Abe’s Day

Though today is the day most Americans honor the birth of the man whose likeness graces the penny, last Tuesday, Abraham Lincoln's actual birthday, a major commemoration was planned. First Lady Laura Bush was to be in Hodgenville, Ky., at the site of the 16th president's birth in 1809, to help lead the nation in a celebration worthy of his life, but weather problems forced the cancellation of the event. Still, perhaps it's just as well that the party did not come off. What, after all, would the country do to follow that act next year, on the 200th anniversary of Lincoln's birth?

That question may not be so easy to resolve. As it stands now, we will have to choose whether Washington, D.C., or Hodgenville gets to be the focus of attention next year. Bicentennial commissions have been set up in a dozen states already—aimed at teaching and enlivening and bringing in tourist money. But those panels are all supposed to defer to Hodgenville this year, and Washington next year. Now it looks as though the next Lincoln birthday will resemble Super Tuesday: each state jockeying for position ahead of the others.

Lincoln would not have minded. Competition was normal and healthy, he thought—in wrestling matches, in commerce, in politics … until the shooting started. After taking down a turkey as a boy, he never shot another living thing. Firing upon federal properties or persons always stirred his wrath.

Sourpusses say there is already too much Lincoln worship afoot in the land. They are wrong. In the midst of the Great Depression the world heard a timely question from the first of the scholar-historians to study Abraham Lincoln, James G. Randall of the University of Illinois. "Has the Lincoln theme been exhausted?" he asked a meeting of teachers and researchers. Hadn't, as many felt even then, the fan-historians, like Lincoln's law partner William Herndon, and journalist-historians, like Ida Tarbell, and poet-historians, like Carl Sandburg, milked that cow dry? No, said Randall, who then went on to write a half-dozen key books about Lincoln's life, especially the presidency, asking unpleasant questions about civil rights in wartime and the role of an opposition party. His wife, Ruth Painter Randall, wrote the first serious books about Mary Lincoln and their family life. Exhausted? The Lincolnologists had only just begun.

And many are at it still. Jean Harvey Baker, a pioneer of women's and political-cultural history, made us see Mary Lincoln more clearly. David Herbert Donald shifted his sharp pen from novelist Thomas Wolfe to Lincoln and won two Pulitzer Prizes. Doris Kearns Goodwin has made us see anew the workings of a "team of rivals" known as a cabinet. Allen Guelzo places Lincoln into an intellectual and religious context better than anybody in the old days of slow-ball and Bible-thump.

Books are hardly the only "new thing" about Lincoln. Here are some things that have bobbed to the surface over the last five years:

1.Archaeology at New Salem, Ill., where Lincoln lived from 1831 to 1837, reveals a ground plan of the town that differs from the recollections of old timers, as told to rebuilders in 1920. The archaeologists are still digging. Did Lincoln live in the store he kept or elsewhere? And was he really making some money at it? Was he actually a successful prairie capitalist, rather than the failed entrepreneur of legend?

2. A letter Mary Lincoln wrote to a neighborhood friend, Mary Brayman, inviting the Braymans over for a Saturday-night social. Did it precede, overlap with, or follow Mr. Brayman's decision to hire Lincoln for the biggest legal case he ever handled, involving the Illinois Central Railroad and a $5,000 fee? What role did Mary Lincoln play in her husband's biggest payday? The letter is undated, but there are internal clues that will occupy scholars for some time to come.