Let me start by saying I have no interest in provoking a historical debate.  I realize that it is fasionable in certain circles to dis Abraham Lincoln, either as a war-mongering aggressor (among creepy neo-Confederate wingnuts) or as a violent racist who doesn't deserve the adulation he recieves.  If you're among either circle, go write your own damn post and talk about it there.  Because here and now, I want to say that across the century and a half between us, I am captivated by Abraham Lincoln and, indeed, love him like he was family. 

Funny thing about Lincoln.  You start out reading a little Civil War history.  Then you buy a biography of him.  Then you buy another.  And another.  And another and another.  Then you buy a short collection of his writings, then you buy a large collection, then you're buying biographies about particular speeches or groups of speeches like the Cooper Union address or the Lincoln-Douglas debate.  Next thing you know, you're downloading the seven volume compilation of his writings with the foreword by Teddy Roosevelt (only on my Kindle, thank you very much.  Cost next to nothing for all seven volumes.)  And suddenly people who look at your bookshelves come to the conclusion that you're some sort of expert on the guy when you know that, compared to the real obsessives, you're a mere dabbler, an amatuer, a tyro. 

 There's always something new about him.  Historians and biographers cannot stay away from him, even though they know that if this much had been written about anyone else, publishers and dissertation committees alike would simply roll their eyes. 

And if you're a lawyer it can become even harder to stay away.  I began this little Lincoln thing of mine well before law school but once the Socratic brain snatchers remold your mush into a brain that, alas, will forever after "think like a lawyer," you at least get the side benefit of having a deeper connection to Lincoln and the way he thought and wrote.  The Emancipation Proclamation becomes far more interesting as you suddenly can retrace the thought processes that led this this brilliant orator and writer to draft this important document in such dry, legalistic, terms .  The Cooper Union speech suddenly jumps out at you as an astonishing piece of legal research for the time, given the resources availible to a lawyer in Sprinfield, Illinois in 1859. 

And once you've endured a legal eduction, you suddenly get a real insight into how a man with less than two years of formal education developed that kind of rhetorical power.  Lincoln's sentences are inaffable and unmistakable.  He would write these long sentences that would hover perilously upon the brink of collapse under the weight of ungrammatical prarie idiom before suddenly resolving into eloquence.

Let us re-adopt the Declaration of Independence, and with it, the practices, and policy, which harmonize with it. Let north and south -- let all Americans -- let all lovers of liberty everywhere -- join in the great and good work. If we do this, we shall not only have saved the Union; but we shall have so saved it, as to make, and to keep it, forever worthy of the saving. We shall have so saved it, that the succeeding millions of free happy people, the world over, shall rise up, and call us blessed, to the latest generations.
Peoria --October 16, 1854.

That is the real issue. That is the issue that will continue in this country when these poor tongues of Judge Douglas and myself shall be silent. It is the eternal struggle between these two principles -- right and wrong -- throughout the world. They are the two principles that have stood face to face from the beginning of time, and will ever continue to struggle. The one is the common right of humanity and the other the divine right of kings. It is the same principle in whatever shape it develops itself. It is the same spirit that says, 'You work and toil and earn bread, and I'll eat it.' No matter in what shape it comes, whether from the mouth of a king who seeks to bestride the people of his own nation and live by the fruit of their labor, or from one race of men as an apology for enslaving another race, it is the same tyrannical principle.
October 15, 1858, Debate at Alton.

And then there's the Second Inaugural.  Just a few paragraphs long.  It starts so dryly and, by the end, sweeps you along in an emotional riptide:

If we shall suppose that American Slavery is one of those offences which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South, this terrible war, as the woe due to those by whom the offence came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a Living God always ascribe to Him? Fondly do we hope---fervently do we pray---that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue, until all the wealth piled by the bond-man's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash, shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three  thousand years ago, so still it must be said ``the judgments of the Lord, are true and righteous altogether.''

Where did he learn to write and think like this?  It helped that he was undeniably a man of vast intellect.  With no more than a year of formal education, he taught himself law and even, as what I assume was merely an intellectual lark, Euclidian geometry during the two years  he was in Congress.  Still, where could a man with less than a year of formal education--"picked up by littles," as he said--learn to write this way, to think this way?  And this is where being a lawyer helps.  Besides those few months of formal education you see, Lincoln had two teachers of whom he was particularly fond: Shakespere and Blackstone.  You can see the influence of both in every sentence he wrote. 

When you start reading about Lincoln, you necessarily learn a great deal about the early days of the Republican Party.  You learn who founded and why, where it drew its strenght from.  You learn of Lincoln's early leeryness of it and yet how quckly he rose to become a dominant figure over vastly more senior and well regarded, and more distinguished, personages such as Seward and Chase.  Make no mistake.  Some things about Lincoln's party are still  distinguishable today.  It was always very frankly pro-big business and so was Lincoln, though with a regard for the rights of labor what would have branded him a dangerous radical twenty years later.  And yet, above all, that first generation of Republicans was first, foremost and above all, dedicated to the destruction of slavery.  Some wanted to do it slowly, others immediately.  Some wanted to have the government simply buy all the slaves and manumit them, while at the other end, the radical abolitionists gleefully contemplated the prospect of slaveowners' entire net worth vanishing in a puff of smoke due to uncompensated abolition.  Some, like Thaddeus Stevens, possessed startingly and gratifyingly modern views on race (though they were demonized for it until the 60s--the 1960s).  Others were basically racists who nonetheless belived that, although blacks were inferior, it did not follow that they should be enslaved. 

Lincoln is widely considered to have evolved from one end of this spectrum to the other over the course of the last two decades of his life.  Perhaps.  Reading his earlier speeches and his letters to Joshua Speed during the 1840s and 50s carefully, it is difficult not to discern a canny politician carefully avoiding and evading the disclosure of racial views well in advance of the voters of his state. 

I cannot stand the Republican Party as it has been for decades, but, regardless, never let myself forget what they used to be, that they were once a party of strong principles, of Lincoln's principles, while the Democrats were the party of racism. 

And that's the background for why it literally makes me want to weep when I see shit  this.  And this.  At long last, this is the Republican Party looks like in 2008 when the chips are down, the internal censors are offline and the likelihood of defeat looms. 

We're sorry, Abe.