Happy 200th Birthday, Abraham Lincoln

(Today is Lincoln’s 203^rd birthday, the following is what I posted at Sermo on his 200^th birthday on 2/12/2009.)

It was perfectly fitting that Carl Sandburg, then 81-year-old poet-biographer, who knew you well, spoke in the joint session of the Congress on your 150^th birthday in 1959, and the Battle Hymn of the Republic was played by the US Army Band; your favorite song and lyric.  And I am sure you were very pleased with the occasion.

Your bicentennial birthday is coming up tomorrow and Doris Kearns Goodwin may stand where Sandburg stood, talking about your leadership, she is a worthy scholar, whose eloquence, I hope, will match yours.  In case you do not know, her book of Team of Rivals can be found on President Obama's desk at White House, along with the Bible.

You remain an enigma in spite of 14,000 books about you; a great emancipator you are, but talk of you being a racist has been around; you saved the Union, but some criticize you starting an unnecessary war that caused the enormous suffering of the Republic.

How wrong you were when you said on that fateful day in Gettysburg, “The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here.”  What you said here had since belonged to the ages, like Edwin Stanton (your War Secretary) said of you when you drew your last breath, “Now he belongs to the ages.”

The success of your law practice comes from your ability of speaking a simple language with persuasive clarity that jurors could understand; your talent in seeing real point in a complicated case; your seemingly inexhaustible resource of anecdotes, and above all, your sincerity and morality; you always made your clients feel that they were trying the case together.

You may or may not know that history has not treated your wife, Mary, nicely or fairly.  Rest assured that I have never been tired of defending her.  You know it was Mary’s unwavering and inflexible devotion/confidence on your political ability and prospect was what drove you to the top of the political arena. 

You must have the fond memory of that election night in late 1860.  You went to the telegraph office [at Springfield, IL] to hear the election returns over the wires.  The news from Pennsylvania and New York confirmed your victory came around midnight.  You rushed back home, shouting, “Mary, Mary! We are elected!”  She was indeed your “Cheerleader-in-Chief”.

We continue to do the job you started; sitting on your Memorial (how majestic you are!), you've watched Marian Anderson singing on April 9, 1939, listened Carl Sandburg's speech in July 1942; you heard Martin Luther King Jr.'s “I have a dream” speech in 1963, and Obama has visited you on many occasions, and, in fact, he will kick off your bicentennial celebration at your Memorial.

Obama swore the oath of office on the Bible you used on March 4, 1861.  You have no equal; but good thing will come out of it if someone is trying to emulate you.

I am sending invitations to my colleagues at Sermo, whose community is as diverse as America is, full of intelligent, analytical, and educated doctors and independent free thinkers, to say a few words on your 200^th birthday.

To know you as you really were is the best way to remember and revere you.  Happy Birthday to You!