinctive and (mostly) healthy patriotism...
Such a patriotism is natural in the early years after a revolutionary struggle for independence. To the generation that experienced the Revolution and the children of that generation, Lincoln explained, the events of the Revolution remained "living history," and those Americans retained an emotional attachment to the political institutions that had been created. But the living memories of the Revolution and the founding could no longer be counted on. Those memories "were a fortress of strength; but what invading foemen could never do, the silent artillery of time has done; the leveling of its walls." So, Lincoln concluded, the once...
...Lincoln implored his fellow citizens in 1838 to replace those old pillars with new ones constructed by "reason, cold, calculating, unimpassioned reason." He knew that such a recommendation--such a hope--was problematic. In politics, cold, calculating reason has its limits. In the event, it was Lincoln's foreboding of trouble, not his hope for renewal, that turned out to be correct. The nation held together for only one more generation. Twenty-three years after Lincoln's speech, the South seceded, and civil war came...
...Lincoln managed, of course, in a supreme act of leadership, to win that war, preserve the union and end slavery. He was also able to interpret that war as producing a "new birth of freedom," explaining its extraordinary sacrifices in a way that provided a renewed basis for attachment to a nation conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Perhaps the compromises made by the founding generation with the institution of slavery would have proved fatal in any case. Still, the fact is that the U.S. was unable to perpetuate its political institutions...