The San Francisco Unified School District decided Jan. 26 that former President Abraham Lincoln did not deserve to have his name on their schools.
The decision makes sense to me, but not in the way the school board intended. If a school board is so foolish that it deems Lincoln’s name unworthy, then the school district does not deserve to use Lincoln’s name.
These pseudohistorians on the board are seeking to discredit the man who freed enslaved people and preserved the Union — two feats we now take for granted but were far from a guarantee in Lincoln’s day.
Rather than considering Lincoln holistically, the school board chose to focus on his order for the mass execution of 38 Dakota Native Americans in 1862.
Three hundred three Dakota Native Americans were initially sentenced to death by a military court for killing hundreds of white settlers who took over their land. Lincoln took the time to review each trial record and commuted the sentences of 265 of those charged, according to Eric Foner’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book, “The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery.”
Never mind that commuting so many sentences was politically unpopular — this reality is inconvenient, and thus, irrelevant.
A cursory knowledge of Lincoln shows he was constantly trying to reach the golden mean, which made him a target of the Confederates and the Radical Republicans.
“Anxious to not act with so much clemency as to encourage another outbreak on the one hand, nor with so much severity as to be real cruelty on the other, I caused a careful examination of the records of trials to be made,” Lincoln said in a message to the Senate Dec. 11, 1862.
The above quote paints a fair picture of Lincoln. He did not want to submit to the mob violence that would have killed more than 300 men, but he was also bound by his oath to faithfully execute the laws.
I will not defend the morality of the decision to have a mass execution because I oppose the death penalty. But I will consider Lincoln’s record holistically and present him not as a savior but as a good yet imperfect man.
Lincoln’s most significant achievement was abolishing slavery. Contrary to what is taught in school, the Emancipation Proclamation did not free enslaved people. Instead, it was a signal to the South that the war was about slavery and its inevitable extinction, not just preserving the Union.
However, Lincoln did oversee the Union’s victory over the Confederacy, which led to the passage of the 13th Amendment that abolished slavery.
Despite his tangible accomplishments, one of Lincoln’s greatest gifts to the United States was his words — a unique American cocktail of humor, reason and virtue.
Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address has endured as one of the great speeches in American history. The Gettysburg Address showcased not only Lincoln’s rhetorical mastery but also his humility.
“The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here,” he said.
If only Lincoln had known how many times politicians would quote his speech more than a century after his death.
Lincoln’s famous 1858 speech, “House Divided,” correctly predicted the nation could not remain “half slave and half free.”
In a speech in Chicago on July 10, 1858, Lincoln gave a cogent argument as to why he hated slavery and why the institution was on the path to extinction.
In the Lincoln-Douglas debates of 1858, Lincoln needled former Sen. Stephen Douglas for his spineless support for popular sovereignty. These debates catapulted Lincoln to national stardom and aided his successful presidential campaign in 1860.
And in his second inaugural address, he spoke of healing, “with malice toward none; with charity for all,” a suggestion we could all learn from in today’s polarized political landscape.
The full texts are all worth reading and add immense value to Lincoln’s legacy.
If you consider Lincoln’s entire career, you’ll see he wasn’t a problematic president and an entirely bad man — certainly not one unworthy of having a school named after him.
Monday is Presidents’ Day, a day on which we honor former presidents Lincoln and George Washington, who, similarly to Lincoln, had problems of his own outside of office but is still revered for his groundbreaking presidency.
I’m not going to ask you to celebrate Lincoln on this day. After all, I’m named after him, and I won’t spend all of Monday poring over his speeches and writings. All I ask is to be spared from pseudo-historical posts defaming our greatest president.
