On November 19, 1863, President Abraham Lincoln followed a two-hour address by a Massachusetts Senator with some brief remarks at the dedication of the Gettysburg Military Cemetery. Those remarks became the most famous address by any American President. The music is "Ashokan Farewell", from Ken Burns' 1989 documentary "The Civil War"
Lincoln was an interesting character. He had so many failures but he continued to push forward. He was not liked by his contemporaries but he was probably the most Presidential President the United States ever had. It was a tragic event in US history when he was assassinated. I wonder how the re-assimilation of the South would have gone if he had not died.
ReplyDeleteThe interesting thing about Lincoln is that the more you learn about the man and read a couple of his fairly new biographers like Doris Kearns Goodwin ("Team of Rivals") or Stephen Oates ("With Malice Toward None..."), the more you realize how many failures indeed the man faced, how despised he was by many, as you said, and how many miscaluations he made, etc. But all that in the end only makes him more human, and serves to show how great he was.
ReplyDeleteI never realized how little I really knew about the Reconstruction Era ( A sidebar in most Civil War books and articles) until I saw an "American Experience" documentary. I think its safe to say Lincoln would have done a more nuanced job than Andrew Johnson, who clearly wasn't up to the job, in dealing with the unrepentant Southern Aristocracy. I don't think he would have wiped race-politics off the map by a long shot, but we would perhaps have avoided the complete disenfranchisement of blacks and the needed fervor of the 1950s-60s Civil Rights Era.
Here's a link to an overview of the PBS Reconstruction Program.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/reconstruction/carpetbagger/index.html