Posted by Tina Grazier
Today marks the beginning of a two year celebration of the bicentennial commemoration of Lincolns birth. Abraham Lincoln served this nation during a crucial periodthe following comes from The Lincoln Institutes, Abraham Lincolns Classroom:
Poet Walt Whitman wrote: As is well known, story-telling was often with President Lincoln a weapon which he employd with great skill. Very often he could not give a point-blank reply or commentand these indirections, (sometimes funny, but not always so,) were probably the best responses possible. In the gloomiest period of the war, he had a call from a large delegation of bank presidents. In the talk after business was settled, one of the big Dons asked Mr. Lincoln if his confidence in the permanency of the Union was not beginning to be shakenwhereupon the homely President told a little story:
When I was a young man in Illinois, said he, I boarded for a time with a deacon of the Presbyterian church. One night I was roused from my sleep by a rap at the door, and I heard the deacons voice exclaiming, Arise, Abraham! the day of judgment has come! I sprang from my bed and rushed to the window, and saw the stars falling in great showers; but looking back of them in the heavens I saw the grand old constellations, with which I was so well acquainted, fixed and true in their places. Gentlemen, the world did not come to an end then, nor will the Union now. – President Abraham LincolnWalt, Whitman, Prose Works, p. viii, 7522.
Words of wisdom for those feeling unsettled about the war in the Middle East, the election, or something of a more personal natureHAPPY BIRTHDAY MR. PRESIDENT