Seven score and 10 years ago...

On this date in 1863, President Abraham Lincoln traveled to Gettysburg to deliver what would become the most famous speech in presidential history.

In 272 words, Lincoln perhaps said more than he knew:

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that this nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate, we can not consecrate, we can not hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

I used to be a Republican...

...until my party was hijacked by neo-fascists, many of whom are continuing to embarrass our great state on a daily basis in Music City.

I still like Ike. He couldn't get nominated today.

I also think, in many ways, Nixon's the One. He couldn't get nominated, either.

TR? Lincoln? Forget it.

Jack Kennedy couldn't get the Democratic nomination today. He cut taxes and was a Cold Warrior.

U.S. Rep. John Duncan? He's got guts. Made the right decision against the wars and the Patriot Act. I like him. A lot.

Many of these new folks bow to the feet of Ronald Reagan, yet must have never studied what the Gipper actually believed. It was a nice mix of idealism and pragmatism. Do any of them even know the source of Reagan's phrase "rendezvous with destiny"? I doubt it.

The days of Everett Dirksen and Mike Mansfield arguing in the Senate and then going out for a drink after 5 are long gone. We're a worse nation for it.

I became a Republican because I thought they believed in getting government out of our lives, not intruding into them.

These days, I am a painter passing through, a wayfaring pilgrim, a person without a party.

You can have what my friend Dean Harned calls this "curious mix of fundamentalist Cromwellian orthodoxy and Christianized Shariah Law," if you want it. I think it's by and large a disgrace.

An April assassination on Good Friday

On this date in 1865, Abraham Lincoln was assassinated.

You know the tale. He and Mary Todd went to see Laura Keene star in the comedy "Our American Cousin" at Ford's Theatre. Their companions were Henry Rathbone and his fiance, Clara Harris. It was Good Friday.

At the moment that always brought the play's loudest laugh, renowned actor and Confederate sympathizer John Wilkes Booth stepped into the presidential box, put a .44-caliber single-shot derringer to the president's head and mortally wounded the best friend the South would have had during Reconstruction.

If you don't believe me, read what happened after April 14, 1865. I recommend Eric Foner's book.

Across town, Secretary of State William H. Seward was also attacked. He would survive.

Taken to the Petersen House across the street from the theater, Lincoln died about 7:22 the next morning.

"Now," Secretary of War Edwin McMasters Stanton said, "he belongs to the ages."

"The Pale Horse had come," Carl Sandburg later wrote. "To a deep river, to a far country, to a by-and-by whence no man returns, had gone the child of Nancy Hanks and Tom Lincoln, the wilderness boy who found far lights and tall rainbows to live by, whose name even before he died had become a legend inwoven with man's struggle for freedom the world over."

I saw the blood-stained pillow, and that disgusting derringer, in 1998. I have forever been haunted by both.

Telling Lincoln about Lincoln

One of these days, if his daddy doesn't beat me to it, I will tell Lincoln James Harned all about his namesake.

My best friend, Dean, and his wife, Allison, are having a baby boy. With a little luck, he might even be born on March 13, my birthday.

A group of friends held the Harneds a baby shower this afternoon, coincidentally and appropriately Abraham Lincoln's 203rd birthday. It was quite nice. Class act, all the way.

Dean is a history buff, like me, and teaches it quite well to high school students. Like me, one of his heroes is our nation's 16th president.

I won't go into all the reasons. You know them. Sometimes I think Lincoln's humanity, his best characteristic, has been lost in modern-day politics and post-assassination martyrdom.

And yet, he's there, if you look. I will tell baby Lincoln about his namesake's humble origins in Kentucky, about his self-education, about his rise in Republican circles, about his debates with Douglas, about his shrewd political prowess, about the American scripture he crafted one November in Pennsylvania.

I will tell him that there are few heroes in this life, but that his namesake is one.

That is, if his daddy doesn't beat me to it...

What we haven't learned in 150 years

At 4:30 a.m. on April 12, 1861 -- 150 years ago today -- Confederate Lt. Henry S. Farley fired a single 10-inch mortar round that exploded over Fort Sumter, S.C.

