Through my travels in Chicago and Illinios I have come to greatly admire the 16th President Abraham Lincoln.
Lincoln grew up in a poor family on the ‘frontier’ before settling in Springfield IL and leading America in its darkest hour during the Civil War, when more men were killed than all America’s major wars combined, estimated at 750,000.
For writers, take note, Lincoln’s greatest speech at Gettysburg clocked in at two minutes and 270 words. It redefined the course of the Civil War, and the soul of America, making it a struggle for freedom and equality not solely the Union.
Edward Everett, spoke for two hours before Lincoln and in a letter to the President the following day said: “I should be glad if I could flatter myself that I came as near to the central idea of the occasion, in two hours, as you did in two minutes.”
Lincoln bore the weight of the four long years of Civil War physically and emotionally. But he had the stomach for the fight despite the unimaginable slaughter in the era of hand-to-hand combat, the Union Army eventually overwhelming the Confederates by sheer weight of numbers.
Thousands upon thousands of families and friends were divided, bereaved and embittered including that of Lincoln’s wife Mary who suffered terribly with mental illness.
Lincoln shows the calibre of people required in politics and should be remembered today not so much in the gigantic stone of his Washington memorial, but in what he did in everyday life – his humour, shrewdness and compassion. As Lincoln grew so did America finally abandoning slavery.
Like Kennedy in a moment of unbearable horror Lincoln paid the ultimate price, cut down in his prime, at the hands of an assassin’s gun fired by Confederate sympathiser John Wilkes Booth at Ford’s Theatre Washington. It was Good Friday April 14 1865, just days after Confederate General Robert E Lee had surrendered.
His violent death should never be in vain.
Watch American Experience documentary: https://lnkd.in/eq3FnV_Y
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