By Jerry Klinger
Though elected by a very distinct, minority of the American people, Abraham Lincoln was inaugurated as the 16th President of the United States, March 4, 1861. The population of the country was just north of 31 million. The country consisted of 33 individual states forged into a common, increasingly tenuous union since the ratification of the U.S. Constitution in 1789.
Deep fissures threatened to irreparably tear the Union apart. Economics, slavery, politics, societal and moral concerns faced Lincoln as he took office. The horror of fratricidal civil war was threatened. It was not what the country wanted. It was not what he wanted.
Unable to navigate a compromise, the cannon shells began bursting over Union controlled Ft. Sumter in Charleston, South Carolina’s harbor. Lincoln called for a National Army to crush the rebellion. Preserve the Union by force and blood became his decision.
Seven southern states had seceded by the time Sumter was shelled. Lincoln’s call for a violent solution to end the secession pushed four more states to leave the Union. They joined together as the newly constituted southern Confederacy.
Four years of carnage, destruction, hate ensued; over 500,000 Americans were slaughtered on both sides of the conflict. The soil across America, fertilized with the blood of so many, flowered an America, an America different from what anyone could have imagined in 1861.
Freedom had not been born fully developed in 1789. After 1865, a new course was set. The shortfalls of the Constitution were amended. A process to establish a newer and better union of States for all the people through the amended Constitution had been constituted.
The New Union would not be smooth, it would not be guaranteed. Left turns still emerged and in time were corrected or put on the road to correction. The imperfect process worked.
Before Lincoln, except for a tiny minority of noisy radical abolitionists, ending Slavery, in any form, did not concern the overwhelming majority of the country. Ending slavery was not a reason that Americans wished to sacrifice their brothers, husbands, and sons for.
After Lincoln, it was.
Lincoln’s pragmatic views of slavery evolved over the four years of war. He steered the ship of Union, not always perfectly, sometimes with mistakes, evolving towards a better freer future for all Americans. He paid for his vision with his life, an assassin’s bullet to his head his reward.
Every year, Jews read and reread the Torah to remember, to relearn, to learn anew.
For decades the activist, originally well-intentioned, American educational system has denigrated, minimized history. History was then not for their today’s social vision. The ancient Greek Delphic maxim written above the Temple’s entrance — “Man, know they-self,” was long forgotten. The associated message, know from where you came, was pushed to dusty library back shelves.
Rabbi Abraham Cooper, of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, framed understanding of history through an old Jewish saying: “In remembrance lies the roots of redemption; in forgetfulness, the roots of destruction.”
Today, 155 years on, memory have been noisily cancelled by the half educated “Woke” mobs of new haters eagerly rushing to cancel, destroy, and remove Abraham Lincoln. Their education little more than feel-good five-minute politically motivated soundbites from half understood audio/visual learning. American mass media, educators from grade schools to universities, textbook publishers, political leaders, many intimidated and fearful, refuse to push back the nihilists. For business, including the education business, to go along, get along.
The year 2020-2021 was the “Year of Outrage and Flame,” sparked by the George Floyd death.
In January 2021, the San Francisco school board voted to remove Abraham Lincoln’s name from a high school. Lincoln was labeled a racist. He was a bad example for children.
Across the national liberal spectrum, Lincoln, some said, did not care if Black Lives Mattered. Others pointed to his hanging of Sioux native Americans during Minnesota’s 1862’s Sioux uprising. Still others condemned Lincoln arbitrarily transferring Native American hunting grounds to Railroad companies building the transcontinental rail system during the Civil War and stomping on Native American rights without supposed reason.
Demeaning Lincoln for political reasons was not new. In 2005 Sen. Barack Obama said, “I cannot swallow the whole view of Lincoln as the Great Emancipator.”
Four years later, in 2009, cynically, Obama chose to be sworn in as the first Black American president using Lincoln’s personal bible.
The Year of Outrage and Flame saw statues to Lincoln, from California to Spokane, Boise, Idaho, Sioux City, to New York to Vermont, to Boston, vandalized, commonly smeared with blood-red paint and or human feces. Lincoln’s statue was pulled down in Portland. Lincoln’s statue was burned in Chicago. In Washington, D.C., the 1922 sculpture of Lincoln as the Great Emancipator with a kneeling former slave at his knee raised Woke insensitivity fury. The sculpture had been paid for by the wages of freed slaves.
CNN was accused of click-baiting Lincoln by inferring Lincoln would not care about “Black Lives Matter.”
The list goes on and on. Grade school students learn more about sojourner truth than Abraham Lincoln. But then in Israel less 50% of Israel’s young know who Theodor Herzl was or why he was significant.
The context of the time, what was possible and when, is lost on the Woke.
Lincoln, for all his warts and imperfections, did what he could in the world he lived in. He led a course correction for a better America that no one else did or probably could have.
Lincoln was a man of his time. He pragmatically evolved with a new vision for tomorrow.
JASHP has chosen to honor President Lincoln with a paver leading to the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum in Springfield, Ill.
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Jerry Klinger is the President of the Jewish American Society for Historic Preservation (www.JASHP.org)
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Postscript:
The worst government-sponsored antisemitic incident in American history was instigated by General, later President, Ulysses S. Grant. Lincoln learned about it three days after he had signed the Emancipation Proclamation Jan. 1, 1863, freeing the slaves in the rebellious South.
Without hesitation, he ordered Grant’s order countermanded.