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Floor Speech

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Mr. YOUNG. Mr. President, during the Civil War, Walt Whitman took stock of Abraham Lincoln's appearance. The President had a face, the poet wrote, like a ``Hoosier Michelangelo.'' But Whitman sensed that underneath the lines and the crags were wells of wisdom and tact perfectly suited to the President, hard-earned long ago.

You see, Abraham Lincoln is widely regarded as one of our country's greatest Presidents, a visionary and an inspiring leader who appealed to the highest American ideals and moved our Nation toward a more perfect Union.

Sunday marks the 214th anniversary of Abraham Lincoln's birth. Even today, historians still wrestle with the question, how is a man of such character forged? The answer, I think, can be found in Southern Indiana, near the Ohio River. In 1860, when asked for details of his youth by a biographer, Abraham Lincoln was uncooperative. It could all, he said, ``be condensed into a single sentence--the short and simple annals of the poor.''

``That's all you or any one can make of it,'' Lincoln insisted. But, if you will pardon me, I would like to make a little more of it. My colleagues from Kentucky will no doubt point out that Lincoln's birth occurred in their Commonwealth, and as my colleagues from Illinois will likely remind you, when Abraham Lincoln departed for the White House, it was from their State. I will give them this: Lincoln was indeed born in Kentucky, and he did make his name in Illinois. But Abraham Lincoln was a Hoosier. ``It was there I grew up,'' he recalled of Southern Indiana. It was there in Spencer County ``I grew to my present enormous height,'' he once joked.

True, there is little left that Abraham Lincoln would recognize in our State today. There are just reminders of a once unbroken forest among the low hills; the soil--in it the graves of loved ones; and a great river separating north from south. In what does remain, though, we can still see where his character was formed, what prepared him for the trials to come.

The Lincolns arrived the same year Indiana became a State. It was still the frontier line. The woods were full of bears and the night air alive with the roar of mountain lions. This was a hard and heartbreaking life, uncertain and often short. Those years of Abraham Lincoln's life were characterized by loss--first the loss of his mother Nancy and later his sister Sarah--and by constant labor which he grew to so dislike. Schooling was scarce. Opportunities for self-improvement were few. By his own account, he had no more than a year of formal education.

Decades later, when Abraham Lincoln recalled his life in Indiana, he wrote, ``My childhood home I see again, and sadden with the view,'' but he also wrote that among the memories, there was ``pleasure in it, too.'' There were happy days in the Little Pigeon Creek community, captivating friends with his homespun stories, and there was the love of a stepmother who nurtured his curiosity.

The sparse schooling he had taught him to read and to write. In fact, he pored over what few books he could find: the Bible, a tattered biography of George Washington borrowed from a neighbor, and later a collection of Indiana law containing the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States.

There was the Ohio River. That river was a gateway of possibilities and a point of departure to the outside world. Lincoln earned his first half dollar ferrying passengers on the river. He first saw the horror of slavery traveling down it.

By the time Abe Lincoln and his family left the Little Pigeon Creek community in 1830, Lincoln had spent a quarter of his life in Indiana. He crossed the Wabash River into Illinois, a grown man whose heart, touched by grief, was kind, generous, and strong; who could spin a yarn like no other; whose intellect far outpaced his meager education. Of course, he carried with him a great reverence for our founding's promise of freedom and a burning desire to rise in life.

Although Lincoln was loathe to speak of it as he grew older, those 14 years in Spencer County, IN--the sad and the joyous--shaped him. The qualities that saved the Union in its time of greatest peril were forged in the Indiana wilderness.

In March of 1865, only a few weeks before Lincoln's death, he addressed the 140th Indiana Regiment. The soldiers had recently captured a Confederate flag in North Carolina, which the President gave to Indiana Governor Oliver Morton. Lincoln reminded those Hoosiers assembled that he was raised in their State, and he praised their Hoosier valor. But he was ever mindful of the Union. He said that day, ``I would not wish to compliment Indiana above other states.''

Well, Mr. President, for whatever it is worth, I do, because Lincoln belongs to all Americans, but Hoosiers can claim a special connection with Abraham Lincoln.

So, on the occasion of his birth, we once again celebrate the life and legacy of this remarkable Hoosier. He represents the best of us. He was one of us.

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