If Lincoln killed vampires, he would be no greater than Lincoln was.
Lincoln died making men free, killed by a friend of slavers. His murder on Good Friday echoed a greater death that made men holy.
I understand the fun of seeing the Rail Splitter blast the undead, but I hope the real Lincoln is not forgotten. The real man was awkward, had only one year of schooling, and a lifetime of pain. The woman he loved died and his wife was not quite mad, but not perfectly sane.
He was a man who hated war who ordered the most deaths in American history. Lincoln acted to preserve a union dedicated to liberty and eventually acted on the logic of his belief to free the slaves.
The Great Emancipator was a racist by today’s standards, but this makes his actions more impressive, though his attitudes no less reprehensible. He freed humans he suspected were inferior because they were human. He was a politician who lost votes to help those who never would be able to vote for him.
And yet that makes me wonder if the analogy is not a proper one. Vampires drink the blood of the living and slaveholders in the race-based slavery of the South were, if anything, worse. The vampire drinks from necessity, the slaver draws blood for profit.
The Southern slaveholder could be a gentleman, think Robert E. Lee, but like the vampires of Twilight, he was a gentleman who had profited at some point from human suffering. Every good of the South was corrupted by the lash and rape and bondage.
Confederates, traitors to their nation and morality, often were pitiably blind to their wickedness, but wicked they were. They fought to maintain a peculiar institution that was built on blood and this original sin undermines any good they did.
Against treason, war mongering, disunion, and a love of bondage stood the Republican Party willing to call barbarism barbaric. Lincoln led the Grand Old Party to see the Glory of the Lord in emancipation, union, and law.
The stake he drove through the heart of the South was steel in the bayonets of Sherman and Grant’s armies. Southern men and women, black and white, were freed from a plantation economy that retarded development and sucked the innovation from the leadership of the region. No fictional vampire ever killed, raped, and tortured more men and women than slavery in the Old South.
Lincoln and his actions ended this god-defying tyranny forever.
For a Christian the only proper response is in the old hymn: “Glory! Hallelujah!”
Abraham Lincoln was a vampire slayer.
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