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February 12, 1809 –February 12, 2009
Four score and seven years ago....
Honoring America’s Greatest President
President Ab raham Lincoln
2009 Collector’s Edition
CELEBRATING L I NCOLN ’ S B ICENTENNIAL
Lincoln: The Least Honored and Most Unappreciated President
“This portrait of Lincoln is the fine work of Miss Kasandra Rae Huff, an eighteen year old high school student from Longview. Washington Kasandra sincerely admired our
16th President, who was perhaps the most lonely person that ever occupied the White House. He was a man not known for his good looks, but for his good heart.
Many scholars criticize Lincoln for his thoughts regarding what to do with the freed blacks after ending slavery, but few commend him for what he did for blacks by ending slavery.
During the past thirty-plus years African Americans have occupied every major cabinet level position in the United States government; two have sat on the United States Supreme
Court; several others have run our nation’s largest cities, including Detroit, Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, and Atlanta; one headed the Joint Chiefs of Staff; and 145
years after Lincoln delivered the Gettysburg Address, this nation has elected its first black president.
History reveals that Lincoln’s appreciation for blacks was an evolving process, as it was for most Americans. The more exposure he had, the more he appreciated and saw African
Americans as equals. By the time he reached Gettysburg on that cold November afternoon in 1863, he was at peace with idea of blacks being equal. Using carefully selected words
in a cleverly crafted speech that he had worked on all night, he told those who gathered at the cemetery in Gettysburg what he thought about equality when he spoke these words:
Four score and seven years ago, our fathers brought forth upon this continent, a new nation,
conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.
Even though he wrestled with what to do with the freed slaves after the war, he had grown to appreciate African Americans through his relationship with his black advisor, Frederick
Douglass, and his wife’s best friend and traveling companion, Ms. Elizabeth Keckley, a black dress designer. (Keckley, a freed black woman, designed dresses for Mary Todd
Lincoln and other prominent women of that time.)
Evidence of Lincoln’s evolving feelings toward blacks was clear to everyone when Democrats pressured Lincoln to sit down with Jefferson Davis to negotiate peace. The president, who
once thought that saving the union “without freeing any slave” was an option, took that option off the table and stated that “reunion and the emancipation” were the only grounds for peace.
Democrats tried to embarrass and discredit the president by accusing him of prolonging an unnecessary and unpopular war and by placing cartoons in newspapers depicting Lincoln as a
“Widow Maker” and the killer of young men. Committed to the cause, Lincoln said, “If at the end, when I come to lay down the reins of power, I have lost every friend on earth,
I shall have at least one friend left, and that friend shall be down inside of me.”
His renewed commitment to the emancipation of blacks was also reflected in the portion of the Gettysburg Address where he said:
“That this nation under God, will have a new birth of freedom and that the government of the people,
by the people and for the people shall not perish from this earth.”
Unfortunately, many critics are quick to quote from Lincoln’s speeches prior to the Gettysburg Address, but not as quick to quote from his speeches after the Gettysburg address. Through
Frederick Douglass, Elizabeth Keckley and the black soldiers who so bravely fought for the Union, Lincoln had gained a greater appreciation than most Americans for blacks. His
struggle was not so much over how he would accept the new black citizens, but how his fellow white brothers and sisters who had only a stereotypical view of blacks would accept them.
With Jefferson Davis leading the nation of the Confederate States, Lincoln was the only president in our lifetime who was faced with the possibility of a future where there would be two
separate nations rather than the one that our founding fathers had established. Winning the war and uniting the country was a tremendous accomplishment and that alone should make
Lincoln the greatest president of all time. Had he allowed the South to exist as a separate nation, and had we remained as two smaller countries instead of one we know today, becoming
a superpower would have been only a dream and never a reality. As two separate (smaller) nations, we would not have grown to be a superpower and our defense of democracies around
the world would have never been a possibility. How different the world be, had he failed.
Had he lost the Civil War, what would have happened to blacks? What would have happened to the Republican Party, the Party of Lincoln? Would the defeat of the Union
also have meant the destruction of this new fragile political party? Without the Party of Lincoln, would there have been the Thirteenth, Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to
the Constitution as well as other subsequent Civil Rights legislation to give blacks freedom, citizenship and the right to vote - all of which paved the way for America to elect its first black
president?
Even though members of the Party of Lincoln honor Ronald Reagan as a great president, he was no Abraham Lincoln. Reagan gave his service to this country, but Lincoln
gave his life for his country. Without Lincoln there is a strong possibility that there would no Republican Party today. We owe it to ourselves to honor this man by keeping the true
Legacy of Lincoln alive. Republicans, African Americans and the world as a whole owe this lonely log-splitting country lawyer much more than we will ever know: perhaps even
our lives.
Please help us establish and maintain the Legacy of Lincoln through the Legacy of Lincoln Foundation so that future generations will know of his true greatness and his enduring
contribution to the entire world.
The Legacy of Lincoln Foundation
P.O. Box 256
Mercer Island, WA 98040
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