206-year-old man in the news

Lock of Lincoln's hair, amid other auction items

Lincoln in the news on his birthday:

The Fresno Bee has an editorial out this week calling for Lincoln's birthday to be made an official holiday.  The editorial maybe doesn't do the best job of making the case:  it's unclear if it's calling for a national holiday or a California state holiday, and dwells longer on his having beaten Jack Armstrong in a fight back in New Salem than on his having beaten the Confederacy and saved the Union, plus it gets wrong the date he was shot.  But it recognizes the inadequacy of the lamest national holiday, President's Day, and points out the embarrassment that more states officially recognize Robert E. Lee's birthday than Lincoln's.  Seems California used to celebrate Lincoln's birthday, but in 2009--the Bee points out the irony that this was his bicentenary year--the legislature deleted the holiday to save money.

Pete Muggins's letter (click to enlarge)

The New York Times reviews Lincoln Speaks:  Words that Transformed a Nation, an exhibit of original manuscripts of 80-some of his speeches and pieces of correspondence and so on, running through June 7 at New York City's Morgan Library and Museum.  Also included in the exhibit is material written to or about Lincoln, including Walt Whitman's handwritten "Oh Captain! My Captain!", and some books from Lincoln's personal library, including one of his Shakespeare collections opened to his favorite play, Macbeth.   Perhaps the most entertaining item exhibited
is the original of a letter mailed to Lincoln in Springfield a couple weeks after he was elected President; as the Times decorously puts it, the letter "remains unprintable in a family newspaper 155 years later."  Via the less fastidious Adam Matthew Digital, which has the original in its digital archives, here is a transcript:

Fillmore, La.  Nov 25th 1860

Old Abe Lincoln

God damn your god damned of hellfire of god damned soul to hell god damn you and god damn your god damned family's god damn hellfired god damned soul to hell and god damnation god damn them and god damn your god damn friends to hell god damn their god damned souls to damnation god damn them and god damn their god damn families to eternal god damnation god damn souls to hell god damn them and God Almighty God damn Old Hamlin to go hell God damn his God damned soul God all over everywhere double damn his God damned soul to hell.

Now you God damned old abolition son of a bitch God damned you I want you to send me God damn you about one dozen good offices Good God almighty God damn you God damned soul and three or four pretty Gals God damn you you

And by doing God damn you

Will oblige

Pete Muggins 

 Speaking of insults, MLive.com--the M stands for Michigan--posts a piece today thanking Lincoln for either coining or popularizing the term "Michigander."  Attacking Lewis Cass, the 1848 Democratic nominee for president, Lincoln called Cass "the great Michigander," his dual point being that Cass's policies were as silly as a goose and that Cass was so fat he waddled.  And we are told that political discourse was more elevated then than it is now.  MLive points out that 58% of, um, Michiganders now use the term to refer to themselves.  It does not point out that the term of Lincoln's day for someone from Illinois, a "sucker," has not held up as well.

The Religion News Service  says that anyone claiming to be outraged by President Obama's
comments at last week's National Prayer Breakfast should also feel the same way about Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address:

Obama appeals to the mystery of God and, without specifically saying it, asks us to remove the speck from our own eye before we set out to remove the log from our neighbor's eye. . . .  When Obama tells Americans to get off their "high horses" and realize that sin has been present throughout human history, even American history, he echoes Lincoln's words on that rainy morning on March 4, 1865. . . .  Both the North and the South, he said, "read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes His aid against the other.  It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God's assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men's faces, but let us judge not, that we not be judged.  The prayers of both could not be answered.  That of neither has been answered fully.  The Almighty has His own purposes."  

On the other hand, Mark Levin on Sean Hannity's FOX News show (as a service to the readers of this blog, I am not providing a link) says that if Lincoln had shared the sentiments Obama expressed at the prayer breakfast, he would not have fought to end slavery.  Sigh.

