CONVERSATION Abraham Lincoln: The Great Emancipator

Conversation
Abraham Lincoln: The Great Emancipator

Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865) was born in rural Kentucky and raised in rural Indiana before settling in Illinois, where he held various jobs before becoming a member of the state legislature. In 1860, he was elected as the sixteenth president of the United States of America. He was re-elected in 1864 in the midst of the Civil War, which began in 1861. Every child knows the Abraham Lincoln story: “honest Abe” who lived in a log cabin and learned to write on the back of a shovel because his family was too poor to have paper; the hardworking rail-splitter who embodied the American Dream by becoming a self-taught lawyer, successful politician, and president; the Great Emancipator who freed the slaves; the strong, laconic, wise leader who led the Union to victory in the Civil War; and finally, the great martyr for liberty, assassinated while attending the theater with his wife on April 14, 1865. While Lincoln’s place among the greatest of American heroes is surely secure, we might ask how much of the story is true to life and how much is mythic. How much of his story is biography and how much hagiography? Hagiography is a term that originally referred to biographies of saints, but has come to mean any bibliography that turns the subject into a saint while ignoring any flaws. To what degree is hagiography appropriate for such a grand figure?

As you read these texts by and about him, think carefully about Abraham Lincoln as a man, as a president, as a writer, and as a legacy. How much does the Lincoln you thought you knew resemble the Lincoln you know when you finish these readings?

Sources

Abraham Lincoln, The Emancipation Proclamation (1863)

The Gettysburg Address (1863)

Letter to Albert G. Hodges (1864)

Second Inaugural Address (1865)

Henry W. Herrick, Reading the Emancipation Proclamation in the Slaves’ Cabin (1864)

Thomas Ball, Freedman’s Memorial to Abraham Lincoln (1876)

Frederick Douglass, from Reminiscences of Abraham Lincoln by Distinguished Men of His Time (1886)

Mario M. Cuomo, from Abraham Lincoln and Our “Unfinished Work” (1986)

James McPherson, from Who Freed the Slaves? (1996)

Ira Berlin, from Who Freed the Slaves? Emancipation and Its Meaning (1997)

Peter Norvig, The Gettysburg PowerPoint Presentation (2003)