by Tom Stilp JD, MBA/MM, LLM, MSC, DBA, April 16, 2025
160 years ago, Abraham Lincoln was shot in the temple, a fact leading the mother of renowned federal district court judge in Illinois, a jurist who lived to be about 100, to name her Orthodox Jewish son, Abraham Lincoln Marovitz, after “the great person who was shot in the temple.”
Despite his lack of formal education, Lincoln had an amazing use of words. Dad always said: “Titles and degrees confer neither intelligence nor understanding.” Without titles nor degrees, Lincoln wrote some of the finest speeches in the English language, for example, stating at Gettysburg: “The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here.” As this In the Loop article attests, the opposite is true.
At the time of Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, 87 years after the Declaration of Independence, thousands were dying on the bloody battlefield, tens of thousands more were wounded or captured, or dying of infectious diseases.
Family members split over issues of slavery or state’s rights. President Lincoln was despised, hated and ridiculed not only in the Southern Confederacy, but in the Northern Union as well. “Lincoln’s War” they said. Newspapers were enormously influential and powerfully partisan.
Those opposed to Lincoln relentlessly attacked his administration and his family. While Lincoln and his wife Mary were privately mourning the death of their 11-year-old son William from typhoid fever (believed to be from contaminated water in the White House), Lincoln was trying to get Congress to end slavery.
People usually think of success as a list of accomplishments, but with Lincoln, and perhaps more importantly, it was a list of obstacles, difficulties, defeats and losses to overcome.
Almost 250 years later, the nation “so conceived and so dedicated” has endured. Given a unique system of laws, and despite our flaws and differences, the US has survived and is one of the most prosperous countries in the World.
It is worth remembering the anniversary and what might have been had Lincoln lived to serve a second term as President.