The Lebanon (Pennsylvania) Daily News believes that Lincoln would not at all approve of pretty much anything Obama says or does.  It delves into metaphysics to prove the point:  "Abraham Lincoln's birthday is upon us.  And with a reluctant but free-spending captain now at the helm of the free world's flagship, we are reminded how sorely we miss Lincoln.  Were he with us now, at the advanced age of 206, what would he think of how his beloved United States has evolved in the 150 years since that fateful night at Ford's Theater?  What would he think of the Oval Office's current occupant?"  Remarkably, the answer to this poser is that Lincoln would agree with the opinions of the op-ed writer asking the question:  "he would want to know what happened to the role of government, and why it sees fit to intrude so regularly in the lives of its citizens."  Good to know.

Auctioned:  funeral admittance card for White House service

Finally, down in Dallas, a lock of Lincoln's hair was recently sold at auction for an amount equal to a year of his presidential salary, $25,000.  It was part of a large collection of Lincoln memorabilia (much of it, for instance a piece of blood-stained linen from his deathbed, and Booth's arrest warrant, centered around the assassination) that brought in a total of $803,889, twice what was expected.  Left unsold was an 1862 letter from Lincoln acknowledging that the Civil War was not going well.

205-year-old man in the news

Lincoln in Bensonhurst

Lincoln in the news on his birthday:

This afternoon at the Old State Capitol Building in Springfield, where Lincoln gave his House Divided speech, the US Postal Service is unveiling a new Lincoln postage stamp.  This one will show an image of the Lincoln Memorial.  The Lincoln Land Community College chorus will perform.  The State Journal-Register has details.

The Lincoln Birthplace National Historical Park has birthday events planned for today as well.  One is the official donation to the Park by Hodgenville attorney and Lincoln historian Carl Howell of the marker from the grave of Thomas Lincoln Jr.--the only brother of Abe, who died in infancy in either 1811 or '12.  WKMS, the local NPR station there, reports that Howell purchased the marker from the owner of the small family cemetery when the owner was selling the cemetery, and quotes Howell as saying, "“I think it needs to be displayed in Larue County at the National Park where people can see it on a daily basis because of its extreme importance and significance to the Lincoln heritage."  Um, shouldn't it be put back on the kid's grave?

The Bensonhurst Bean informs us that Bensonhurst police have apprehended 24-year-old Vladimir Bubnov and charged him with being the graffiti artist who has spray-painted Lincoln's image, in the Bean's words "on public and private property along a broad swath of Brooklyn. The images can be seen at almost every Belt Parkway overpass and subway easement, as well as on the sides of many businesses, from Mill Basin to Bay Ridge."  Bubnov was stopped by police because he failed to signal a turn, which seems a tad careless when it's been publicized that the police are looking for you and you are transporting graffiti stencils and spray paint in your back seat.  According to the Bean, Bubnov goes by the street name of AINAC ("Art Is Not A Crime"), and it is speculated that he "may also be the person responsible for the “All you need is love” tag that is nearly as ubiquitous as the Lincoln image."

Kalamazoo, Michigan, civic leaders are organizing efforts to place a statue of Lincoln in a park there, says the Kalamazoo Gazette, to commemorate Lincoln's only public appearance in Michigan.  He spoke at a Republican rally there in 1856 in support of the party's first presidential candidate, John C. Fremont (Campaign slogan:  "Free Soil!  Free Labor!  Fremont!").  The city government and the local press are all in favor of it.  

