I thought, even as a child, that a poor person with discipline, energy and talent could become someone who could do something good for the world. He was the first president to be born in a log cabin, in Kentucky, as well as the first president to be born outside the original thirteen states. These facts impressed me as a child.
Ideals in a child are built upon examples. From a small settlement in Illinois to the White House and into the tragic times of the Civil War, Lincoln remains one of the most fascinating presidents. Whether one agrees with all his decisions or not, one can state that his real stand against slavery marks him as an extraordinary man for his time.
We Americans have lost the ideal of the "self-made-man", an ideal many of my generation valued.
All parents have a duty to introduce their children to the heroes of the times or of history. New Salem, a car drive away, was part of the fabric of my childhood, just as were the lives of the saints.
Are you, parents, showing your children good role models, or are you letting them be sucked down into the sewer of the false gods of entertainment and music?
Today would be a good day to look at Lincoln.
On June 16, 1858 Lincoln accepted the Republican nomination to run against Douglas and delivered his famous "House Divided Speech" in the Illinois state house. "A house divided against itself cannot stand. I believe this government cannot endure, permanently half slave and half free. I do not expect the Union to be dissolved---I do not expect the house to fall---but I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing, or all the other. Either the opponents of slavery, will arrest the further spread of it, and place it where the public mind shall rest in the belief that it is in course of ultimate extinction; or its advocates will push it forward, till it shall become alike lawful in all the States, old as well as new---North as well as South." http://www.nps.gov/liho/historyculture/life.htm