Having grown up in an age when Pluto is no longer a planet, I have often thought of convention for its own sake.  That is why as a child I was puzzled by the convention of celebrating a famous person’s birthday.  After all, being born was not the greatest achievement of someone worth celebrating, I knew that.  Yet as these famous figures stopped being two-dimensional cartoons and began to gain some real depth as people, real people, I began to realize that this is not a convention for its own sake.  Celebrating a death may be off-putting or in downright bad taste to some, while someone’s birth is simple and innocuous.  Everything in between is equally shaky for the sole reason that the anniversary of such a person’s greatest achievement, which would ideally be the best date for celebration, is made impossible by a plethora of subjective value judgments.

Interestingly enough, Abraham Lincoln is perhaps one of the best examples of this.  While his role as president in the Civil War is undoubtedly the most famous act of his life’s play, it is subject to a milieu of often opposing interpretations.  Some see him as The Great Emancipator, while others believe him to have been a white supremacist; he has been described as either the Self-Made Man or a quintessential politician whose rhetoric espoused only the views of his immediate audience.  He was known to be very quiet, introspective, and mysterious, yet he has become the most popular dead American for debate, oral or written.  It is for this reason that I do not wish to focus on the amorphous Lincoln; instead the concrete aspects of his life must define his legacy.

“We must disenthrall ourselves,” as he famously said. He was one of the greatest presidential orators, possessing a degree of skill attributed to his devotion to the rhythmic lyricism of Shakespeare and the Bible.  Not only did they endow him with this age-old speech, however, but they also gave him a different view of the world from that of his rural life in “the short and simple annals of the poor.”  The ability to indeed, disenthrall himself from old ways of thinking seems to have struck him at an early age, as shown by the stories of his childhood (whether they are myths is irrelevant; they are demonstrably consistent with his character).  One, in particular, has a young Abe play a joke on his smother by enlisting the help of his siblings to create a trail of muddy boot prints on the ceiling of his home, as if a phantom had paid a visit upside-down!

Clearly, Lincoln was very adaptive and open-minded, and he slowly changed his opinions on several subjects.  Yet he was not indecisive, either, and his collection of differing worldviews and opinions led him to the conclusion that the political scheme of the last half-century would not and should not remain as it was.  Lincoln embodied the ability to recognize something in the world around him before it was even given a name and clichéd: the Paradigm Shift.  He recognized the two distinctly different sociopolitical and cultural realities of the North and South, as well as the façade of loose compromises, alliances, and vendettas held together by fraying political string.  Therefore, he decided that the country would not survive such tensions indefinitely, finding precedent in the fiery stubbornness of his misunderstood predecessor, Andrew Jackson, to preserve the Union.  He was constantly plagued by the anguish of his decision, especially the human cost of the war, yet it remained a decision which he held fast. 

Abraham Lincoln’s commitment to renew the American experiment began a legacy of pragmatism and adaptability that followed after either the war or Reconstruction.  He set the standard for not only finding ideological middle ground, but also launching substantial decisions from it.  The quality is especially important in today’s climate of interest group lobbying and partisan rancor.  Deadlocks and unsatisfactory compromises alike are slowly rendering modern Washington as ineffective as antebellum Washington.  Indeed, followers of Lincoln would be wise to strive toward his meditative decisiveness.

The role of the United States’ sixteenth president as an opponent of stagnant convention gave Americans the precedent and the liberty to do the same, to break free of roundabout bickering that merely exacerbates problems.  He teaches us that we should carefully scrutinize all matters of convention (in case you were wondering, the convention of celebrating bicentennials holds up).  Indeed, when the paradigm shift is needed, we must be ready for it, not wearing a stovepipe hat and beard, but a familiar look of strong-jawed resolution.