Happy Birthday, Mr. Lincoln. I hope it was worth it.

Today is the 205th birthday of Abraham Lincoln, the 16th president of the United States, who began serving when he was 52 years old. He was president from March, 1861, until his death on April 15, 1865. One of the most beautiful arrangements of words in the English language is, to me, the Gettysburg Address,  a speech he delivered on November 19, 1863. The speech dedicated, even consecrated, the Soldiers' National Cemetery in Gettysburg, PA, just four months after the Union Army had defeated Confederate troops at that site. This particularly bloody battle carries the burden of its distinction of having resulted in the greatest number of casualties of any battle in the entire Civil War.

On April 9, 1865, Confederate General Robert E. Lee surrendered to U.S. General Ulysses S. Grant at Appomatox Court House, Virginia. Two days later, on April 11, Lincoln spoke at the White House, mentioning his approval of granting the former slaves' their right to vote. Already a hated figure among many Southerners, and despite the fact that the war was over and the "Union" was preserved, these words tipped the balance in the mind of at least one man in the White House audience, the actor John Wilkes Booth. Booth was a member of one of may groups of pro-Confederate conspirators, who could not accept the war's ending in their defeat or the end of the Confederate States of America, not to mention freedom for the slaves. It turned out that most of these groups were all talk, but conspiratorial talk would no longer do for Mr. Booth. He vowed that what he had just heard would be the last speech that President Abraham Lincoln would ever make. He was now ready for his group of conspirators to move ahead with their plans to harm President Lincoln, and they did so very quickly.

President and Mrs. Lincoln attended the play "Our American Cousin" at Ford's Theatre in Washington, DC, on the night of April 14, 1865, three days after Booth heard Lincoln speak and made his decision to commit murder. It was now just five days since Lee's surrender to Grant, ending the war. There at Ford's Theater, John Wilkes Booth shot Abraham Lincoln, mortally wounding him, and then fled. President Lincoln died the next day, April 15, 1865, becoming the first U.S. president to die by assassination.

Abraham Lincoln really did give his life to save this Union, which is one of the major reasons that the throwing around of the threat to secede on the part of contemporary figures in the old Confederate states angers me so much, as does the lingering of Booth's and the Confederates' racism.

Here is that most beautiful of speeches, from Gettysburg, PA:

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. 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 battlefield 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.

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.








And it is up to us, Mr. President, to see to it that you too have not died in vain.