Two hundred and three years ago today, one of the greatest presidents in American history was born in Hardin County, Kentucky. Abraham Lincoln, who had little formal education and spent his entire childhood in abject poverty, learned from an early age the importance of hard work and perseverance. Not unlike many of his contemporaries, however, his life was beset with tragedy. During his adolescence, for example, he witnessed the death of his mother and older sister. And shortly thereafter, during his mid-twenties, he suffered the death of his first romantic interest – Ann Rutledge – which was attributed to typhoid fever.
Yet despite – or perhaps even because of – the enormous hardships he faced as a young man, his rise from poverty and his determination to be successful is an inspiring (and quintessentially American) story. Lincoln, of course, is hardly a president who has escaped our collective imagination. The New Yorker estimates that there have been at least 15,000 books written about him since his death in 1865. An intensely private man – he never kept a formal diary – and historians for generations have struggled to understand his enigmatic life.
As Pulitzer-prize winning historian Eric Foner explains in his award winning book, The Fiery Trial, one of Lincoln’s greatest qualities as a statesman was his ability to change. Indeed, following Lincoln’s post-assassination apotheosis, the ensuing legend that the late president was a congenital champion of black rights captured the hearts and minds of a bereaved nation. History, on the other hand, teaches us that as an elected official Lincoln supported both colonization and gradual emancipation. In fact, he did not support total and uncompensated emancipation until nearly halfway through his first presidential term.
The purpose of highlighting such unsavory facts is not to disparage his legacy, but to cast light on his greatness. Though Lincoln once asserted “if slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong,” it was exceedingly difficult for him (or perhaps any public figure living during the nineteenth century, for that matter) to imagine the United States as a multiracial society. Moreover, during the antebellum period, racism was in many ways as pervasive in Illinois as it was in Mississippi. To be sure, most Northerners and Southerners at the time opposed black enfranchisement and the amalgamation of the races.