• Lincoln's death robbed U.S. of reconciliation

  • February in Illinois gives new meaning to the concept of bleakness.
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    But every Feb. 12 at the Old Statehouse in Springfield, Ill., scores of farmers leave the livestock and the frozen corn and bean fields to sit in the balconies alongside scholars and statesmen for the Abraham Lincoln Association's annual Lincoln Symposium, held since 1908 on Lincoln's birthday.
    Lincoln is buried not far away at the Oak Ridge Cemetery, where generations of Americans have lined up to rub an index finger along the bronze cast of Lincoln's nose in a gesture that is three parts reverence, two parts tradition and one part superstition.
    I went one year with my friend John Power, the publisher of a newspaper in nearby Morgan County and an avid collector of antique books and Lincoln documents. (Across the street from that newspaper, where I worked as editor in the early 90's) stands the handsom0e sandstone Morgan County Courthouse where Lincoln biographer and poet Carl Sandburg found many of the legal papers that he used in writing his biography of the 16th president).
    That afternoon, we heard a lecture by scholar and author Gary Wills about the Gettysburg Address, a talk that would become part of Wills' book "Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words That Remade America."
    Afterward, we stepped from the Old Statehouse into a snowy twilight talking about how that bleak town set amid the bleaker prairies of central Illinois had managed to produce the Great Emancipator.
    "It was as good a place as any and better than most," Power said.
    Had Lincoln not been assassinated in April 1865, he said, the United States might not have had to endure another century and a half of racial enmity between black and white because the end of slavery would not have had to be accompanied by the forced Reconstruction of the Confederacy and the hardening of racial hatred in the hearts of southern whites.
    "Of course we'll never know," he said, "because in America we shoot our troublemakers."
    Only months before, South Africa had released Nelson Mandela, who had spent 27 years in prison for his resistance to the nation's racial apartheid policies. A few years later, he would help lead his country through the first multi-racial election in its history, be chosen as president and help establish the extraordinary Truth and Reconciliation Commission that brought apartheid's victims and perpetrators together to confront the past, to grant amnesty to those who sought it and were willing to take responsibility for the wrongs they committed, and to forgive.
    It helped prevent the bloodbath many feared as political power shifted from the white minority to the black majority.
    And that was what the United States missed when Lincoln died.
    There was no reconciliation, no process that forced slave owners and those who benefited from slavery north and south to stand before a people's tribunal, admit what they did, make reparations where they could, and ask and receive forgiveness from the millions they had wronged.
    Instead, we were left with our own American apartheid, with Jim Crow laws that legally segregated the South and busing demonstrations and red-lining in the North.
    By the time that the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. stood before the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., in 1963 and dreamed of an America where whites and blacks were truly equal, the American Civil War had been over for nearly a century, and every slave and slave owner was dead.
    And perhaps because the United States never had its own reconciliation, King was murdered for resisting the same racial inequalities as the great Mandela, who died peacefully Thursday at age 95.
    One man would be become a martyr, the other the president of his country and its great emancipator.
    Bob Unger is the Editor and Associate Publisher of SouthCoast Media Group, the editor and publisher of The Standard-Times and SouthCoastToday.com. He can be reached by email at runger@s-t.com or by phone at 508-979-4430.
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