Daily Times

On one nice April day in Springfield, the capital of Illinois, my business finished early. I had a few hours before the flight home so I asked the concierge if there was a must-see destination in town. He named Lincoln’s tomb. I had always thought he was buried in the Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia. But he was buried here because he had spent many years in Springfield practicing law.

The tomb was situated in a garden where I read he had met his future wife. The tomb stood in the center, stately and majestic.

It was a fitting tribute to one of America’s greatest presidents who had put an end to the Civil War that had threatened to tear the nation apart. For that reason alone, Lincoln would go down in history. His assassination at the Ford Theater in Washington, DC secured his position in the pantheon of world leaders. I walked in the garden and tried to imagine what Lincoln must have felt like dating his future wife. Perhaps, years later, he had returned to the garden to reminisce about the days of his youth and to find solitude.

Lincoln’s legacy lives on. His face appears on the ubiquitous penny coin. The Lincoln Monument in Washington is one of the most visited in the US capital. Visitors from around the globe listen to his speech at the Universal Studios in Los Angeles

Then I entered the tomb. It had several chambers with his words inscribed on the walls. His wife and children were buried in a vault. And then there was his grave. It was a solemn and sober moment for me as I stood in front of it. Behind the grave, high up on the wall,there was the phrase: “Now he belongs to the ages.”

It transported me to that English class in high school where we had been assigned a play about Lincoln. It discussed how he came to be selected by the Republican Party as their presidential candidate. They had finished interviewed him when he voluntarily left the room so they could freely arrive at a decision. They picked him, he ran for office, and won on a campaign to abolish slavery.

The South did not want to abolish slavery and that led to the terrible Civil War. Four years later, the South was defeated and Lincoln was re-elected for a second term. Tragically, within a couple of months, he was assassinated by a well-known stage actor who he had admired. Lincoln was but 56 years old.

On the last page of the play in my class, as his body lay in bed and a service had just been performed, a man standing next to him murmured, “Now he belongs to the ages.”

Several years ago, I had stopped at Gettysburg in Pennsylvania while driving from Washington, DC to the Niagara Falls in Canada. Dusk was settling in and casting a shadow on the rows and rows of graves that lay in front of us. It felt spooky.

My mind conjured Lincoln standing on the platform giving his“Gettysburg address.”It was one of the shortest and possibly most effective orations in world history, to the point and full of pathos. Every man, woman and child in America seemed to know it by heart.

Books had been written explaining its meaning and discussing how it had evolved through multiple drafts. Finally, on the 19th of November, 1863, Lincoln gave the speech which included these statements: “We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

“But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate — we can not consecrate — we can not hallow — this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here.”

Several years later, I picked up a book by Fred Kaplan, “Lincoln: The Biography of a Writer.”I discovered that Lincoln had no formal schooling. He was a self-taught man with humble beginnings in Kentucky. He had grown up in Indiana and then moved to Springfield, Illinois, where he practiced law. Kaplan says that early in his childhood, Lincoln developed a passion for reading. There were very few books in his house so he would read them over and over again until they became second nature to him. They would furnish him with a reservoir of aphorisms from which he would draw almost continuously, first in his legal career and then in his political life.

His father was a devout Baptist so it is not surprising that he was a vociferous reader of the Bible. In particular, the stories of the Old Testament haunted him and stayed with him throughout his life. Despite this reading of the scripture, Lincoln did not become particularly religious in his adult life. It was only now and then that he went to church, seeing it largely as a social activity. Later on, he discovered Lord Byron, Robert Burns and William Shakespeare.

As he got on in life, he got to see the power of language in influencing people and shaping their views. Appearances to the contrary notwithstanding, none of his major speeches were extemporaneous, including the eulogy he gave at Gettysburg. While it was the sword of the Northern Armies commanded by General Ulysses S. Grant that put an end to the Civil War, it was the force of Lincoln’s pen that preserved the Union.

Lincoln’s legacy lives on. His face appears on the ubiquitous penny coin. The Lincoln Monument in Washington is one of the most visited in the US capital. Visitors from around the globe listen to his speech at the Universal Studios in Los Angeles. On a recent trip to Boise, Idaho I saw that his words were inscribed on a pillar in front of the state capitol building.

But like any great man, Lincoln has his detractors. Some think that he fought the South just to save the Union, not because he believed in racial equality. And some in the South hold him guilty for launching a “war of northern aggression.”

While passing through a confederate cemetery which was adorned with many statues in Richmond, Virginia, I asked the driver if one of them was a statue of Lincoln. He said there is one at the other end of town, and it is often pelted with rotten tomatoes. He does indeed “belong to the ages.”

The writer can be reached at ahmadfaruqui@gmail.com

Published in Daily Times, May 25^th 2018.