Speaking of Republican rallies, the GOP in Multnomah County, Oregon, is apparently going ahead with its Lincoln Day raffle this Saturday.  From their website:  ". . .we celebrate the legacy of two great Republicans who demonstrated leadership and courage that all of us still lean on today: Martin Luther King, Jr and Abraham Lincoln. In celebrating these two men, and the denial of the rights they fought so hard against, the Multnomah County Republican Party announces that we have started our third raffle for an AR-15 rifle (or handgun of the winner’s choice)."  It apparently really didn't occur to them that there might be something gauche about raffling off a gun to "celebrate" two assassination victims.  When there was the predictable outcry, they issued a non-apology apology for having "issued a press release that was unfortunately easily misunderstood."  Not for calling King a Republican, though, or for the incoherence of "the denial of the rights they fought so hard against."  As for the raffle, The Oregonian reports that the group expects the publicity to sell out all 500 raffle tickets.

Indiewire.com reports Terrence Malick has produced a Lincoln biopic, directed by A.J. Edwards, that is playing festivals and looking for a distributor.  Called The Better Angels, it seems to be about Abe growing up in Indiana.  Here's a link to watch the trailer on Indiewire.

A fun game that everyone can play is to imagine that Abraham Lincoln would completely agree with you about whatever contemporary issue you want to name.  Derek Hunter at Townhall.com seems convinced that Lincoln would side with him in opposing Obamacare;  Mike Lux blogs at HuffPost that Lincoln would want the federal government to start arresting Wall Street CEOs who deserve it; Alissa Wetzel in the Indianapolis Star just knows that he would agree with her about gay marriage; and Eric Zorn writes in the Chicago Tribune that Lincoln would agree with him that Lincoln's Birthday should not be a school holiday in Illinois anymore.  Nobody seems to care what George Washington would think about any of these issues.

Late-breaking news from the Lincoln assassination

After one hundred and forty-seven years, the apparently never-before-read report of the first physician to reach Lincoln after he was shot has surfaced.

From The Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum press release: 

Papers of Abraham Lincoln researcher Helena Iles Papaioannou came across something unexpected while searching the records of the Surgeon General in the National Archives in Washington, DC. Papaioannou discovered a copy of a twenty-one-page report by Dr. Charles A. Leale, the army surgeon who was the first to reach the presidential box to care for a wounded Abraham Lincoln on the night of April 14, 1865. Leale wrote out his story just hours after the President died the next morning, but the text of that first report had remained undiscovered, until now. The newly discovered report is not in Leale’s hand, but is a “true copy” written in the neat and legible hand of a clerk. For nearly a century and a half, it has been tucked away in one of hundreds of boxes of incoming correspondence to the Surgeon General, until Papaioannou discovered it.

Page 3 of Dr. Leale's report; full report available here

Charles A. Leale was 23 years old and had held a medical license for all of six weeks when he took his seat 40 feet away from the presidential box to watch Our American Cousin.  Remarkably, this evening would be the second time in three days he would be mere yards away from both Lincoln and John Wilkes Booth.  On April 11, he had been in the crowd outside the White House when Lincoln had given what would be his final speech, from the second story window over the main door of the White House, about his hopes for Reconstruction and endorsing voting rights for blacks.  Elsewhere in the crowd were Booth and his co-conspirator Lewis Powell, to whom Booth raged,“That means nigger citizenship. Now, by God, I’ll put him through. That is the last speech he will ever make.”

It seems incredible to us that a large crowd of random people would have free access to the very front steps of the White House to call the President to come to a window and speak, but of course no one had ever attacked a president before.

Leale's report is a quick and compelling read, as much for the medical specifics he details as for the simple narrative of the still-shocking events of the awful evening:

When I reached the President he was in a state of general paralysis, his eyes were closed and he was in a profoundly comatose condition, while his breathing was intermittent and exceedingly stertorous.  I placed my finger on his right radial pulse but could perceive no movement of the artery.

By the way, there's no mention of Laura Keene entering the presidential box and cradling Lincoln's head in her lap.  Leale later said that this had happened, but it's nowhere in his report filed the day Lincoln died.

Lincoln's papers are scattered all over the world.

