The Writer's Almanac
I seldom listen to the Writer's Almanac anymore. It's not that I stopped liking it, I just stopped listening to NPR in the morning. I used to drive to CU and back around 8:30 and hear it a couple times a week, or I would lay in bed listening to it on the bedside alarm clock radio.
This morning I heard it as I was looking out the window at the "Vote Today" sign I left in my yard over night. Yesterday a few people voted on the Ithaca City School District budget. Today's Writer's Almanac was historical (as always), but also related to my empire state, politics, forgiveness and government. Here's how the segment opened:
It's the birthday of the man who served as Secretary of State under Abraham Lincoln, William Seward, born in Florida, New York (1801). Seward was considered a shoo-in for the Republican nomination before the election of 1860. He'd been the governor of New York and a senator from New York, and he was probably the most widely known and respected Republican politician in the country. Before he went to the nominating convention in Chicago that year, he had already composed the resignation speech he planned to make to the Senate when he accepted his party's nomination.
So Seward could hardly believe it when a lesser-known lawyer from Illinois named Abraham Lincoln outflanked him at the convention and won the nomination instead. Seward probably lost the nomination because he was seen as too extreme in his anti-slavery views. In one famous speech, he had argued that the Constitution might allow for slavery, but that there was a higher law than the Constitution. Moderates saw that point of view as too dangerous, and so they nominated Lincoln instead.
Seward viewed Lincoln as an inexperienced country bumpkin, and so when Lincoln asked Seward to serve as secretary of state, Seward saw it as his chance to run the government from behind the scenes. He assumed that Lincoln would be unprepared and easy to control. When the Confederates blockaded federal troops at Fort Sumter, Seward advised Lincoln to back down and avoid war. Lincoln did precisely the opposite. Seward was so infuriated that Lincoln hadn't taken his advice that he wrote the president a angry memo, basically calling Lincoln a fool. But within a month, he realized that Lincoln had been right to force a confrontation with the South.
Seward expected Lincoln to fire him for writing such an insubordinate memo, and he was shocked when Lincoln instead forgave him. Seward wrote to his wife, "[Lincoln's] magnanimity is almost superhuman. The president is the best of us." Seward went on to become Lincoln's most trusted advisor and friend in the administration.
magnanimity: the quality of being magnanimous : loftiness of spirit enabling one to bear trouble calmly, to disdain meanness and pettiness, and to display a noble generosity
Strive for it, that's all I can ask.
And then it was time to work, so I did.
