From the springs near his hometown in Kentucky to today’s divided politics, Lincoln’s life provides a lens on whether his “better angels” can overcome division and unite America in 251.
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Hodgenville, Kentucky – Climb 56 steps cut into pink granite to find a neoclassical temple that looks like it was plucked from ancient Greece and deposited on a Kentucky hilltop. One for each year of President Abraham Lincoln’s life.
If the first eight steps, rising among the estate’s oak and maple trees, can be seen as his birth and childhood in the state, the stairs at the top reflect the struggles and trials of his later years.
Split. Slavery. civil war. It was all written on the face of a man who spent his presidency uniting a country that seemed to be tearing itself apart.
Recently, at the Lincoln Birthplace National Historical Park near Hodgenville, Kentucky, visitors discovered a ramshackle one-room log cabin inside the monument, symbolizing the humble origins of the effort that helped the nation reach its 500th anniversary and enter its next chapter.
“Without Lincoln, America wouldn’t exist for 250 years,” said Harold Holzer, a prominent Lincoln author and scholar.
For some visitors, the monument commemorating one of the country’s most important chapters also drew unsettling parallels to today’s division. The American experiment appears to be beset by controversy once again – over what the country is, who belongs to it, and whether its oldest institutions can hold.
“There was a lot of division,” said Keisha Conrad, a 46-year-old mother of three from Kentucky. She tried to get into the president’s cabin, where she praised him for his work on equality. “I’m kind of worried.”
There has been a lot of turmoil in recent years. Widening cultural disparities. Attack on Congress to overturn the election. The right to free speech is put to the test. Political demonization and misinformation. Survey shows fewer Americans value democracy.
Nicole Hemmer, a history professor at Vanderbilt University, said this is not a civil war over slavery, but today’s context lends to a more somber and introspective Memorial Day mood.
“I think we’re at a very important historical crossroads, and I think that’s why Lincoln speaks to people,” she said.
Lincoln author and University of Florida professor Allen Guelzo argues that division is part of the price of democracy.
Mr. Guelzo said President Lincoln believed in the power of democracy to weather storms, and that problems could be resolved by appealing to what he called the “better angels of our nature.”
That there can be room for disagreement while avoiding an unbearably divided house.
Conrad, who visited his birthplace at Sinking Spring Farm, said Lincoln’s lessons stayed with him. Her hope for this 251-year-old country is that more people will help bridge the gap, not just between political parties, but across neighborhood fences and schoolyards.
“I just hope things get better,” she said.
From childhood to a respected and reviled president
Ten miles to the northeast, a two-lane road winds through forested hills and fields to a small valley with copper-colored water flowing through limestone stream beds.
This is Knob Creek Farm, where Lincoln lived from the ages of 2 to 8 and where he settled in 1811 after being evicted from Sinking Spring in a land dispute. They grew corn, tobacco, and pumpkins and attended a Baptist church.
A rebuilt log cabin and a 1933 tavern that now serves as a visitor center mark the site that inspired the classic national story of Lincoln’s rise from log cabin to White House.
But this location, located on the Old Cumberland Trail between Louisville and Nashville, also planted the seeds of what was to come. He saw enslaved people in chains marching down this road to be sold to plantations in the Deep South.
That image defined his presidency and shaped the belief that led to the Emancipation Proclamation: that a nation could not endure forever half-slave and half-free.
By the time Lincoln was elected president in 1860, slavery had already divided the nation. Congress at one point stopped hearing anti-slavery petitions because they were too divisive. Some Southern postmasters withheld abolitionist tracts. There was political violence.
“In the lead up to the Civil War, they kept trying political solutions, and those political solutions didn’t work,” Hemmer said, noting there are echoes of compromise that are increasingly rare today. “There are two conflicting views about what this country should look like, and we have to sort it out.”
Lincoln would refuse to divide the nation, but the war would come at a staggering cost of hundreds of thousands of lives, for which he would be both reviled and revered. There were moments during the war when rights were threatened, such as the suspension of habeas corpus, a legal mechanism that prevents arbitrary detention.
But it kept the union together. And that led to the 13th Amendment, which abolished slavery, and the 14th Amendment, which guaranteed equal protection and due process, and laid the foundation for the civil rights laws of the 1960s, including the Voting Rights Act. They were also given birthright citizenship. Some of those issues are being discussed again today.
Standing near the cabin and reading a placard was Philipp Wolfgang, 54, a natural gas plant worker from Ohio who was visiting with his family. He marveled at the anguish Lincoln must have felt as the country was crumbling under his watch and he tried to keep it together.
He acknowledged some of Lincoln’s obligation to work with rivals for the greater good.
Even though seven states seceded, President Lincoln said at his first inauguration, “We must not be enemies.”
Lincoln’s legacy conveyed hope for the next chapter of a nation that continues to champion the freedoms that “live and keep alive.”,” Wolfgang said.
“Even if we disagree, at least we can agree that we are Americans, and we want to see this country succeed,” he said. “That’s what I want for my children in the future.”
“We could use him by now.”
Sandwiched between his birthplace and boyhood home, Hodgenville, a town of 3,300 people, is a living testament to Lincoln’s origin story.
Lincoln National Bank, Lincoln Village Apartments, Lincoln Boulevard, and a statue of Lincoln sit in Lincoln Square. Nearby is the Lincoln Museum, filled with artifacts and wax dioramas spanning his life, from his early cabin days to the end of Ford’s Theater.
Rob Thurman, the museum’s deputy director, said some visitors can’t help but connect Lincoln’s American era with today’s politics.
“I think the comment I hear most often is that we could definitely use him by now,” he said.
To this day, some people still try to pick a fight by calling Lincoln a unifier or a divider, someone to be admired or hated, or linking him to modern-day divisions.
Iris LaRue, Museum directors avoid such conversations.
“Anti-Lincoln people are anti-Lincoln and I’m not going to say anything to change them,” she said.
It’s certainly a difficult time to tell history. President Donald Trump’s executive order targeting displays that are “disparaging to Americans” has led some sites to remove billboards about slavery and the genocide of Native Americans.
In Portland, Oregon, a statue of Lincoln, which was removed from its pedestal in 2020 amid nationwide social justice protests after the killing of George Floyd, will be reinstalled. Protesters at the scene spray-painted references to the 1862 death order he approved for 38 of the 303 Dakota men sentenced to death by a court for killing settlers.
While this country debated its past, Stan Franklin came to the memorial to think about its future.
The 64-year-old had come from Oklahoma with his wife and son to walk up the 56 steps next to Sinking Spring, a sinkhole that opens into the karst aquifer where Lincoln first drank.
If this anniversary is marked by turmoil, Franklin said, so was the nation’s bicentennial in 1976, when the country had just witnessed the resignation of President Richard Nixon, the Vietnam War and the OPEC oil embargo. One hundred years ago, in 1876, historians said the centennial occurred amidst the violence and economic devastation that followed the Civil War.
Admittedly, the 250th day is full of anxiety. But the monument to some here served as a reminder that Lincoln believed that democracy was resilient, but that it could not be taken for granted. Generations have had to choose it.
Franklin now has grandchildren. 15 months old. He wants to inherit a prosperous country.
He looked up at the monument engraved with Lincoln’s guide lights. “Have no malice towards anyone, but benevolent to all.” That gave him confidence for the next chapter of this country.
Next to him, the water from Lincoln’s sinking spring was still cold.
