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What Would Abraham Lincoln Do Now?

September 27, 2025

In “the year of our Lord” 1909, Count Leo Tolstoy was one of the most famous humans on Planet Earth, by far.

He was a person who had survived into the twentieth century in a very vital way from another era, a man who had been born into the age of serfdom (or Russian slavery) in his own land and seen it fall (around the same time American slavery fell), a man who was as well-known then as Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr., would later become (and a man who had already corresponded with Gandhi, famously), a man who was known for educating, and attempting to free, the serfs on his own land before the national reforms came along, a man who had started a globally-known peace movement called Tolstoyism based on the real and true teachings of Jesus Christ taken directly from the Gospels, and a man who, if the world had listened to him back then, could have solved ALL of the world’s current problems today via the solutions he was offering at the time, a man so well-known and so accomplished that he deserved not just the Noble Prize in Literature (see the list at the end of this essay) but also the Nobel Peace Prize, like very few others in history (except, perhaps, figures like Bob Dylan, John Lennon, Bob Marley and Martin Luther King, Jr., all of whom could have been awarded the Literature prize as well as the Peace prize based on their work in both fields).

1909 was also the centenary of Abraham Lincoln’s birth. A reporter came to ask Tolstoy to write something about Lincoln for this event. He found the great, long-bearded, long-haired, physically frail and elderly man and writer too sick to rise from bed or pick up a pen for long, but somehow still able to think and talk just as clearly as ever.

Tolstoy surprised the world, just a little bit, by what he told the reporter that day, when he called Lincoln the greatest national hero and national leader of all time, a man who would, in a couple of centuries, make all other national heroes and leaders look like nothing compared to him. “Of all the great national heroes and statesmen of history Lincoln is the only real giant,” Tolstoy said.

Tolstoy listed “depth of feeling, greatness of character, and a certain moral power” as the qualities that made Lincoln so much greater than the other heroes and leaders. Tolstoy said, “His genius is still too strong and too powerful for the common understanding, just as the sun is too hot when its light beams directly on us.” He said that Lincoln’s “supremacy expresses itself altogether in his peculiar moral power and in the greatness of his character.” He said that Lincoln, “wanted to be great through his smallness.”

Tolstoy said of Lincoln: “He was what Beethoven was in music, Dante in poetry, Raphael in painting, and Christ in the philosophy of life. He aspired to be divine – and he was.”

***

America is on the verge of its next civil war, or is already in the beginnings of it.

Because this new civil war won’t be a “Civil War” with capital letters like the last one was.

It will be (for the most part) a much more insidious and secret affair, many or most of the battles playing themselves out within the battlefield of the human heart.

There won’t be huge lines of gray and blue soldiers blowing each other to smithereens across a river until kingdom come like the first time.

But there will be, and already is, great hatred involved, great contempt for one’s fellow human beings, great nastiness and moral decrepitude even among the youth of America, a great bitterness and a great belittling of each other, utter small-mindedness and small-heartedness on both sides as we stare each other down and hate each other’s guts and hope someone else will come along and do our sporadic killing for us, and then applaud when they do so while we execute them in return, smiling bitterly all the while and cursing the world in our hearts while taking responsibility for none of it.

So it’s worth asking, at this great and terrible point in American history, “What would Abraham Lincoln do if he were here now?”

After a lifetime (on and off) of studying Lincoln, both his life and his writings, from his home ground in Illinois, I believe I know the answer to this question. And I can break it down into three key points, very briefly.

Read on to find out.

***

ONE: He would rise above the fray. He would not take sides. He would try to look at the truthful aspects of both opposite points of view and leave all the lies and bad “information” lying in the dust. He would see it from everyone’s level, no matter who they are.

HE WOULDN’T BECOME PETTY WHEN THE GOING GETS TOUGH. AND HE WOULDN’T START THROWING STONES AT HIS NEIGHBOR, NO MATTER WHO THAT NEIGHBOR IS, OR WHERE THEY CAME FROM.

NO EXCEPTIONS.

TWO: He would resist the totalitarian impulse, which crushes genuine humanity, at all levels, but he would resist it within himself first.

He wouldn’t let himself be seduced by the urge to crush, or even think less of, those who are weaker than or “different” from himself.

As Kahlil Gibran said in The Prophet, “And if it is a despot you would dethrone, see first that his throne erected within you is destroyed.”

THREE:

HE WOULD LOVE. The tragic irony here is that anyone who can understand this third point is already doing it.

And the final tragic irony of this column is that Lincoln is no longer a hero for either side.

The Drifter on Tolstoy’s short works: Tolstoy is the author of two short stories and one small autobiographical nonfiction book that deserve to be studied by anyone on the Planet who wants to turn themselves into a better person during these horrible times.

“The Death of Ivan Ilyich” is about a man who discovers he’s held the wrong materialistic, selfish, Scrooge-like values his entire life, right before he dies. Ironically, it’s his illness and his approaching end that make him see the light and saves him (just in time).

“Master and Man” is one of the most life-affirming stories about self-sacrifice ever written. No spoiler alerts. But the horse in this story is more alive than the humans in almost everyone else’s fiction.

“A Confession” is an autobiographical nonfiction tale that influenced Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr., as they developed and extended nonviolent resistance, just as Tolstoy himself had been influenced by Percy Bysshe Shelley and Henry David Thoreau before him.

Tolstoy suffered from Depression, the modern variety. This book shows you what it’s like if you’ve never been in it; and how to get out of it if you have.