As for the "Lincoln" part of this post, it again has to do with Knox and its proud tradition. I have written about this before here but I'll repost the pertinent paragraphs (to get info on the asterisks you'll have to go to the original posting):
In 1858, a previously little-known circuit lawyer named Abraham Lincoln was running for the United States Senate against the incumbent Senator Stephen Douglas. Douglas was a Democrat who had earned the nickname "Little Giant"* because although he was quite short, he was a forceful speaker and a dominant figure in politics. Lincoln was running as a Republican, a party that had just recently been established in Ripon, WI, a primary plank of their platform being that slavery should not spread beyond its current borders.**
Two years before the Civil War these two candidates met seven times all over the state in a series of intense debates, now known as the Lincoln-Douglas debates. One candidate would speak for 60 minutes, then the other for 90 minutes, and then the first would have 30 minutes to reply. On October 7, 1858, they met at Knox College, on a temporary stage outside their Old Main classroom building*, where Douglas publicly stated that the Declaration of Independence was not meant to apply to non-whites. "The Government was made by our fathers on the white basis...made by white men for the benefit of white men and their prosperity forever." Lincoln, on the other hand, perhaps comforted by the abolitionist spirit of Knox College and Galesburg, took the opportunity to announce for the first time, his moral opposition to the institution of slavery.
Following our game on Saturday I took a quick tour of the Knox campus and found Old Main, which has two large plaques posted outside its door celebrating the great debate and its participants. A current student filled me in on the crawling-out-the-window story that I had heard. Looking at the front of the building below you can see the green doors, the two plaques on either side of it (Lincoln to the left, Douglas on the right), and the large window to the left of the door.
Apparently, the debate was held just in front of this building. A large platform had been erected across the face of it that was high enough to block the door and part of the windows. Each candidate had been given a room inside the building to relax and prepare for the debate, and when the time came to take the stage, Douglas, understanding that he couldn't walk out the front directly onto the stage, went out the back and walked around the building and up some steps to the debate platform. Lincoln, in a moment that historians and forensic psychologists could probably spend weeks dissecting, simply opened the window nearest to him, and climbed out onto the platform. All six foot, four inches of him.
 |
| The famous window |
In our current political climate, YouTube footage of this event would have been almost immediately available on Twitter and whatever cable news station was for States' Rights would have ridiculed this gangly, awkward, country bumpkin who taught himself to read by firelight from borrowed books. Alternatively he would be accused of trying to appear folksy and common when really he was lawyer who didn't at all understand what a farm laborers life was like. He would have not only lost the 1858 Senate election in Illinois but likely wouldn't have made it as a candidate for President in 1860 and our world may be very different than it is today. I've thought about this moment all week and I've decided that I like the folksiness of it. I like the lack of pretension it shows. Again, he probably didn't even spend two seconds debating whether to go out the window or all the way around the building and here I am discussing it on a soccer blog in 2013!
No comments:
Post a Comment