Inside the fort was Major Robert Anderson and his small Federal command. They had been there since December, waiting for reinforcements that never made it.

The Confederate barrage continued. Rabid Virginia secessionist Edmund Ruffin, who had come to Charleston that spring to witness history, fired one of the first shots.

Anderson waited until after dawn to retaliate. At 7 a.m., the first Federal shot came from Captain Abner Doubleday, the man whom would later be given credit for "creating" the game of baseball. The only casualty was a Confederate horse. It was a bloodless beginning to a very bloody affair.

They didn't call it the Shot Heard Round the World -- that, you see, is relegated to important things like home runs -- but Fort Sumter touched off what would become known as the Civil War, a strange moniker indeed, given that this conflict was anything but civil. From then until even after Lee surrendered to Grant in April 1865, Americans went to war with one another. Nearly 620,000 would perish. So would an American president.

William Faulkner said perhaps more than he knew when he noted, years later, that "the past is never dead; it isn't even past."

To this day, Americans argue over what caused the war. To this day, they argue over what to call it, what to make of it, what to learn from it.

Abraham Lincoln is a hero to some, an anathema to others. Take a look at a presidential electoral map -- particularly from 2000 or 2004 -- and tell me that we still don't have a sectional divide. (2008 was an exception; it remains to be seen whether it will be an anomaly or a watershed.)

Civil War books continue to roll off the presses month after month. Civil War roundtables and societies can be found in virtually any American city of any size.

American political discourse in 2011, yes, still includes talk of secession.

Everything -- and nothing -- has changed.

I watched the first part of the Ken Burns documentary last night. Before drifting off to dream, I read a few pages from Bruce Catton's centennial history of the war, written 50 years ago. (He's better than even Shelby Foote, folks.)

I thought about that bloody pond at Shiloh, about the hallowed ground at Gettysburg, about the gentle spirit now belonging to the ages that left us while the man to whom it belonged lay dying in a small bed at the Petersen House in Washington on Good Friday, April 15, 1865.

I thought about those moving Mathew Brady images, about the dingy daguerreotypes of forgotten men and boys who didn't make it home, about the loved ones they left behind.

I thought about "Dixie," that sweet minstrel tune; and "The Battle Hymn of the Republic, the stirring stanza about the terrible swift sword; and the melody to the maudlin "Lorena."

I thought about the myths and the mysteries, the ugly truths and the damnable lies, the good, the bad, heaven and hell, and how the weather was.

And I thought, too, about the waste -- the utter, horrible waste of it all -- and wondered for the hundredth time how we ever came to think of this godawful bloodbath as anything remotely resembling romantic.

Old times there, you see, will never be forgotten, though His truth is marching on.

'The American Sphinx'

Forgive my absence for a few days.

Low back pain. Doctor. Please don't let it be a kidney stone. Good news. Inflamed sciatic nerve. Really? At (almost) 33? Oh, well. It's not a stone. Thank God.

Watched for the first time since its 1997 premiere the Ken Burns Thomas Jefferson biography. Our third president is an enigma, indeed.

One can't help but admire Jefferson. One also can't help but marvel at his contradictions. The author of the American Scripture, the Declaration of Independence, who never freed his slaves. The man with an organized mind and cluttered, chaotic personal habits.

Joseph J. Ellis calls Jefferson the American Sphinx. That's as apt a description as any.

I am always moved by the story of Jefferson's reconciliation with John Adams during the last decade of their lives. Their letters are elegiac -- moving and monumental.

Perhaps this spring or summer I can return to Virginia, to Monticello, to the house Jefferson never quite finished. I would love to stroll the campus of the university he designed and dream again of living the scholarly life.

I stand in awe of his intellect and am frustrated by his public (that terrible embargo) and private acts. And, yet, I forgive him somewhat, too. Even the great Jefferson was a product of his time.

Of all the great moments in the American experience, surely Jefferson's and Adams' deaths on July 4, 1826, 50 years to the day after the signing of our Declaration, soar among the stars.