So, big kudos to The Papers of Abraham Lincoln for finding this.  It's a joint project of  the Lincoln Presidential Library and the Illinois Historic Preservation Agency.  They've been at it for eight years, and will be for years to come:  locating and digitizing every document they can find that was written either by or to Lincoln.  Of course, Leale's report is neither of these, but it's hard to imagine a more important exception to make.  I believe the earliest document they've found is a heavily deteriorated page of math problems from a school workbook he had as a teenager in the 1820s, and just this spring they came across a cache of previously unknown documents held in a collection in Japan.  These include a letter he wrote in 1833 for Ann Rutledge's father on a business matter, and a very short bio of himself he wrote in the 1850s that includes this gold nugget: “Born Feb. 12, 1809, in Hardin county Kentucky.  Education, defective."  Next month the search moves to Australia, where they know of one document (a Presidential letter appointing a Camden, New Jersey, postmaster) and have hopes of finding more.

203-year-old man in the news

One of the four people lined up against the wall in this photograph is actually a drinking fountain. Can you tell which one? 


Lincoln in the news on his birthday:

Today Ford's Theatre held an open house for its new $25 million Lincoln Museum.  From the New York Times article:  "Lincoln has long been at the heart of the capital city: the National Mall is an affirmation of the Union he championed, the Lincoln Memorial on one end, and the Ulysses S. Grant Memorial on the other. But there was, until recently, no extensive exhibition here about Lincoln and his times. Ford’s Theater, Mr. Tetreault explained, used to be a brief stopping point.  Now, with these exhibitions, Lincoln has found a home in a place best known for his death."

A famous portrait of Mary Todd Lincoln, and the tearjerker story behind it, have both been revealed as frauds concocted in the 1920s to cheat the Lincoln family out of a few thousand dollars.  Via the Boston Globe:  "The Lincolns were not the only ones fooled. Ever since The New York Times announced the portrait’s discovery in 1929, on Feb. 12, Lincoln’s birthday, historians and the public have assumed it depicted Mary Todd Lincoln. It was reproduced in The Chicago Tribune and National Geographic, and versions of it still illustrate at least two biographies, including the latest paperback edition of Carl Sandburg’s 1932 Mary Lincoln: Wife and Widow."

The U.S. Department of Agriculture, which Lincoln created in 1862, is celebrating this week in Springfield by giving away free seeds for the Lincoln Tomato.  The Springfield State Journal-Register has the details.

Lech Walesa was in Springfield Friday, two days too soon to get free Lincoln Tomato seeds, touring the Lincoln Museum there, which has an exhibit on Walesa running through March 5.  Here's the Rockford Register-Star.

People like to argue over whom Lincoln would agree with today.  Here's Jackie Hogan in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution claiming today's Republican Party would have nothing to do with Abe:  "He was the first American president to sign federal income tax into law. And not only that, but it was a progressive income tax, with the wealthiest Americans paying a higher rate."

On the other hand, Joseph A. Kohm Jr., blogging for The American Thinker, believes that if Lincoln were alive today, he's be part of the anti-abortion rights movement:  "Historians tell us the deaths of his mother, sister, first love, and second child, each took a heavy emotional toll on his psyche.  The well-chronicled depth of Lincoln's despair as he mourned those mentioned above was so profound that it is impossible to conclude that he did not contemplate and examine the very quintessence of life, including its significance, origin, cessation, and most importantly for the unborn, qualification." 

The best news of all:  At an Anaheim (California) City Council meeting on Tuesday, Patsy Bauman's kindergarten class, dressed in homemade stovepipe hats and fake beards, recited the Gettysburg Address, which they had spent two months learning by heart.  They repeated the performance for their whole school on Friday.  The Orange County Register has the scoop, and a video of all 19 of them going at it in what passes for unison.

And then there's this.

