Abraham Lincoln — Caralayah Brown
“A house divided against itself cannot stand. I believe this government cannot endure, permanently half slave and half free. I do not expect the Union to be dissolved – I do not expect the house to fall – but I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing or all the other. Either the opponents of slavery, will arrest the further spread of it, and place it where the public mind shall rest in the belief that it is in the course of ultimate extinction; or its advocates will push it forward, till it shall become alike lawful in all the States, old as well as new – North as well as South.”
— June 16, 1858. Republican State Convention. Acceptance speech when chosen as candidate for U.S. Senate.
This speech was a perfect example of Lincoln’s political outlook: if the country was divided on such a major issue as slavery, they would never move forward as a country, only backwards.
Early life
Abraham Lincoln was the child of Thomas Lincoln and Nancy Hanks. He was born in a one-room log cabin in Hardin County, Kentucky, on February 12th, 1809. When Abraham was about five years old, him and his sister Sarah began their education. When Abraham was seven, his family relocated to Indiana. Lincoln’s mother died of milk sickness in 1818, and in 1819 his father moved the family to Kentucky and got remarried to a woman named Sarah Bush Johnston. Sarah and Abraham had a very close relationship, and she greatly encouraged him to continue his studies. Although Abraham attended school for a good quantity of his childhood, he was left with very little knowledge of reading, writing, and mathematics. Despite the fact that he was not well skilled in these scholarly subjects, Sarah Bush Johnston recalls:
“Abe read diligently…. He read every book he could lay his hands on; and when he came across a passage that struck him, he would write it down in the boards, if he had no paper, and keep it there until he did get paper. Then he would rewrite it, look at it, repeat it.”
Major accomplishments
Obviously, Abraham Lincoln’s greatest achievement in life was when he became president of the United States of America on November 6, 1860. Before winning the presidential race, he had run for the Illinois General Assembly twice, failing the first time and successful the second. He served in this office for 7 years, before winning a seat in the U.S. Congress.
Another achievement of Lincoln’s was being Commander in Chief of the United States during the Civil War (1861-1865). During this time, the country was in shambles. Before Lincoln’s election, many of the slave states had decided to secede from the Union. Some of those states went as far as creating their own separate nation. He handled this tragic situation calmly, despite what was at stake. At his first inaugural address, he said about the issue:
“Apprehension seems to exist among the people of the Southern States that by the accession of a Republican Administration their property and their peace and personal security are to be endangered. There has never been any reasonable cause for such apprehension.”
The Emancipation Proclamation, although it did not free a single slave, was actually quite successful in achieving other goals. It was put into practice on January 1, 1863, and declared that all slaves in the United States were free. The problem with this was that all of the slave states had seceded from the Union at this point, therefore causing the Emancipation Proclamation to not apply to them. Lincoln released this document at just the right time in the war, and it caused the focus of the war to be slavery, thus taking European support away from the South.
After his success holding the country together during the Civil War and reconstruction, Abraham Lincoln was elected for a second term, and remained president until he was assassinated in 1865.
Leadership skill
Lincoln’s most important leadership skill was the fact that he practiced Collective Leadership, as seen through his use of rhetoric in many of his famous speeches and addresses.
Criticism
The main criticism of Lincoln is that he was not actually interested in the welfare of the slaves, as seen in this quote:
“My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that.”
However, this was not the case. In fact, he successfully ended slavery before the end of his presidency. His main goal was not to create a better country for the slaves only, but the country as a whole.
The skills that Lincoln displayed during his time in political office: holding strong beliefs, discipline, and collective leadership can be applied to many experiences in life, including my time at PRHS (Port Richmond High School) during my first semester at Wagner College. For my Reflective Tutorial class, we had to visit a particular class of PRHS students and encourage them to tackle a local environmental issue. All of us Wagner students had to take a leadership role at one point or another during our visits at the high school. To choose which issue that we wanted to tackle during this time, we had to fight for our belief as to which issue was most important to the community. We had to display the skill of discipline by keeping calm and maintaining control when the high school students would act out while we were trying to mentor them. Collective leadership was exercised at Port Richmond when we were trying to engage the students in the activities that we were doing. For example, we had to try to convince the students that their input was just as important as ours in any given issue, and we compared the situation at hand to the Grassroots movement of the Civil Rights Movement.
Resources
Abraham Lincoln: “Inaugural Address,” March 4, 1861. Online by Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, The American Presidency Project. http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=25818
Abraham Lincoln: “A House Divided Against Itself Cannot Stand,” June 1858. http://www.nationalcenter.org/HouseDivided.html
Field, Peter S. “Abraham Lincoln and the First-Person Plural: A Study in Language and Leadership.” American Nineteenth Century History 12, no. 1: (2011) 49-75. Academic Search Premier, EBSCOhost (accessed November 4, 2012).
Nicolay , John G. A Short Life of Abraham Lincoln. Middlesex: The Echo Library 2006.