Why Abe never said, 'I'm blacker than Frederick Douglass'

Life was stressful and unfair at times for Abraham Lincoln, but it's hard to envision him sitting around with a magazine reporter and uncorking a big bottle of stupid in the way our former Land of Lincoln Gov. Rod Blagojevich did in his whine with Esquire.

Had Lincoln been an arrogant, delusional, foul-mouthed idiot, the Lincoln archives in Springfield could have documents quoting Lincoln along these lines: "What the (expletive)? I'm blacker than Frederick Douglass. I split rails. I taught myself to read by (expletive) firelight."

But Lincoln never said anything remotely that stupid or offensive.

"Lincoln was pretty careful," says Thomas Schwartz, the Illinois state historian.

Blagojevich calls Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan the highly offensive "C word," but Lincoln never even called Stephen Douglas a "little blank."

"That wasn't part of his regular behavior," Schwartz says. "The worst you are going to find" is a personal letter in which Lincoln said a rival Illinois legislator was "not worth a damn."

OK. But maybe Abe said stupid things when he took off that hat and let his hair down Let's say Abe was doing an impression of Stephen Foster singing "Camptown Races" in front of reporters on the campaign trail, when he started talking about his spouse, Mary Todd Lincoln, just as Secretary of State Hillary Clinton sometimes talks about her hubby, Bill.

"There's one last thing that's a problem, which is my wife," Lincoln might have said. "You've seen what this is like. It will be a circus if I take this job."

Mrs. Lincoln was on the receiving end of some "especially intense" criticism, Schwartz says. When she donned a fancy hat and dress, a U.S. Senator said, "She had a flower pot on her head and she had her milking apparatus on display," the historian says.

But Abe managed restraint.

"I think he realized that taking the tit-for-tat approach or taking the low road always had consequences," Schwartz says.

Lincoln and his first vice president, Hannibal Hamlin, might have had more disagreements than John McCain and new Fox News contributor Sarah Palin, but there is no evidence that Abe's staff had to give Hamlin a history tutorial on the Revolutionary War.

Worried about having his words twisted, Lincoln was "circumspect" in his public comments, often directing reporters to his writings and speeches, Schwartz says. For foot-in-mouth Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and outspoken GOP Chairman Michael Steele, that kind of prudent silence might be what Blagojevich would call "(expletive) golden."

Was Lincoln, whose 201st birthday will be celebrated on Feb. 12, just smarter and better behaved than politicians today, or even back then?

"He really didn't have the kind of vices that were prevalent among 19th Century statesmen and political figures," Schwartz says. President Lincoln wasn't a drunk, a gambler, a womanizer or even a guy who spoke first and thought later. But he wasn't born perfect.

"When Lincoln was young, he said things that frequently got him in trouble with his political opposition," Schwartz says.

An anonymous editorial penned by Lincoln once led to a lawsuit that didn't go anywhere, Schwartz says. Another time Lincoln solved a dispute peacefully after state auditor James Shields challenged Lincoln to a duel for criticisms that actually were written by Lincoln's future wife. And once, in a failed attempt to keep political opponents from reaching a quorum, Lincoln is said to have "jumped out a window," and "he got grief for that," the historian says.

Between 1837 and 1842, Lincoln was "kind of young and impulsive," Schwartz says, "but he learns."

It's too late for Blagojevich to earn the nickname "Honest Rod," but he might give Lincoln's learning thing a try.