When Lincoln Paid

For Lincoln's birthday this Sunday--203 years old and still lookin' good--here is a one-minute clip from a recently rediscovered 1913 silent film called When Lincoln Paid.  It had gone missing for 90-some years until a print was discovered in 2006 in a barn in New Hampshire.  It stars and was directed by Francis Ford, the older brother and professional mentor of the great American film director John Ford.  I learn from Wikipedia that Francis Ford played Lincoln in at least seven silent films--all of them lost, until this one was found.  Francis was a big name in silent movies, but his career declined thereafter.  His last directing credit was in 1928, though he worked as a character actor into the 1940s.  His younger brother John, who learned much about film-making from him, consistently cast him in small, relatively unimportant, roles in his films, including an uncredited bit part in 1939's Young Mr. Lincoln, which starred Henry Fonda.

The Great Emancipator

Discussing some upcoming Civil War plays around the country last week, I digressed briefly to complain about the currently stylish perception of Lincoln as having needed to evolve toward accepting the moral necessity of emancipation.  Today Richard Striner has a piece in the New York Times's Disunion blog making the same point better and at greater length.  The Constitution, as we all know, constrained the federal government from outlawing slavery in the states. The territories were a different story, and as the war progressed, Lincoln felt obliged to take the constitutionally questionable step of using his war powers to make the rebel states a different story too.  It's become conventional among people who aren't up on their history to conclude that the time it took Lincoln to take that step was the result of his lack of commitment to opposing slavery.

Libertarians like Ron Paul have a different wrong point to make:  intent on denying the federal government legitimate authority to act against the Confederacy, Paul says that the Civil War was "senseless" and that the federal government should have simply purchased all the slaves from their owners  and set them free.  Any good follower of Ayn Rand should realize that a transaction requires both a purchaser and a seller; if Paul thinks the South was full of slaveholders willing to sell all their slaves to the Lincoln administration, he may wish to pick up a history book sometime.

Striner's piece rebuts both these errors by describing Lincoln's attempt in 1861-'62 to get Delaware to pass legislation enabling the federal government to, yes, buy all its slaves and set them free.  He hoped a successful transaction in Delaware would provide opportunities to do likewise in other loyal slave states and thereby serve to weaken the Confederacy, perhaps even tempting some Confederate states back into the Union and ending the war in a matter of months.  It didn't work, because Delaware wouldn't agree to it.

The whole thing is worth reading, but here's a chunk of it:

In November 1861 he drafted legislation that he hoped would be introduced in the legislature of Delaware, the smallest of the slave states — and a slave state loyal to the Union. “Be it enacted by the State of Delaware,” Lincoln’s draft began, “that on condition the United States of America will, at the present session of Congress, engage by law to pay . . . in the six per cent bonds of the said United States, the sum of seven hundred and nineteen thousand and two hundred dollars, in five equal annual installments, there shall be neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, at any time after the first day of January in the year of our Lord one thousand, eight hundred and sixty-seven, within the said State of Delaware.” An alternative version of Lincoln’s text would have extended the phase-out of slavery in Delaware over 30 years.

The plan might sound outlandish, but it was wholly within Lincoln’s often misunderstood anti-slavery position. The conventional view today holds that Lincoln’s abolitionist sympathies evolved over time. But the real evolution wasn’t in his opposition to slavery per se, but in his thinking on how to bring about its end. Unlike some of his firebrand anti-slavery colleagues, he understood that any plan for blanket abolition would tear the country apart; indeed, he was proven right when the mere fear of such a plan drove 11 Southern states to secede.

The Delaware legislature voted Lincoln's plan down, and Delaware voters turned their congressman George P. Fisher--Lincoln's ally in the proposed legislation--out of office.  On July 1, 1862, Lincoln met with congressmen from other border slave states to push his idea of state-authorized federally-compensated emancipation, and found insufficient support among them to keep the idea alive.  Three weeks to the day later, he presented the first draft of the Emancipation Proclamation to his Cabinet.

Civil War plays for 2012

Our own Opus 1861: the Civil War in Symphony, a world premiere music theatre piece we're building from about 20 Civil War songs, goes up in April.  There are other Civil War shows going up around the country next year as well--I haven't done an actual count, but it seems like there will be more in 2012 than there were in 2011.

