Abraham Lincoln vs Harry S. Truman: Two Paths to the Same Office

Who they are and where they stand

Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865) was the sixteenth President of the United States and the political leader who guided the nation through the Civil War, preserved the Union, and issued the Emancipation Proclamation that began the legal abolition of slavery in America. His assassination by Confederate sympathizer John Wilkes Booth at Ford's Theatre on April 14, 1865 — five days after Lee's surrender — transformed him into the martyred savior of American democracy and established him at the apex of nearly every presidential ranking. Lincoln's origins were genuinely humble: born in a log cabin in Kentucky, largely self-educated, a frontier lawyer from Illinois who had served one undistinguished term in the House of Representatives before his 1858 Senate debates with Stephen Douglas made him a national figure. His election in November 1860 triggered secession of the Southern states before he had taken office, and the Confederacy fired on Fort Sumter in April 1861, three weeks after his inauguration. He thus inherited a war he had not started. As a war leader, Lincoln combined political shrewdness with genuine moral growth. He came to the presidency as a man committed to stopping slavery's expansion but not to its immediate abolition; he left it — or rather was taken from it — as the president who had signed the Thirteenth Amendment's passage. His Gettysburg Address of November 1863 — 272 words — remains the most celebrated piece of presidential rhetoric in American history, redefining the Civil War's purpose from union-preservation to equality-realization. His Second Inaugural Address of March 1865, with its closing "with malice toward none, with charity for all," set the tone for a reconstruction policy of magnanimity that his death made impossible. Harry S. Truman (1884–1972) was the thirty-third President of the United States (1945–1953), who assumed office suddenly upon Franklin Roosevelt's death in April 1945 and faced a cascade of decisions that shaped the post-war world: the use of atomic bombs against Japan, the establishment of NATO and the Marshall Plan, the containment of Soviet expansion, and the conduct of the Korean War. Despite leaving office with low approval ratings, historians have consistently ranked him among the ten greatest American presidents in retrospect. A Missouri haberdasher and county judge who reached the Senate through the Democratic machine of Tom Pendergast, Truman was a Washington outsider when Roosevelt chose him as vice-presidential running mate in 1944 as a concession to the conservative wing of the party. He had been vice president for only 82 days when Roosevelt died. The Truman Doctrine (1947) committed the United States to supporting free peoples resisting communist subjugation; the Marshall Plan (1948) provided $13 billion to rebuild Western Europe and prevented the economic desperation that communists could exploit; NATO (1949) created the permanent military alliance that anchored Western Europe's security; and the Korean War decision (1950) established the principle that communist aggression would be met with military force. His decision to fire General Douglas MacArthur in 1951 — a genuinely dangerous military commander who was publicly contradicting civilian foreign policy — was the most important assertion of civilian control over the military in modern American history.