Abraham Lincoln

Monday is Presdient Lincoln's birthday. Lincoln was one of our best presidents. He held our country together - by force. He advocated leniency toward the leaders of the Confederate South, when many wanted to hang all the generals and leaders.

Jim Miller wrote the story the newspapers didn't carry at Sound Politics. A sample:

And this ambitious man taught himself to be a lawyer — and an enormously successful one — and then a politician with remarkable gifts. Those achievements by themselves would be remarkable enough, but Lincoln did far more. This boy from the backwoods somehow made himself into a great statesman and led us to victory in our bloodiest war.

His war leadership is far too large a subject for a brief post, but I can say something about his most famous speeches. As I have said before, the Gettysburg Address, his most famous, does not touch me as some of his other speeches do.