Mr President, we must not be enemies, unite Kenyans

[email protected]

With mounting challenges from virtually all points of the compass, amid deepening ethnic fissures and rising political temperatures, President Uhuru Kenyatta may want to pick some lessons from the presidency of Abraham Lincoln.

A self-educated lawyer from humble roots, Lincoln overcame incredible challenges to become President of the United States, serving from March 1861 until his senseless assassination in April 1865. He led the US through the Civil War, a bloody moral, constitutional and political crisis of monstrous proportions — but still managed to preserve the Union, abolish slavery, strengthen the federal government and modernise the economy. In surveys of scholars ranking presidents since the 1940s, Lincoln is consistently rated highly.

Generally, the top three US Presidents are rated as 1. Lincoln; 2. George Washington; and 3. Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Of the many attributes that made Lincoln a good man and a great president, I invite Uhuru to particularly observe his handling of the daunting challenge of uniting a sharply divided nation in the throes of war. Lincoln had already established a reputation as a “unifier” long before he was elected President.

After the Republican Party nominated him for the Illinois Senate race in 1858, he delivered his House Divided Speech, drawing on Mark 3:25: “a house divided against itself cannot stand...” After the emancipation, he made enlisting former slaves in the military official government policy. By the end of 1863, at Lincoln’s direction, General Lorenzo Thomas had recruited 20 regiments of blacks from the Mississippi Valley. Frederick Douglass once observed of Lincoln: “In his company, I was never reminded of my humble origin, or of my unpopular colour”.

His rise to the presidency was itself defined by sharp divisions. On November 6, 1860, Lincoln was elected the 16th President of the United States, beating Democrat Stephen A. Douglas, John C. Breckinridge of the Southern Democrats, and John Bell of the new Constitutional Union Party. He was the first president from the Republican Party.

His victory was entirely due to the strength of his support in the North and West; no ballots were cast for him in 10 of the 15 Southern slave states, and he won only two of 996 counties in all the Southern states. Lincoln received 1,866,452 votes, Douglas 1,376,957, Breckinridge 849,781, and Bell 588,789. Turnout was 82.2 per cent, with Lincoln winning the free Northern states, as well as California and Oregon. Douglas won Missouri, and split New Jersey with Lincoln. Bell won Virginia, Tennessee, and Kentucky, and Breckinridge won the rest of the South.

As Lincoln’s election became evident, secessionists made clear their intent to leave the Union before he took office the next March. On December 20, 1860, South Carolina took the lead by adopting an ordinance of secession; by February 1, 1861, Florida, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas followed. Six of these states then adopted a constitution and declared themselves to be a sovereign nation, the Confederate States of America.

President Buchanan and President-elect Lincoln refused to recognise the Confederacy, declaring secession illegal. The Confederacy selected Jefferson Davis as its provisional President on February 9, 1861.

Lincoln tried hard to strike a compromise. In his first inaugural address on 4 March 1861, he ended his address with an appeal to the people of the South: “We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies ....” The failure of the Peace Conference of 1861 signaled that legislative compromise was impossible. Meanwhile, Lincoln and the Republican leadership agreed that the dismantling of the Union could not be tolerated. But he would remain gracious and humane even after winning the war. Shortly after Lee’s surrender, a general had asked Lincoln how the defeated Confederates should be treated, and Lincoln replied, “Let ‘em up easy.”

His firm stand on slavery bespeaks of a President not afraid to make tough choices. On June 19, 1862, endorsed by Lincoln, Congress passed an Act banning slavery on all federal territory. His Emancipation Proclamation of September 22, 1862 declared free the slaves in 10 states not then under Union control. Lincoln’s comment on the signing of the Proclamation was: “I never, in my life, felt more certain that I was doing right, than I do in signing this paper.”

He would later champion the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution, enacted on December 6, 1865 to “clinch the whole matter” of outlawing slavery.

The writer is Budalang’i MP and Chair of Parliament’s Public Accounts Committee