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Lincoln's Birthday
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By Dr. Michael Burlingame, February 12, 2010 in Uncategorized

Today is the 201st birthday of America's 16th president. 

Abraham Lincoln

Lincoln speaks to us not only as a champion of freedom, democracy, and national unity, but also a source of inspiration.  Few will achieve his world historical importance, but many can profit from his personal example, encouraged by the knowledge that despite a childhood of emotional malnutrition and grinding poverty, despite a lack of formal education, despite a series of career failures, despite a miserable marriage, despite a tendency to depression, despite a painful midlife crisis, despite the early death of his mother and his siblings as well as of his sweetheart and two of his four children, he became a model of psychological maturity, moral clarity, and unimpeachable integrity.  His presence and his leadership inspired his contemporaries; his life story can do the same for generations to come. -- from Abraham Lincoln: A Life

Tags: Abraham Lincoln

1 Comment
Peter Haworth on Oct 1, 2010 at 4:23 pm

Dear Dr. Burlingame,

I respect your work, but I urge students of history to ask the hard questions about Lincoln. Such questions include the following: (1) Why did Lincoln advocate secession as legitimate while arguing against the Polk Administration in the 1840's but, then, take the opposite position as president in the 1860's? (2) Why did Lincoln's and the Republican's anti-slavery rhetoric and speeches become more severe and frequent in the 1850's after the decline of the multi-sectional Whig Party and when uniting the Northern States into a mono-sectional party became highly probable possibility? (3) Why did Lincoln's strategy against Douglas in their famed debates match the strategy of other Northern Republicans- i.e., exploiting the Northern Democrats' divided loyalties to both their anti-slavery constituency in the North and their need to maintain a political coalition with the Southern Democrats for the sake of remaining viable within the federation-wide presidential elections? (4) Why did Lincoln argue in his second inaugural address that it was God's will for the war to continue for some divine purpose (e.g., a punishment for slavery) when the war's continuation was largely due to Lincoln's own personal determination not to allow the South to secede? Was this merely clever rhetoric employed to justify his own willfulness, or does it betray a gnostic (in the Voegelin sense) attribution of God's purposes to secular history? There are many more critical questions about Lincoln that can be asked, and I encourage serious minded people to be wary of those propagating a "Cult of Lincoln."

Best Regards, Peter Haworth

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about the author

Michael Burlingame
Michael Burlingame

Born in Washington, D.C., Burlingame attended Phillips Academy, Andover. As a freshman at Princeton University, he enrolled in the Civil War course taught by the eminent Lincolnian David Herbert Donald, who took him under his wing as a research assistant. When Donald moved to Johns Hopkins University, Burlingame followed him upon his graduation from Princeton. Burlingame received his Ph.D. in 1968 from Johns Hopkins University and joined the history department at Connecticut College in New London, where he taught until retiring in 2001 as the Sadowski Professor of History Emeritus. He joined the faculty at the University of Illinois at Springfield in 2009. Burlingame is the author of "The Inner World of Abraham Lincoln" (University of Illinois Press, 1994) and has edited volumes of Lincoln primary source materials. Burlingame has received the Abraham Lincoln Association Book Prize (1996), Lincoln Diploma of Honor from Lincoln Memorial University (1998) and an Honorable Mention for the Lincoln Prize (2001). He was inducted into the Lincoln Academy of Illinois in 2009.