ABRAHAM LINCOLN Part One "the American Soul" by JR McCarthy

Abraham Lincoln is the trademark of American history. His image is the image we see when we think about what our nation is supposed to be, and his words are the words we hear when we remember what our nation is supposed to mean. Inasmuch as his name and his image on the cover of a book or a periodical makes it eminently salable, his name and image are always with us. Predictably, we have become just as cavalier about his name and reputation as we are with any of our dead celebrities. He has been gone for one hundred and forty four years, and yet any salacious rumor about him, any juicy peccadillo uncovered, or merely fabricated, is circulated before it has been properly analyzed. I could enumerate some of the more provocative, and some of the more ludicrous examples, but it troubles me too much to do so I fret that scandal masquerading as relevance, and calumny that calls itself revisionism, can besmirch even his indelible image, or compromise even his singular example. Lincoln is just too important to me.

Ten score years ago, come February 12th, Abraham Lincoln was
born. Two score years ago, my first grade teacher read to us a
little each day from a book of his life. By the time my second grade
teacher was taking us to the school library to borrow books for
ourselves, Lincoln had become one of my heroes. Lincoln has
long endured as a hero, just as the union that nearly came
asunder on his watch ? that would have come asunder but for his
watch ? has long endured.

There can be few things more unremarkable than an American
school boy''s adulation, or an American grown-up''s continued
ardor, for the life and times of Abraham Lincoln.

He is called "The Great Emancipator" by those who would carve
history in marble, and he is called "Honest Abe" by those who
would soak history in sepia. Plumbing the depths of his mystery is
beyond the blunt tools of both mythology and sentimentality. He
was certainly and obviously flawed, and before his assassination
he was as bitterly criticized and reviled as any politician in
American. Nevertheless, it is possible that no one will ever be
able fully to explain, in the kind of felicitous language for which
Lincoln himself had such a gift, the totality of who he was, and
who he is.

Martin Luther King came close. He called Lincoln "a great
American in whose symbolic shadow we stand." I don''t know if I
can come any closer to what Lincoln means to us all, but I can get
much deeper into what he means to me.

I attended first and second grade ? and every grade through to
college ? in New York City Catholic schools. I am a product of that
education in every sense of the term, and it is thus perhaps
needless to point out that Lincoln was not my first hero, and is not
my greatest hero. Suffice to say that the system in which I was
educated corroborated for me what my parents had already taught
me: for as long as I can remember, I believe that I have an
immortal soul. I believe that my immortal soul was redeemed by a
sacred mystery, made manifest by the murder of a prophet on
Good Friday. I also believe that the redemption of my immortal
soul, made possible by that Good Friday, is contingent upon the
ongoing development of my character in the direction of
compassion.

If America has a soul, that soul was transformed by the murder of
another prophet on another Good Friday. I would betray one
prophet and misrepresent the other if I was to insinuate that both
murders had the same meaning. The martyrdom of Abraham
Lincoln did not redeem the American Soul: it relegated the
American Soul back to the purgatory from which we thought we
were beginning to emerge as the Civil War ended.

Of all the "what ifs?" in American history, none is more salient, or
more tragic, than "What if Lincoln had not been murdered?"
Would the Era of Reconstruction, had it been left to the
stewardship of Abraham Lincoln, spared us the scourge of Jim
Crow, or the hypocrisy of "separate, but equal". Would a second
Lincoln Administration have laid the groundwork to lead the
American Soul in the direction of compassion?

Lincoln''s murder set the American Soul upon another awful path,
and we may call that path the rocky road to national and cultural
redemption. That path is, among many other things, the trajectory
from the sixteenth president to the forty-fourth. It is surely cause
for celebration that the incumbent president is descended from
the race that bore bitterest witness to the need for this journey,
but it is both naïve and dangerous to assume that his election
brings the journey to completion.

In order to understand both the sorrow and the necessity of the
last seven score and four years of American History, it is useful to
imagine what American History might have been like if Lincoln
had lived a little longer. It is even more useful to savor the purest
possible distillation of the vision of Abraham Lincoln. Both of
these things can be accomplished by a careful and thoughtful
reading of the last paragraph of Lincoln''s Second Inaugural
Address, which I just happen to have here with me:

With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the
right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the
work we are in, to bind up the nation''s wounds, to care for him
who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan,
to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace
among ourselves and with all nations.

Abraham Lincoln emerged from the bloodiest period of our
history, and he said these words to us forty days before he was
murdered. He spoke of his commitment to, and his longing for an
America that was conceived in liberty, but reborn in compassion.

Only a writer who was in Lincoln''s league should attempt to
express what that means to our nation and our planet. I am only
competent to express what it means to me, and what it meant to
the child I was when I first heard those words.

Abraham Lincoln reminds us, as we stumble down the rocky road,
that we are not just on the quest for a just and lasting peace: we
are also on our way to resembling, in every conceivable way, what
he described (as only he could) as "the better angels of our
nature." America is destined to become a just and compassionate
nation for the simple reason that every American ? and every
human being who has ever lived, and will ever live ? has a duty to
become a just and compassionate person. It is a duty that can be
stalled, and it is a duty that can be betrayed, but it is not a duty
that can be obliterated.

On the way to the America that we dream about, we have the
voice of Abraham Lincoln to sustain us and to spur us on. It is a
steady voice that emanated from a troubled soul, schooled and
steeled by a life story that Horatio Alger would not have dared to
fashion. It is the steady voice of our most eminent self-made man,
our most unflinching commander-in-chief, and our most eloquent
and transcendent statesman. It is a voice that first came to me
when I was a little boy. It is a voice that is with me still.

Shortly after Abraham Lincoln took his last breath, Edwin Stanton
is said to have intoned, "Now he belongs to the ages."

He always belonged to the ages.
JR McCarthy

JR McCarthy is a published author and also a staff writer for ArtistsILove.com