Lincoln and Darwin

Much is being made in this bicentennial year of Lincoln's birth of the stunnning coincidence that Charles Darwin was also born on the very same day, February 12, 1809. Nobody can possibly think of another world class coincidence like it, short of the surreal fact that Thomas Jefferson and John Adams died on the same day in 1826--and on July 4, yet.

But Lincoln and Darwin--two of the preeminent giants of the 19th millenium, born on the same day in the same year--only hours apart! And what a chronological couple those two make! No two men have left such huge handprints on our world. Lincoln, by seeing the Union through the agony of civil war and disunion, saved the America that has became arguably the greatest and most powerful nation on the planet, and the beacon of republican and democratic government that nearly all nations strive to emulate. In succeeding, he also rooted out slavery in its last major entrenched stronghold in the world. Had he not succeeded, history would have been entirely different. He left us a legacy that has endured and survived the test of time.

And so did Darwin leave a huge world-changing legacy that has stood the test of time. He unlocked the secret of all life on earth with his study of the origin and evolution of species, including man. His core theory for a century and a half has stood the test of the most intense scrutiny in the history of science. And it has endured. One scientist has said "I am struck with the fact daily that the more information we accumlate, the more validation we find of Darwin's theory." Another has said, "I think this [today] is a new golden age of evolutionary science. But what we're really doing is fleshing out Darwin's idea in ever greater detail." Indeed, as yet another scientist has said, "Darwin didn't know 99 percent of what we know," but, "the 1 percent he did know was the most important part."

What these two giants left us, the important part they left us, whether they knew it would be so or not, is even more mind-boggling than the fact they were born on the same day. Life has its wonders.

The Stakes

What Abraham Lincoln surely saw as the Union seemed to be dividing, splitting, and shattering under him, was unacceptable emasculation. At stake was not just whether slavery would live or die. It was not just whether republican government, "the last best hope of earth" would succeed or fail--as important as those two outcomes were. There was a host of very practical reasons he could not let the rebellion succeed, to not let this "government of the people, by the people, and for the people" perish from the earth.

He doubtless clearly saw that a divided Union, a separate nation in the South and a separate nation in the North, which was what the South was seeking--to save slavery and its political leverage-- would have given us not the single united nation that would become the greatest in the world by the next century. It would have given us instead two second rate operations with little separate leverage, power, and clout in a growing world. To let the Union divide would be to emasculate America, water down its power and influence across the board. To be a great nation the Union had to be a union, a single hegemony, a single powerful whole, unified economically and in every way across the board, not an entity split in two.

His America was not just a geographic whole, but an economic, cultural, and social whole, inextricably linked and interdependent in so many ways. We simply could not afford to balkanize and diminish the muscle of this young republic by splitting into two separate nations going their own way. It simply would not do. As divided nations, both would be worse off. It was a sad truth that the South either did not see in its resolve to save slavery and the Southern way of life, or did not want to see.

Lincoln saw it, and despite what it would cost in lives, had to do what he eventually succeeded in doing--holding the entire enterprise together. Because he succeeded America become indeed the greatest power on earth.