Leadership in a Time of Crisis:
The Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Symposium
Saturday, March 21, 2009
9 a.m. - 3:30 p.m.
Abromson Community Education Center, University of Southern Maine, Portland
The Rise of Abraham Lincoln Bruce Chadwick (bio), New Jersey City University Before he was the leader of a nation torn apart by a Civil War, Abraham Lincoln was a young man growing up during tumultuous times in Illinois. Historian Bruce Chadwick explains his rise to power from his first unsuccessful race for the state legislature to his election as President. His talk will examine Lincoln’s extraordinary political skills, his hatred of slavery, and how the crisis of the 1850s brought him back into politics and catapulted him towards the White House.
Lincoln’s High Wire Act Patrick Rael (bio), Bowdoin College As a politician running for office in a badly divided democracy, Abraham Lincoln faced many challenges, most obviously a looming civil war. Abraham Lincoln deftly steered a democratic society through the travails of this crisis, all without ruining himself politically. While that acrobatic feat defines his legacy, the tightrope walk he performed in the decades before the war offers instructive lessons on Lincoln’s America. Lincoln’s pre-war political positions negotiated a delicate, shifting balance between the racism that pervaded the Northern states and a growing sentiment that slavery undermined something essential about the Union. In the end, Lincoln’s take on these views won the day, and the Presidency. Understanding how that happened reveals much about how the Civil War came to be.
In the Aftermath of the Lincoln Assassination Elizabeth Leonard (bio), Colby College Abraham Lincoln’s shocking assassination in April 1865, just as the Civil War was drawing to a close, threw the nation into chaos. The Federal government divided sharply over a number of questions associated with his murder, including how to punish the assassins, how far up the Confederate chain of command the assassination plot could be traced, and how to make his death-like the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Union soldiers-have real and lasting meaning. Leonard’s talk will ponder this divide and these questions, focusing on the struggle between those in the federal government who were determined to enforce Reconstruction as a means to avenge Lincoln’s death (and the war itself), and those who aimed to forgive the rebel South and forget the plight of the recently freed slaves.
The Afterlife of Abraham Lincoln Thomas Brown (bio), University of South Carolina Lincoln has been memorialized in literature, the visual arts and theatre. In this engaging presentation, Thomas Brown will examine the ways in which America has remembered Abraham Lincoln, particularly in public monuments. Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the Civil War president played a key role in a variety of debates over regionalism, race relations and governmental power. Each of these debates offers a different perspective on the Lincoln Memorial, dedicated on the Mall in Washington, D.C., in 1922. An awareness of this ongoing tradition of Lincoln commemoration informs our understanding of the 2009 Bicentennial.
Presented by the Maine Humanities Council, Maine Historical Society and the American and New England Studies Program at USM
