Remembering Honest Abe

EDINBURG — “A house divided against itself cannot stand.”

Those words have clear relevance to today’s political scene, but they were uttered by Abraham Lincoln, the 16th president of the United States, in June 1858. Today is the 199th anniversary of Lincoln’s birthday, who was assassinated April 14, 1865 soon after the Civil War ended.

People like Noel Benavides, 65, of Roma, still revere him.

“He means individual freedom,” said Benavides, treasurer of the Roma Economic Development Council and a city councilman.

“He’s a man who symbolizes America, came from very meager beginnings to being the president of the United States,” Benavides said. “Anything is possible in a country like the U.S., a melting pot of the world that’s trying to set up a fence.”

Benavides has strongly opposed the federal government’s plans to build a fence along the U.S.-Mexico border.

Lincoln was born in Kentucky to Virginian parents of undistinguished families.

“Lincoln made extraordinary efforts to attain knowledge while working on a farm, splitting rails for fences, and keeping store at New Salem, Illinois,” says www.whitehouse.gov. “He was a captain in the Black Hawk War, spent eight years in the Illinois legislature, and rode the circuit of courts for many years. His law partner said of him, ‘His ambition was a little engine that knew no rest.’”

More than 140 years after Lincoln’s death, he is still known by many for freeing the slaves, says James Finck, a history lecturer at the University of Texas-Pan American.

“I know that’s become kind of generic: freeing the slaves and keeping the country together during the Civil War,” he said.

However, the Lincoln story is a bit more complicated than that. Lincoln’s main goal was to keep the union, in other words, The United States of America, together. Finck paraphrased a statement Lincoln made to the effect that, if he could free all the slaves and save the Union, he would do so. If he could free none of the slaves and save the Union, he would do that, too.

Lincoln, he said, was not an abolitionist in the sense that he wanted to end slavery in the South. However, he and the Republican Party wanted to stop the spread of slavery into other areas and opposed Kansas entering the Union as a slave state.

The Emancipation Proclamation, issued in 1862 and taking effect in January 1863, freed only the slaves in the rebellious South.

“He freed the slaves out of military necessity,” he said. “By freeing the slaves in the South, he hurt the South.”

However, slaves in states that remained part of the Union, such as Kentucky, Maryland and Missouri, were not freed by the Emancipation Proclamation. Some areas of the rebellious Southern states — Virginia, Arkansas, Louisiana and Tennessee — came under federal control. Slaves in those areas also were not freed by the proclamation.

All the slaves were freed by the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution in 1865.

Regardless of the reasons, Lincoln’s actions did result in officially banning slavery, Finck said. His impact on the country had other far-reaching implications on the United States today.

“A lot of people during that time would have let the South go,” he said. “They opposed the war. Lincoln was not a popular president when he was president. It’s similar to today. We are in the middle of a very bloody war. A whole part of the population is saying, ‘Why are we fighting this war?’ He believed in preserving the Union.”

Ideas of federal government changed after the Civil War, too.

“Before the Civil War, people would say, ‘The United States are a great country’,” he said. “After the war, they said, ‘The United States is a great country.’”

Travis Whitehead covers features and entertainment for The Monitor. You can reach him at (956) 683-4452. For this and more local stories, visit www.themonitor.com.