Knowing this important and historic holiday is typically ignored (and surely not celebrated) in schools now, allow me to opine.

Please share with your children:

Despite what we’re taught, President Lincoln did not really care about slavery until the last two years of The War Between the States. At this point, he realized a focus on abolition would weaken the south and, more importantly, remove the foreign influence (France, Britain) that had been supporting/sustaining the south through their early successes. The Emancipation Proclamation was therefore strategic, not philanthropic. Indeed, Mr. Lincoln had to wait an additional four months to release it until the strategic Federal win at Antietam 17 Sept 1862 was recognized.

Lincoln, like most northerners, especially the small-town infantry soldiers doing the fighting and dying, cared mostly about preserving the union. Slavery was rarely a thought.

Southerners also didn’t really care about slavery either, but rather states’ rights. Only about 20% of southerners were wealthy enough to own slaves. There was definitely more anti-black racism in the south for a century after the Civil War (1865-1965)— or by northern/coastal liberals’ racist social engineering policies the past four decades—than prior to or during the conflict.

From their formation in the 1854, the GOP platform was preservation of the union; the Dems’ was states rights.

One way or another, slavery would have ended by the late 19th century—whenever the next Republican was president. U.S. Grant probably would not have been president if not for his war service, therefore likely Rutherford B Hayes in 1877 would have “freed the slaves.’’

As I literally sit here as a northern military historian in one of America’s finest civil war museums, in a state with numerous Lincoln tributes and ties, I can tell you that the Civil War had precious little to do with slavery; it was a simple matter of economics. Slavery is just a selling point for academia and the media. The South was NOT evil, and would have been forced to become less agriculturally based and more industrial by the 1880s anyway, ending slavery quickly, and without bloodshed.

That established, Lincoln would probably be a “warmonger” by today’s warped/ignorant standards. He was not as great a hero as some think (extended federal authority too far: jailing the Maryland legislature, suspending habeas corpus and much else that was as illegal as Woodrow Wilson’s totalitarianism, FDR’s interning of Japanese & much else, Bush’s GWOT/Patriot Act et al. It’s called extension of presidential power during wartime!), but he also risked his political career and gave his life as a martyr for the cause. He didn’t have to do this. And this is why, on Friday, we honor him as a nation. (Provided we can find him in the record DC snowfall)

As for General/President Washington, for various military/patriotic reasons – not to mention his unselfishness and humility in comparison to the current narcissist in “power” – he is, quite simply in my view, the Greatest American to Ever Live in my mind. Hail to the First Chief!

Bottom line:

We should take our heroes as we can take them.

We shouldn’t be naive as to consider them super human – as these guys have flaws like every single person on this planet – but the greatness does not have to be diminished.

Ari Kaufman