About the only good thing to come out of having Obama as the 44^th president, is that more and more Americans are truly learning about their heritage.  I, for one, am becoming reacquainted with my country's history and its prescient thinkers.  It seems the right and proper thing to do as our nation comes under daily attack of racially divisive, class conscious maneuverings of the Obama administration.  Thus, it was particularly striking for me to come across this Walt Whitman journal note about Abraham Lincoln. 

On April 16, 1865 Whitman wrote that:

I find in my notes of the time, this passage on the death of Abraham Lincoln:  He leaves for America's history and biography, so far, not only its most dramatic reminiscence ~ he leaves...the greatest, best, most characteristic, artistic, moral personality.  Not but that he had faults, and show'd them in the Presidency; but honesty, goodness, shrewdness, conscience, and (a new virtue, unknown to other lands, and hardly yet really known here, but the foundation and tie of all, as the future will grandly develop,) UNIONISM, in its truest and amplest sense, form'd the hard-pan of his character.  These he seal'd with his life....By many has this Union been help'd; but if one name, one man, must be pick'd out, he, most of all, is the conservator of it, to the future....the Union is not assassinated ~ caira! [it goes on; it succeeds]....the Nation is immortal."