'HONEST' ABE: SAVIOR?

My graduate professor commented to us as to why Abraham Lincoln was called 'Honest' Abe: 'For the same reason you call a tall man 'Shorty.' That's not the national myth, of course, a myth perpetuated this Easter season in Richard Wightman Fox's column 'The President Who Died for Us':

by April 1865 the majority of Northerners and Southern blacks took him as no ordinary person. He had been offering his body and soul all through the war and his final sacrifice, providentially appointed for Good Friday, showed that God had surely marked him for sacred service.

At a mass assembly in Manhattan five hours after Lincoln's death, James A. Garfield — the Ohio congressman who would become the second assassinated president 16 years later — voiced the common hesitancy, then went on to claim the analogy: "It may be almost impious to say it, but it does seem that Lincoln's death parallels that of the Son of God."

Jesus had saved humanity, or at least some portion of it, from eternal damnation. Lincoln had saved the nation from the civic equivalent of damnation: the dissolution that had always bedeviled republics. "Jesus Christ died for the world," said the Rev. C. B. Crane in Hartford. "Abraham Lincoln died for his country."

Garfield should have known better, of course. And Fox is aware of the political calculation involved in the instant hagiography of Lincoln, as well as the rather dubious religious convictions of the President. But even Fox falls victim to the myth:

Seven score and one years have passed since Good Friday 1865, and Lincoln has always remained his own man. In his final years, he had set his own course by balancing a pressing sense of the rule of Providence with a persistent belief in the power of reason. Still, he can — and should — stand as historic demonstration that a republican hero's sacrifice for the people comes very close to Christ's ideals of self-denial and self-giving.

I think I prefer to have my Savior a little more sinless.

[For a clearer understanding of Lincoln read M.E. Bradford's fine writings on the subject. And thanks again to theosebes reader SB for the link.]