Next year, the nation celebrates the anniversay of Abraham Lincoln’s birth in Kentucky in 1809, and many historical conferences will mark the event.  Only two among many: one in Louisville, Kentucky, in October 2008 (see www.filsonhistorical.org/callforpapers%202008.html), when scholars will compare and contrast Lincoln with Jefferson Davis.  (Both of them are Kentucky natives, believe it or not.)  Another in March 2009 in Washington, D.C., where historians will focus on Lincoln alone (www.lincoln-institute.org/index.html).

Both conferences welcome students, nonprofessors, and people in general who are interested in these historical figures.

For a moment, let’s think about Lincoln as a writer.  Unlike most presidents today, he wrote his major speeches himself.  And he was a terrific writer, one of the best who has served in the office.  For sheer enjoyment, why not re-read his first inaugural in 1861, the Gettysburg address in 1863, or his correspondence.  He is crystal-clear, always, and succinct.  Those short sentences pack quite a punch!  He can also be eloquent.  The famous opening of the Gettysburg speech, ”Four score and seven years ago,” harks back to the Revolution, as Lincoln ties the issue of emancipation with the ideals of the Revolutionary struggle.  His humor is evident in his correspondence, rather than his speeches.  His dry wit, which entertained juries in Illinois during his career as a lawyer, is still funny today.

Unfortunately, Jefferson Davis’s writings do not give the modern reader much pleasure.  He was at best an ordinary writer, producing long speeches of dull prose before and during the war.  Not much humor, and certainly none of the timeless phrases composed by Lincoln.

Joan E. Cashin received her doctorate from Harvard University, and she is an associate professor of American history at Ohio State University.  She is the author of A Family Venture: Men and Women on the Southern Frontier (1991) and First Lady of the Confederacy: Varina Davis’s Civil War (2006) and the editor of Our Common Affairs: Texts from Women in the Old South (1996) and The War Was You and Me: Civilians in the American Civil War (2002).  She is currently working on a book on the civilian population in the South during the Civil War.