Abraham Lincoln for March 1, 2009 By Carol Taylor [email protected] Last month marked the 200th birthday of our 16th president, Abraham Lincoln. A recent poll of professional historians ranked Lincoln as the best president of the United States. In addition, Abraham Lincoln is one of the most popular cultural figures in American history. Countless books, artwork, poetry and sculpture of Lincoln can be found. In the W. Walworth Harrison Public Library alone, we have twenty-three biographies of Lincoln, in English and Spanish, for adults and children, and in audio, video and print. Plus you can find more than 158 titles relating to the Civil War. One of our new Lincoln books, Tried by War: Abraham Lincoln as Commander in Chief by James M. McPherson was one of two winners of the Lincoln Prize given by Gettysburg College in Pennsylvania. The other was Lincoln and His Admirals: Abraham Lincoln, the U. S. Navy and the Civil War by Craig L. Symonds. The two men shared the $50,000 cash prize and each took home a bust of Lincoln for his mantel. Both authors are professor emeritus, McPherson at Princeton and Symonds at the U. S. Naval Academy. This was the second time McPherson won the prize, making him one of the leading authorities on the Civil War alive today. Anything he writes is extremely readable, accurate and worthy of one’s attention. Ironically, Lincoln’s successor Andrew Johnson was listed as the next to last on the list, one step above President James Buchanan who served just before Lincoln. Buchanan is blamed for not doing more to prevent the war while Andrew Johnson deserves much credit for the disaster of Republican Reconstruction following the war. Last month, Ancestry.Com bought the rights the Abraham Lincoln Papers at the Library of Congress, Manuscript Division, part of the American Memory Project. The collection contains approximately 20,000 documents, all images of the original records. The papers cover the period from 1833 to 1897 but the majority is from the 1850s to 1865. They include correspondence, memos, notes, drafts of speeches and other such documents. Many of the documents, primarily those written by Lincoln himself, have been annotated by the Lincoln Studies Center. These annotations provide explanations and bring historical context to the documents. An alternate free site where these papers can be accessed is American Memory of the Library of Congress at http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/alhtml/athome.html. This is a perfect site for students, historians and genealogists. However, if you have a Confederate soldier in the Civil War, don’t expect his letter to get to Washington. Although, there is one piece of correspondence from a Midwestern father who had one son fighting in the Union Army and the other had fled to Louisiana to join the Confederate Army. The father asked Lincoln is he could prevent the two brothers from fighting against each other. Lincoln promoted the Union brother to Lieutenant and put him in an office. This week I was perusing the Greenville Messenger of 1921 and discovered that banks were closed here in Greenville on February 12th for Lincoln’s birthday. So almost sixty years after the war, Lincoln was held in high regard here in Texas. .