The Washington Stage Guild in downtown Washington DC is producing the world premiere of Amelia:  a Story of Abiding Love by Alex Webb from January 5-29.  It's a two-person show starring the playwright and his wife about a woman trying to free her husband from the Andersonville Confederate prison camp.  It's inspired by one sentence in a journal kept by someone at Andersonville:  "Rumor has it that a woman has come in here after her man."

Half a mile away, Ford's Theatre, itself of course a piece of Civil War history, stages the world premiere of Necessary Sacrifices by Richard Hellesen from January 20 through February 12.  Hellesen has written three other Civil War plays for Ford's; this one is about the relationship between President Lincoln and Frederick Douglass.  You would expect the people at Ford's, which besides being a working theatre is a national museum dedicated to Lincoln's legacy, to have its facts straight, but here's how they describe the play in their season guide:

Richard Hellesen’s new play Necessary Sacrifices imagines the
real-life meetings between abolitionist Frederick Douglass and
President Abraham Lincoln. In the midst of the Civil War, the
president responds to Douglass’s passionate arguments for allowing
African Americans the opportunity to be represented in the Union
Army, thereby fighting for their own freedom.

The problem with this is that Douglass visited Lincoln at the White House for the first time in the summer of 1863, whereas the federal government had begun recruiting African American enlistments in 1862.  By the time they met, Douglass was already the most prominent recruiter of black soldiers for the Union army, and both his sons had enlisted.  So had thousands of other African American men, so many that in May '63 the government had set up the Bureau of Colored Troops to handle the high volume of enlistments.  They met to discuss the unequal treatment of black soldiers which had caused black enlistment to slow down; once Lincoln heard Douglass's bill of particulars, he agreed with him and took steps to remedy matters.

So what gives?  Let's hope that the mistake in Ford's season guide is simply that, a mistake in the season guide.  But I fear that it might accurately reflect the play itself, which would indicate that Ford's has bought into the currently fashionable opinion that Lincoln had to be convinced of the morality of things like emancipation and civil rights.  Lincoln's well-known slowness to adopt emancipation and related issues like black enlistment as his administration's policies was essentially political, in the best sense of the word--to lose support for the war in the tentatively still loyal slave-holding border states would be to lose the war, which would doom any federal effort to do anything at all about slavery in what would then be a foreign country.  It can be argued, though I think not successfully, that his caution was bad political strategy.  But there is nothing in the historical record to support the idea that Lincoln disagreed with the moral rightness of what people like Douglass and Charles Sumner were urging him to do faster.

But I digress.  Touchstone Theatre in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania has a really interesting show coming up for a short run in April (the 13th through the 15th only, the same weekend we preview Opus 1861).  It's a community-based play called A Resting Place, about the lives of area residents during the Civil War.  The playwright is Alison Carey.  Here's a plot summary: "A loving mother decides to break ground for a memorial to the long-dead of our nation’s bloodiest conflict. But when she digs up more than she expects, Bethlehem present comes face to face with Bethlehem past."  Assuming it doesn't involve zombies, this sounds great to me.

By the way, the Touchstone website says this: "Produced in conjunction with Moravian College, Touchstone concludes the Historic Bethlehem Partnership’s commemoration of the 150th anniversary of the American Civil War . . ."  Really, Historic Bethlehem Partnership?   You're concluding your commemoration in 2012, three years before the anniversary period ends?  C'mon guys, step up to the plate.

Finally, for now, the Masquerade Theatre in Houston, which does musicals, is putting together a show they're calling simply The Civil War.   Period songs, diary entries and so on, plus text from Lincoln, Douglass, and Whitman.  It runs May 18-27, and the Masquerade website says it'll be both "gut-wrenching and awe-inspiring."  My goodness.

