The One Room Schoolhouse

  Today marks the 214th anniversary of the birth of one of the noblest men in American history. The 1917 biography of Abraham Lincoln by Wilbur Fisk Gordy was the book that brought me to know the man. By the final pages, as Gordy recounts Lincoln's funeral procession, I was literally weeping with the Americans of 1865. "But the most tender of all the expressions of love and sorrow came from those who had been his friends and neighbors before he was called to the White House. As they looked upon his familiar face for the last time, they thought of him, not as the emancipator of slaves, nor as President of the United States, but as one who in earlier years had been kind and helpful in a thousand ways." Gordy introduces his work about Lincoln with these words, "It is an old and true maxim which says that we learn from experience; meaning, of course, our own personal experience. But much is to be learned also from the experience of others, especially of the great a