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Opinion: Abraham, Barack and me.

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I was one of the hordes on the National Mall on Inauguration Day last month. Like many, my friends and I sang songs, joked with bystanders and did whatever we could to while away the hours of frozen tedium before the swearing-in. And then it happened. Chief Justice John Roberts said “Congratulations, Mr. President,” and the world exploded. Two million people (or rather, 1.8 million) shouted with joy. Strangers hugged, some cried, everyone waved flags like crazy. And it wasn’t just for Barack Obama the man, or Barack Obama the Democrat, or Barack Obama the black man. At least not for me. It had more to do with my country’s incredible journey back toward its beginning, toward its declaration that all people are created equal.

The next day, I went to the Lincoln Memorial.

It was teeming with visitors. School children and families, out-of-towners and even some locals were gazing up at Daniel Chester French’s masterpiece. A group of Kenyan youths clad in minimal tribal clothing and clutching shields set off a frenzy of photo-ops. And when they were tired at last of posing they too stared up at Lincoln.

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Looking up at that wise, melancholy, craggy visage, I was amused to think that Lincoln’s enemies and the supporters of slavery actually were right and he was wrong: Freeing the slaves was going to set the country toward a course of equality for everybody. There would be no stopping it and no turning back. Like a good politician, he had pooh-poohed that idea, but arch-nemesis Stephen Douglas knew what he was talking about when he said: (I’m paraphrasing) first comes freeing the slaves, then comes voting, then comes equality and, for crying out loud, black elected leaders!

And then I thought about the Emancipation Proclamation. It didn’t just free “the slaves,” or more precisely, the slaves in rebel states. It liberated my family: uncles and aunts, cousins, grandparents, several “greats” back. I looked up at the statue and wept. Yes, I know that Lincoln made a calculated, tactical decision that he believed would win the war, but he also knew it was the right thing to do. The night before — Dec. 31, 1862 — free blacks and runaway slaves gathered in churches and waited. Watch night, they called it, and when morning came on Jan. 1 and the news arrived that “Father Abraham” had signed the proclamation, the world exploded. They wept and shouted and prayed with joy. My great-great-grandparents Anthony and Mary Ellen were in Alabama, a rebel state, and therefore, freed. By then, Grandpa Anthony, about age 20, had already had three owners, having been sold away from his mother, a slave named Rose, by his father, Thomas Knight, who was also his master.

I don’t know when they learned they were free. I’m sure it wasn’t the day Lincoln signed the proclamation, but that was the beginning. I try not to mythologize Lincoln. And I know that the cause of freedom had truer champions: ardent abolitionists and conductors on the underground railroad who risked their property, liberty and lives. People like Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman, Levi Coffin and William Lloyd Garrison. But I love Lincoln, too. Lincoln is the best of America. That gangly backwoods lawyer understood perfectly that it was the Declaration of Independence, the nation’s poetry, and not the Constitution, her prose, that had set us on an irreversible path.

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