February 12, 2024- Lincoln’s Tomb is closed on Mondays. That gives the spirit of the nation’s 16th President a break from the mostly reverent, but sometimes excited visitors, to the extent that spirits need a break from mortals. Today was a day, for those who do such things, to recite the Gettysburg Address. Time was, when memorizing that speech was required in school. For some reason, that went away, before I got to the grades where it was in the curriculum. My late godmother, and eldest maternal aunt, taught me what she remembered:

“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.

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.“ 

The middle of the speech was missing from her remembrance. One reason might be that her father, a native of St. Louis, who had moved to Saugus, MA to raise his family, was quite opinionated against anything Southern. So, it fell to me to later learn that missing part: ”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.“ 

Papa, from what I heard, felt that the two-tiered system that was segregation had made of the Black man a dissolute and shiftless burden. He remonstrated with men of colour whom he encountered, to quit standing around and follow him into work. He blamed everything on the Jim Crow laws, but thought the Blacks should stand up for themselves-and not seek handouts. I wonder what he’d have made of the Civil Rights movement, had he lived to old age. (He died in 1935, at age 53). 

Abraham Lincoln was well-regarded, by both sides of my family. In 1979, I visited his boyhood home, in Knob Creek, KY. In 1997, the three of us, Penny, Aram and I, saw what was free of the National Historic Site dedicated to him, in Springfield, IL. In 2011, I went back to Springfield and visited the National Historic Site, and New Salem State Park,, more extensively. The Tomb, though, was closed that day.

We have, as a nation, gone through several spurts of revisionist thinking, in which Lincoln’s flaws have been advanced by some, as a reason to topple him from the pedestal. He made a grave error, in sanctioning the execution of 30 Dakota men, in Mankato, MN-as the Civil War was at its zenith. He may have been influenced by lingering memories of his time in the Army, during the Black Hawk War of 1832. That would be ironic, though, as the Dakota people supported the United States, in its dispute with the Sauk. It is true that he reduced the number of people to be executed, commuting the sentences of over 60 people, but the thirty who were killed constitute the largest number ever put to death in the United States, by Presidential fiat, outside of a declared war.

It is also true that Lincoln once expressed the view that an enslaved Black person was legally 3/5 of a white man. He wrestled with that, especially after meeting and holding conversation, at length, with Frederick Douglass, a freed slave who had made good of his life. Ultimately, as we see, he determined that freeing enslaved people, first and foremost in the Confederate States, and a bit later, in the border states that were still loyal to the Union, was both the moral and the practical economic right thing. He lived to see the first, but the second occurred not long after his assassination.

I thought of both my maternal grandfather, and Mr. Lincoln, while contemplating the movement of people across national boundaries. There is, no doubt, an order to be followed, in admitting people to a nation. The common people who already live in the country need to feel that their needs are not being sacrificed for the sake of newcomers-and yet, those newcomers should not have their needs sacrificed for the comfort of the wealthy or of large corporations. This is as true of the United States as it is of any European nation, of Japan, of Canada, or of Australia, to say nothing of emerging economies.

It is, in fact, most important to help those economies to continue to emerge, if a real solution is to be found to the mass migration issue. Most people I’ve met, over the years, in countries like Mexico, Guyana, the West Bank and the Philippines, want to stay where they were raised, where their roots are-just as people in developed nations do. Most who move are fleeing lack of opportunity or lack of safety. So, the true solution, as my grandfather would probably have said, is to provide meaningful work and a safe environment, in every part of the world. THAT, rather than investment in guns, bombs and deadly chemicals, would serve to reduce the numbers of people on the move from country to country. There is much to be done, and it will likely far outlast my lifetime, but it is worth starting the process.