Lecture on Lincoln

We went to a lecture on Abraham Lincoln given by the Lincoln Scholar Michael Burlingame at the Commonwealth Club on Monday. The 30 min lecture and 30 min Q&A was filled with very interesting stories about Lincoln. I’m not sure if I’m going to buy the 2 book volume as it is 2000 pages long and weighs 10 pounds. He also mentioned that some of the stories in his new book had not been widely documented or studies in the past. Some of the more interesting things I heard were:

- Lincoln would probably be considered to be predisposed to depression and had 2 episodes when the depression was physically debilitating (death of his first love and broken engagement to Mary Todd). His mother died when he was young and he was estranged from his father who beat him for minor indiscretions. When his father was dying, he asked to see Lincoln, but he refused.

- He had a high tenor voice and spoke with a “hillbilly accent,” but his voice was very passionate and it carried long distances.

- Mary Todd had a VERY difficult life and she made Lincoln’s life very difficult. Her mother died young, her father abandonded her and her siblings after marrying her stepmom, 3-4 of her children die before adulthood, and then her husband was murdered. She did some pretty unethical things in the White House and frequently was physically abusive even though he was 6’3” and she was 5’2”. Because of her treatment of him, he traveled a lot and stayed away from home by keeping busy with work.

- In 1865, soon after Lincoln’s death, Frederick Douglass said that he was the black man’s president and that he was the first president to rise above the prejudices of the time.

- In his 2^nd inaugural address his comments seem to infer that his justification for the Civil War was that it was god’s punishment of white people for enslaving blacks.

- 2 days after Lee’s surrender Lincoln put forth the idea of limited black suffrage – meaning those blacks that had fought in the war or were intelligent (i.e. literate) should be given the right to vote. After this speech, Booth decides to assassinate him.

- Lincoln would often send in letters to the Springfield Whig newspaper ripping on the Democrats. There were no gems to be found in these letters.

- The greatest amount of personal and professional growth for Lincoln was the 5-7 years pre-presidency when he was essentially on political hiatus. Basically, he had a successful mid-life crisis. He had an inferiority complex about his education and his looks.

- Stephan Douglass was an even more amazing hateful race baiter than most people realize.

- Was great at working with people during his presidency – even his enemies (esp. Seward and Chase).

- Lots of similarities between Obama and Lincoln, but Lincoln was a wartime president and Obama’s biggest priority is the economy. Obama is probably more like FDR.