Guts and awe aside, one cool thing about the graphic Masquerade is using for the show is that the tattered flag it shows is apparently a photo of the actual flag that flew over Fort Sumter.  Nice touch.

Abe's Mini-Me?

This is from the excellent Library of Congress Illustrated Timeline of the Civil War.  I've seen this photo many times, of course, but I've never noticed (maybe because he was always cropped out?) the Lincoln look-alike sitting on the grass in the background over on the left.  Who the heck is that guy?

The Titus Andronicus from New Jersey, not ancient Rome

Indie band Titus Andronicus put this out a couple of years ago--a Civil War-themed punk album called The Monitor, after the Union ironclad vessel.  This is track one, "A More Perfect Union."  One nice touch is that, though Lincoln is usually portrayed as a baritone, this number opens with an excerpt from his Lyceum speech read in a nasal tenor twang, which is supposed to be more like how he sounded.  No idea if they were equally fastidious about the William Lloyd Garrison portrayal that ends the song.

Profile in Caution

Now that President Obama has acquiesced to a fundamentally Republican plan to raise the debt ceiling, which means federal spending cuts that will contract the economy when it needs to be expanded, it may be worth pointing out a couple of Civil War connections to the whole fiasco.

One, of course, is the Fourteenth Amendment, much in the news lately as Obama rebuffed suggestions he invoke its clause that the “validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law . . . shall not be questioned” in order to keep paying the country’s bills no matter what the Congress did.  In a position to need all the leverage in his fight with Congress that he could get, he threw this lever away and had his spokesman say that he didn’t think the amendment applied in this situation.  He’s the constitutional scholar, not me, but there are plenty of other experts who thought he was wrong, and a look at why the clause was written suggests they might have been right.

The Fourteenth of course was one of the Reconstruction amendments, put into place as the states of the old Confederacy took their places again as part of the Union.  Fearful that Southern federal legislators might someday acquire a voting majority in Congress and get it to vote to refuse to pay the U.S. war debt, or to take on some or all of the Confederate debt, Section Four—forbidding both—was included in the amendment.  That is to say, one explicit reason it was written was to prevent Congress from taking a vote that would prevent the federal government from paying its bills. 

How is that different from the recent situation?  I dunno, but the question brings us to the other Civil War connection.  Obama’s hero Lincoln more than once took executive action that he believed crucially important to the nation even when he couldn’t have sworn he had a winning argument for the Supreme Court were he to be challenged there.  His biggest gamble was the Emancipation Proclamation itself.  He knew that as Commander in Chief of the military during a time of armed rebellion, he had the military right to seize private property that was necessary to the war effort, and that the legal status of enslaved blacks as property meant that he could seize them from their owners.  But with all other types of property, after the military necessity has passed, the property is returned to its owner.  The Proclamation declared that the slaves under its jurisdiction were “forever free,” which was essential but constitutionally suspect.  If, after the war was over, a plantation owner whose slaves had been emancipated were to sue the federal government for their return as property, and fought the case all the way up to substantially the same Supreme Court that had issued the Dred Scott decision, the odds might well have been good he’d be given his slaves back.  Lincoln might not have had the authority to make emancipation permanent. 

He was aware of this, and worried about it.  Thankfully, we’ll never know how that hypothetical former slave-owner’s case would have turned out, because Lincoln rushed to send to the states the Thirteenth Amendment outlawing slavery; its ratification meant the Proclamation’s full legality never had to be tested. 

We’ll also never know if the Fourteenth Amendment gambit would have cut the Gordian knot in the debt ceiling crisis, because Obama declined to find out.

Lincoln's courage is part of  his greatness.  Obama, a profile in caution, cannot plausibly have been worried that he might be successfully impeached for continuing to uphold the nation's credit by paying its bills.  John B. Judis of The New Republic has an article online headlined "If Obama Likes Lincoln So Much, He Should Start Acting Like Him."  Well, yes.