"Now he belongs to the angels."

Today is the bicentennial of the birth of Abraham Lincoln, our greatest president.

Old Abe has been in for a lot of abuse in recent years. Romantic (and sometimes racist) reactionaries buy into the wartime Confederate view of the Great Emancipator as despot and tyrant. Yes, he cut constitutional corners at times- notably suspending the writ of habeus corpus (only Congress had the legal authority to do that). Lincoln's defense of the action was compelling: should one law be scrupulously observed, if the consequence is that all the other laws go unenforced? He had a rebellion to put down and a Union to save. Any president who did not act as Lincoln did would have deserved impeachment.

And no, the South did not have a right to secede. True, several of the Founding Fathers wrote in theoretical support of a right to secession. But their writings as such do not have the force of law, and the Constitution itself does not even hint at such a right. No, the Texas-American Annexation Treaty of 1848 did not contain a clause guaranteeing even Texas the right to secede; that's an urban legend. The full text of the actual treaty- lacking any such provision- is here.

If there is any legal ground for deciding the case in either direction, it has to be as a matter of contract law. And if the Union is viewed as a contract, and the several states as parties to the contract, the permission of all parties would be required to abrogate it. In resorting to "coercion" in order to keep the Union together, Lincoln simply fulfilled his oath of office. He enforced the contract.

On the Left, there are those who want to lift Lincoln out of his time and judge his views on racial equality and emancipation- both of which progressed as his career went on- by contemporary standards. This is just as silly as the neo-Confederate critique of Lincoln. Lincoln at his most reactionary was ahead of his time, and as Lincoln's duty to preserve the Union began not only to permit but to demand emancipation, he acted not reluctantly, but in full conformity with his convictions as to what was right. Frederick Douglass, who knew Lincoln well, also judged him otherwise than do his modern critics on the Left, who utterly lack Douglass's credentials.

And no, Lincoln was not gay. In the Eighteenth Century, when central heating had yet to be invented and motel beds were not nearly as common as they are today, it was common practice for men to sleep in the same bed with no sexual implication whatsoever. In fact, Doris Kearnes Goodwin even points out that Lincoln joked about the number of times he had shared a bed with his friend Joshua Speed in terms that would be unthinkable for a gay man in Victorian times, and certainly for a gay man in public life. Deep same-sex friendships were also the rule at a time when men married later, if at all. And the fact is that people in Lincoln's day were not nearly as obsessed with sex as they are now. Whatever of that nature in Lincoln's life which might have raised eyebrows today at the time was regarded as wholly unremarkable.

Years have passed, and gay activist Gary Kramer has yet to produce those much-balleyhooed "love letters" between Lincoln and Speed, or Speed's supposedly lurid diary;  the publisher of C.A. Tripp's book arguing that Lincoln was of homosexual orientation had to get a second forward, because the author of the first concluded that Tripp simply hadn't made his case. The consensus of the historical community is that the claims of Lincoln's homosexuality are, in the words of Lincoln scholar David Donald, "highly dubious;" historian Gabor Borritt calls Kramer's claims "almost certainly a hoax." For his part, Kramer refuses to allow his alleged evidence to be examined by others until the publication of his book- that is, if he ever gets around to publishing it. No matter what The Simpsons and David Letterman and Salon magazine might insinuate, there is no evidence that Lincoln- awkward as he was with women, and intimate in a platonic sense with various men- ever had a homosexual experience; needless to say, there is absolutely no credible evidence that either of Lincoln's two great loves, Mary Todd Lincoln and Ann Rutledge (Kearns, for one, finds the romantic tale of Lincoln's tragic romance with Ann first related by William Herndon to be wholly credible) ever had a masculine counterpart.

Finally, a few years ago a poll was taken of the post-literate American people asking who was our greatest president. Incredibly, the largest number of people named a flash-in-the-pan modern mediocrity, John F. Kennedy. Kennedy accomplished very little; he wasn't president long enough to have accomplished much. Surely both Roosevelts, Wilson, Jackson, Truman and many others- including his vice-president and successor, Lyndon Johnson- would have to rate ahead of JFK in any rational analysis.

Lincoln is secure in his place in history as our ideal. At the time of our nation's greatest political and moral crisis, he summoned "the better angels of our nature" successfully, laying not only the groundwork for the United States as a modern nation but for the survival of liberty in the modern world. The men who might have been elected in 1860 in Lincoln's place- Stephen A. Douglas, William Seward, Salmon Chase, Edward Bates, and John C. Breckinridge, to name the most likely- were men of ability. But none was a Lincoln. Seward- Lincoln's secretary of state, friend, and closest official confidant, who regarded Old Abe at first with contempt- came to regard him instead with with awe, as the greatest man of his age. Able men come along quite often; many of them have served in the White House. But the greatness- and the goodness- necessary to the crisis Lincoln faced are qualities we were extraordinarily and uniquely blessed as a nation to have had in our chief executive at the hour of our greatest need.

The sad and kindly man who could not bring himself to allow the whole soldier to be shot just because his legs were cowardly, and who met human tragedy with a compassion documented over and over again (and rare in any man who ascends to the leadership of a great nation) mark him as something other than merely another in the series of great men history throws up from time to time. Lincoln was a uniquely good man- and one who personally represented what is best in us as a nation. And it is even a greater tragedy for the South than for the nation as a whole (the neo-Confederates and Stephen Oates- who doesn't buy the notion that Lincoln planned to be as generous to the South as most historians believe- to the contrary) that Lincoln did not survive to help all Americans navigate the treacherous waters of reconstruction.

When he died at the Peterson boarding house across the street from Ford's Theatre the morning after he was shot, Secretary of War Edwin Standon murmured a phrase a version of which appears above the spot in Lincoln's tomb where his body lies: "Now he belongs to the ages." But some of the people who were there remember what Stanton said differently.

Lincoln was not an atheist, as unbelievers like to claim. Neither was he an orthodox Evangelical, as those on the Religious Right would have it. He was a man of broadly Christian, but highly unorthodox, beliefs; he could not bring himself, among other things, to believe in an afterlife. Nevertheless, perhaps that other version of Stanton's statement still is appropriate- the version he may have originally uttered, only to insist later upon a fortuitous mishearing on the part of others.

Some claim that Stanton actually said, "Now he belongs to the angels." And regardless of the question of the eternal destiny of the Great Emancipator, he always did. Lincoln summoned forth, in his own phrase, "the better angels of our nature" at the moment when the nation needed them the most. One of the saddest things about his assassination was that it meant that he would not be there to summon them in the turbulent and divisive era that followed the Civil War.

And the slanders of political and social extremists to the contrary, he still summons them today. He is the ideal American statesman, and whatever one thinks of President Obama, he chose his role model well when he selected our fellow Illinoisan.