THE BOY THAT DEFY THE ODDS

Table of Contents

ABRAHAM LINCOLN

The boy was born in dirt. Living in a one-room dusty floor cabin in Kentucky. His mother, Nancy was his home teacher who died when he was nine, of “milk sickness.” The grief of his mother's death was a kind of soil from which he grew.

He was a serial failure. He failed in business, failed to get into law school, he was defeated for state legislature, for Congress, for the Senate, twice. He lost the woman he loved to fever. His own fiancée called off their wedding. He carried these losses not as scars, but as lessons etched into his bones. Each defeat taught him how to listen, each heartbreak taught him the shape of human sorrow.

In 1861 he became the president of the United States of America, the country was in the tick of a civil war, secesion was threatened, the fight for and against slave trade was on. The air was poisoned with rage. Lincoln spoke, his voice was not thunder, it was a steady, clear bell in the storm. “A house divided against itself cannot stand,” he said. He did not seek war, but he would not let the house fall.

For four years, the war was a butcher's blade, cleaving the nation. The telegrams of casualty reports stacked like ghosts on his desk. He paced the halls of the White House, gaunt, shoulders bent under the weight of thousands of sons. He was mocked as a gorilla, a tyrant, a fool. He doubted himself, he prayed, he changed generals, and changed them again, searching for the strength to see it through.

However, in the furnace of that war, he forged a new meaning for the country he loved. It was no longer just about preserving the Union. It was about rebirthing it. On a cold January day in 1863, he put pen to paper. The Emancipation Proclamation was not a graceful document; it was a war measure, legalistic, limited. But its heartbeat was monumental. With those words, he declared that if the Union won, slavery in the rebel states would die. He had transformed a war for territory into a war for freedom. He had given the struggle a soul.

At Gettysburg, after the field was still littered with the dead, he spoke for two minutes. In 272 words, he changed the world's understanding of democracy. It was not, he said, a finished thing, handed down perfect. It was a struggle. A promise. “A new birth of freedom.” He redefined the war as a test of whether a nation “conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal, can long endure.” He made the sacrifice sacred, and gave it a purpose: that government of the people, by the people, for the people, should not perish.

He won the war, he saved the Union, and five days later, he was murdered by an assassin's bullet.

How did this man, born in dirt, failing constantly, leading a nation through its bloodiest hell, how did he change the world?

He changed it by refusing to let pain make him cruel. Every loss could have hardened him. Instead, it made him merciful. He issued pardons to young soldiers who fell asleep on duty. He planned a reconstruction “with malice toward none, with charity for all.”

He changed it by evolving. He started with the political aim of stopping slavery's spread, and he grew into the Great Emancipator. He listened, he learned, he was argued with, and he changed his mind for the sake of a higher truth.

He changed it by giving suffering meaning. He took the unbearable grief of a nation and did not let it be for nothing. He said the fallen had hallowed the ground, and that it was for the living to be dedicated to the “unfinished work.”

Most of all, Abraham Lincoln changed the world by embodying a singular, stubborn idea: that a cause grounded in human dignity, no matter how battered, no matter how unpopular, no matter how lost it seems in the middle of the story, is worth every ounce of effort.

His story tells us: You can be born in dirt. You can fail, again and again. You can be ugly, awkward, and sad. You can lead in a time when everyone screams that you are wrong; and yet, with unwavering conscience, with a heart that refuses to shrink, and with words that cleave to the moral truth, you can bend the arc of history.

You can take a broken house and, with your own scarred hands, lay the foundation for a new birth of freedom. The boy is gone, the man is decayed, but his words, his deeds, they lit a lamp for the world, and it still burns.

365 men that changed the world.

Kamikun John, Author 366 days of wisdom.