He failed in business in ’31.He was defeated for the legislature in ’32.He again failed in business in ’33.He was elected to the legislature in ’34.His sweetheart died in ’35.He had a nervous breakdown in ’36.He was defeated for speaker in ’38.He was defeated for elector in ’40.He was defeated for congress in ’43.He was elected to congress In ’46.He was defeated for congress in ’48.He was defeated for the senate in ’55.He was defeated for vice-president in ’56.He was defeated for the senate in ’58.He was elected president in ’60.His name was Abraham Lincoln.He never admitted defeat.

Today we remember the birth and life of U.S. President Abraham Lincoln. With barely any formal education, born in Kentucky to a poor family, he studied on his own to become a frontier lawyer. In time, his deft leadership held the nation together through its worst crisis. All these years later, historians and laypeople alike regard him not only as the foremost president, but as well arguably the greatest American.

By his own slow, laborious hand, he left us writings, speeches, letters, and more that have offered wisdom and guidance worldwide. In fact, if you quantify them simply in terms of words, Lincoln’s writings and speeches number 1,078,365. This compares to 926,877 words in the Bible, and 1,025,000 in the works of Shakespeare. But it’s the inspiring quality of what he said that endures. As a man and as a leader, he survives the closest scrutiny far more honorably than any historical figure. If public and private leaders today emulated his example only to some degree, they would do much for our country and our communities, with a renewed spirit of cooperation among their colleagues.

Lincoln had abhorred slavery from his youngest days. “If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong,” he would say. He first publicly called for the abolition of slavery as a state legislator in the 1830s (which, interestingly, is when he also advocated extending to all women the right to vote). When elected to the presidency in 1860, his well-known opposition to slavery prompted Southern states to prepare to secede from the United States.

First, though, a proposal arose in Congress after he was elected president but just before he was sworn in, known as the Crittenden Compromise, which kept the South from seceding as they were threatening to do until this “deal” was voted on. The Crittenden Compromise, if approved, would have kept the Union together and avoided civil war. But it also would have legalized slavery permanently in the South and some future territories. For that reason alone, President-elect Lincoln actively led the fight to oppose it, despite the risk of breaking up the Union.

It was a dramatic choice between slavery and the Civil War, which came to pass, and Lincoln was steadfast for abolition at all costs. This episode alone rebuts the Lincoln doubters who today dismiss his commitment to abolition. And by the fall of 1861, the first year of the war, Lincoln had finally linked the war for saving the Union with the abolition of slavery, followed in 1863 with his pioneering Emancipation Proclamation.

Yet the Lincoln doubters ply their revisionism in many classrooms, even from some pulpits. They will point to some of his statements during the war where he seems to give priority to preserving the Union over everything else, and where he reversed one of his general’s orders to free all slaves in Missouri. These were, however, necessarily measured steps by Lincoln to calm numerous storms of division in the North, and in hindsight proved instrumental along his righteous path of ridding America of what he called slavery’s “despotism of class rule and human servitude.”

And it is true that Lincoln contemplated the colonization abroad of the freed slaves. Clearly, however, his deeply humanistic spirit would never have forced this upon freed slaves who would desire to stay.

Lincoln’s tenacity to win victory for the Union and the slaves’ freedom was met with horribly enormous battle casualties, brutal and relentless criticism of his character (to which he would not respond — a cogent lesson for today’s politicians) and constant political opposition, even in his own cabinet. When he ran for re-election in 1864, while the war raged seemingly endlessly, one of his own leading generals was the Democratic candidate against him, running albeit unsuccessfully on a popular peace platform of compromise at all costs with the South.

Nor was Lincoln spared devastating personal misery, including an intensely stressful marriage and the death of his precocious, 11-year-old son. He coped with his prolonged melancholy by telling jokes and frontier yarns, often to the disgust of his more polished cabinet members, most of whom had earlier been his political rivals, a factor he ignored when he appointed them.

Source: RiverheadLOCAL