Candidate Lincoln
Some regard the current occupant of 1600 Pennsylvania
Avenue as the least qualified and most divisive president in United States
history, but oddly enough the honor actually goes to the man considered by most
historians as the greatest U.S. President, Abraham Lincoln.
Lincoln was a dark horse candidate to become the
nominee of the Republican Party in 1860.
Although one of the highest paid lawyers in America, with a gift for
connecting with the common man in his speeches, Lincoln had little formal
education or political experience, having been largely self-educated and having
served only two years in the U.S. House of Representatives. Lincoln defeated an impressive line-up of
opponents for the nomination which included four Senators and a Governor. Lincoln won on the third ballot. His principal opponent William H. Seward was
aghast, but fell in behind the party’s nominee.
Lincoln won the presidency by convincingly winning the
Electoral College vote. However, Lincoln
won less than forty percent (39.8%) of the popular vote, with the balance being
spread amongst three other candidates.
In the original #NotMyPresident movement, seven southern states seceded
from the United States between Election Day and Lincoln’s inauguration. Shortly after his inauguration four more
states seceded and the nation was plunged into four years of bloody civil war. That was "resistance" with a capital R.
Although now universally beloved and acclaimed, throughout
the Civil War Lincoln was derided as unqualified for office by prominent Northerners. George
Templeton Strong, a prominent New York lawyer wrote that Lincoln was “a
barbarian, Scythian, yahoo, or gorilla.” The abolitionist preacher Henry Ward Beecher
blasted Lincoln’s lack of refinement.
Some Northern newspapers called for Lincoln’s immediate assassination. General George B. McCllellan called Lincoln “an
idiot,” and “the original gorilla.” ElizabethCady Stanton, the famous abolitionist, called Lincoln “Dishonest Abe” and bemoaned
the “incapacity and rottenness” of his administration. Elizabeth Cady Stanton vowed that if Lincoln
“is reelected (1864) I shall immediately leave the country for the Fijee
Islands.” Lincoln was
re-elected. Stanton did not move to the
Fiji Islands (the more things change, the more they stay the same).
Although we now regard Lincoln as the original “Great
Communicator”, during his own lifetime editorial writers sometimes described
Lincoln’s speeches as, “… involved, coarse, colloquial, devoid of ease and grace, and bristling
with obscurities and outrages against the simplest rules of syntax.”
A Pennsylvania newspaper
had this to say about Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, “We pass over the silly
remarks of the President. For the credit of the nation we are willing that the
veil of oblivion shall be dropped over them, and they shall be no more repeated
or thought of.” A correspondent for the Times (London) wrote,
“Anything more dull and commonplace it would not be easy to produce.”
This is what media
savants had to say about Lincoln’s words now carved in marble at the Lincoln
Memorial ("With malice toward none, with charity for all …"), contained in
the second inaugural address, “a little speech of ‘glittering generalities’
used only to fill in the program.”(The
New York Herald), and “We did not conceive it possible that even Mr.
Lincoln could produce a paper so slip-shod, so loose-jointed, so puerile, not
alone in literary construction, but in its ideas, its sentiments, its grasp.”
(The Chicago Tribune).
Democracy is rowdy
and has not become less so with the passage of time.