If Washington is the father and Lincoln is the savior, Jefferson, then, is the soul -- encompassing both the light and the darkness, the good and the bad, the great American dilemma between ideals and reality.

Quote of the day

"Whenever I hear anyone arguing for slavery I feel a strong impulse to see it tried on them." -- President Abraham Lincoln

Two minutes that changed the world

On this date in 1863, President Abraham Lincoln delivered the greatest speech in American oratorical history. His cogent, simple words captured in two minutes what the featured speaker that day, Edward Everett, couldn't say in two hours.

I post the speech below, with the continued prayer that government of the people, by the people and for the people shall never perish from the earth.

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate -- we can not consecrate -- we can not hallow -- this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us -- that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion -- that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain -- that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom -- and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

A remarkable American life

It is haunting, this photograph.

The face is weary, exhausted, melancholic. The eyes are sunken into the face, blackened from years of stress. The negative is cracked, an apropos symbol of this man's fate.

It was the last image of Abraham Lincoln, taken days before his assassination, ironically at the moment of his greatest triumph -- the conclusion of the war that plagued his soul.

Today is Lincoln's 200th birthday. What can be said about him that hasn't already been said?

He is with us still. He is with us in all these silly comparisons to Barack Obama. He is with us in a plethora of books. He is with us in at least two new TV documentaries.

I have read more books about Lincoln than about any other human being save Richard M. Nixon. And, while Nixon remains a fascinating enigma, Lincoln remains a legend, the high-water mark of the American presidency; he is in so many ways the savior of our country.

Lest you accuse me of hagiography, let me say just a few short words.

Lincoln, more than any other president, ascended from humble beginnings. He literally was born in a log cabin. He received less than a year of formal education. He was a partner in a general store in his youth, heavily in debt, but honest enough to eventually pay each debtor in full.

He became a successful lawyer, one of the best on the Illinois circuit. He developed a talent for soaring oratory, engaging the most formidable Democrat of the time, the Little Giant Stephen A. Douglas, in a spirited series of debates leading up to the 1858 Illinois U.S. Senate election. And he lost it.

But, two years later, he was elected president of the United States, with only a few years in the Illinois House, and one term in the U.S. House, under his belt. If anyone was destined to lead his country at a particular moment in history, surely it was Lincoln.

He stumbled and fell at times during his first term. He knew personal tragedy, losing his son Willie in 1862. But he kept at it, refusing to give up, doing what it took to preserve the Union.

And he was a ruthless politician. He suspended the writ of habeas corpus, suppressed the freedom of the press, made decisions (even choosing when to announce the Emancipation Proclamation) based on political calculations. Let's not forget, after all, that Lincoln was a flesh-and-blood human being, not the statue that forever stares toward the reflection pool.

I am no expert, but if you were to ask me to name my favorite Lincoln books, I would say these: "Lincoln" by David Herbert Donald; "With Malice Toward None" by Stephen Oates; "Re-electing Lincoln" by John C. Waugh: and "Team of Rivals" by Doris Kearns Goodwin. I have James M. McPherson's "Tried By War" on my bookshelf. I have tried to read Carl Sandburg's epic biography. I will try again someday.

For those of you in the Knoxville or East Tennessee area, take an afternoon and drive up to the Abraham Lincoln Museum on the Lincoln Memorial University Campus. If you can, go in the fall, when the leaves begin to change. Harrogate in autumn is as pretty a spot as anyone can find.

And so today is Lincoln's birthday. We owe this man so much. Here's hoping that we stop to realize that Honest Abe is much more than the Great Rail-Splitter, the mythical monument, the face on the penny.

His is a remarkable American life.

A mountain in grandeur of soul...

Let us speak now of humanity a few minutes, since there seems to be so damn little of it anymore.

Forgive the cynical attitude tonight. I have had enough of human beings and their despicable behavior for one week. At some level, it's getting more and more difficult to give a damn.

So let's talk of humanity, and of presidents -- or at least one in particular -- since we will inaugurate a new one on Tuesday. He was a good man, wise beyond his years, decent, humane and brilliant.

