Why was Lincoln "great?"

[Liz Rosenthal]

(06-24-2013 06:10 PM)Eva Elisabeth Wrote:  When I reflected my instant answers to your question I began to wonder what greatness is, where it begins. It’s a word like “friendship”, I would need a closer definition. So many people do great things in their scope, aren’t they all great? If Lincoln had lost the 1860 election we probably wouldn’t have discussed his greatness because we wouldn’t have come to know about it.

Nevertheless, these are three of the points that came to my mind first:

- I think that Lincoln was always willing to grow and to reconsider former believes, although sometimes slowly, and that his intentions at all were pro humanity. (I guess someone will object now that his good intentions didn’t make 618,000 victims feel better.)
He treated people kindly and respectfully and, exept for his father he didn’t hold grudges even where most people would have done.

-Although his presidency was one of the hardest one could imagine and the pictures of him witness what he went through he didn’t give up or break down.

- Lincoln was often said to be shrewd when it came to dealing with people in difficult situations, and I would second this. Some incidents fascinated me, they developed like a drama and while reading I wondered how he would ever manage to get out of that dilemma. And then he did. He acted for himself as a deus ex machina and I just thought “Wow. How clever”. Two examples are the way he manipulated Seward in the Trent Affair (when he let him write the “pro-release” argumentation) and the way he dealt with the Republican caucus against Seward in 1862.

I like Eva's points, especially the second one about Lincoln's ability to persevere. He had a certain single-mindedness which was not always evident - or perhaps not evident much at all - to his contemporaries. Things were too turbulent then for most people to get a clear view of what was going on, let alone what Lincoln was doing.

When one reviews the pressures Lincoln faced and what he actually did in the face of that pressure, what is remarkable is how steadily he stuck to his chosen course. A lot of lesser individuals would probably have taken an easier road - another compromise with the South, a negotiated peace. A lesser individual might have followed the course favored by Seward in encouraging belligerence with Europe so as to either unify North and South or just distract everyone from the issues that actually needed to be addressed. A lesser individual might not have cared as much about the fate of black slaves and not made much effort to get the 13th Amendment passed.

It helped that Lincoln was extremely confident in his abilities. If he hadn't been, he probably would not have had the wherewithal to realize his goals. Seward would truly have been the "premier" or Congress would have had power over the make-up of Lincoln's cabinet or it would have stepped all over him when it came to the timing and manner of ending slavery and how Reconstruction was to develop or Greeley would have wittingly or unwittingly made a fool of him.

Lincoln had the right combination of street smarts, book smarts and smart-smarts, not to mention a sense of who he was, what he could do and what he had to do.

Then you look at Lincoln's writings, and so much of it is great literature. It's no accident that his art - his words - has been equated with that of Shakespeare and Mozart.