Introduction A life-sized bronze statue of Abraham Lincoln stands in front of the entrance to the New York Historical Society With the stovepipe hat the statue is nearly 7 feet 2 meters tall Hope Lourie Killcoyne 6
For most Americans conjuring a mental image of Abraham Lincoln is not that hard to do The figure is tall Lanky There’s the hat The beard The wry smile and the glint in the eye Trying to visualize other presidents though is another story Aside from recent leaders and some near-mythic early ones Washington Jefferson very few strike the visual chord that Lincoln does Admit it try to picture Benjamin Harrison and the slate is blank But Lincoln was not just a memorable face Despite the fact that all told Abe Lincoln the 16th president of the United States of America spent less than a year in school he was a brilliant orator issuing profound and precise sentiments that could not but com mand the attention of his listeners be they sympathetic to his politics or not Consider this prescient passage from one of his most famous speeches delivered in 1858 two years before he was elected president and nearly three years before the start of the Civil War A house divided against itself cannot stand I believe this government cannot endure permanently half slave and half free I do not expect the Union to be dissolved I do not expect the house to fall but I do expect 7
Abraham Lincoln it will cease to be divided It will become all one thing or all the other Or this line delivered by then-President Lincoln to an Indiana regiment in March 1865 four years into the war Whenever I hear anyone arguing for slav ery I feel a strong impulse to see it tried on him personally Perhaps it was the axe-wielding prow ess Lincoln mastered in his early years that informed his way with words allowing him to chop to the core of a complex issue but he was a master at creating tight pithy utter ances Perhaps the most memorable and extraordinary example of Lincoln’s singu lar ability to find the essence of an occasion or thought or emotion was his 268-word Gettysburg Address in 1863 As president Lincoln was asked to speak to those gathered at the dedication ceremony of the National Cemetery on the site of one of the Civil War’s deadliest battles nearly 8,000 soldiers died in the three-day struggle His presence at the site was something of a postscript to the main speaker Edward Everett an erudite and 8
Introduction esteemed orator of the day Lincoln’s speech began with the now indelible sentence Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation conceived in liberty and ded icated to the proposition that all men are created equal Lincoln’s speech took a mere three min utes Everett’s lasted two hours It is a fairly safe bet that most Americans do not even remember that Everett spoke at Gettysburg on that day but say those words from Lincoln’s address and they will know if not whence it came then at least who said it Lincoln’s character is also well known Honest Hardworking Humble Intelligent Thoughtfully decisive He was not however always strictly serious and his sense of humor is sometimes overlooked Witness this line uttered and then recounted by Lincoln in a dream of his in response to an observer com menting that he was a common-looking man Common-looking people are the best in the world that is the reason the Lord makes so many of them 9