Yes, in case you're wondering, it's Abraham Lincoln. And if you think that is a cliched statement, well, I will refrain from saying anything ugly.

When Lincoln rode the train from Springfield to Washington in the winter of 1861, the fate of the republic lay in the two hands on his lanky frame. He was untried, inexperienced, virtually unknown to most of the country. Few gave him a chance.

And yet he became the greatest president we have ever known.

Sure, Lincoln was manipulative, scheming, aware of the power of politics. But he rose above his time, spoke words only a remarkable soul can ever create, seeking malice toward none and charity for all.

Read his Second Inaugural Address. Read the most poignant two-minute oratory in presidential history (it happened at Gettysburg in November 1863 if you need a clue). Then think about the fact that the lawyer from Illinois took less than a year of formal schooling.

He is my one, true hero from American history, a shining example of what a human being and a president can be, someone to grasp onto when you're looking for an inspiration amid the insanity.

I have just about had it. I have witnessed too much senseless anger, too much heartache, too many examples of those who call another "friend" showing no more decency than one would treat a mouse that had stumbled into the house, too many two-faced politicians who offer the world nothing but a shit-eating grin. It doesn't mesh with what I want to believe about the world. It is depressing.

But I think about a lot of things -- the real friends; life's true priorities; the precious, wonderful, all too uncommon moments of pure, unadulterated joy.

And I think, too, about Abraham Lincoln, of the life that is very much the exception to the rule.

Here, let me leave you with some words from the poet Carl Sandburg. This never fails to stir my soul.

"There is no new thing to be said about Lincoln. There is no new thing to be said of the mountains, or of the sea, or of the stars. The years go their way, but the same old mountains lift their granite shoulders above the drifting clouds; the same mysterious sea beats upon the shore; the same silent stars keep holy vigil above a tired world.

"But to the mountains and sea and stars men turn forever in unwearied homage. And thus with Lincoln. For he was a mountain in grandeur of soul. He was a sea in deep undervoice of mystic loneliness. He was a star in steadfast purity of purpose and service.

"And he abides."

Nerd moment for the week

Wouldn't you know it? I fell asleep right at the good part.

OK, here's my nerd moment for the week. Last night, I rearranged my entire evening so I could catch one of my favorite movies on TCM.

"Abe Lincoln in Illinois," from 1940, stars Raymond Massey as the Great Railsplitter, following our greatest president's journey from New Salem, Ill., through his fateful train ride to Washington in 1861 to become president of the United States. It's corny, melodramatic, plays fast and loose with history, but is a lot of fun.

And the funny part is I keep missing it every time it airs. The last time TCM showed the film (it's not available on DVD), I set the TiVo, all excited that I'd finally be able to watch this classic from start to finish. Yeah, it didn't record.

So guess what happened last night? I got all the way through the movie and fell asleep right at the part where Lincoln gives his famous "house divided" speech. I woke back up on the night of the 1860 election, when Lincoln waits calmly at the telegraph office for the results.

I did manage to catch his dramatic speech at the train station that closes the film, but I guess I'm just not supposed to EVER see this damn thing in its entirety. One thing I was glad to see is that the film faithfully replicates certain aspects of Lincoln's life, including his broken-promise engagement to Mary Todd (he later changes his mind and, for some reason, she does too) and his early struggles with money and difficulty finding a direction in life. Massey is a dead-ringer for Ol' Abe.

On a serious note, I did think a lot about Lincoln -- and our current election -- after the movie ended. And it really makes you marvel at this most remarkable American story.

Lincoln had been a one-term U.S. Representative and a state Rep. in the Illinois legislature for a few years prior to winning the Republican nomination for president. And that was about it.

He'd lost a Senate seat against the Little Giant, Stephen Douglas, in 1858. Honest Abe could tell a funny story, but he wasn't much to look at. He had a high-pitched voice. He couldn't have been elected dogcatcher if he'd came of age in the TV era.

But if ever a human being was born to play a certain role in history, surely it was this gentle soul from Springfield by away of Kentucky. His tale is indeed one for the ages.