It has to be one of the most enormous coincidences of birth in the universe that Abraham Lincoln and Charles Darwin were both born on February 12, 1809. Of course Charles, being born at Greenwich Mean Time was some few hours older than Abe but never mind. Two of the great definers of what it is to live in the world today share not only the month and day, but the year, not only their birth but a shared culture of massive, resistant, creaking change, to which they each added their shoulders to push on, push on, both in utmost modesty and self effacement. Good men to light a candle to.

Both lost their mothers in early childhood. Both suffered from depression (Darwin also suffered from a variety of crippling stomach ailments and chronic headaches), and both wrestled with religious doubt. Each had a strained relationship with his father, and each of them lost children to early death. Both spent the better part of their 20s trying to settle on a career, and neither man gave much evidence of his future greatness until well into middle age: Darwin published “The Origin of Species” when he was 50, and Lincoln won the presidency a year later. Both men were private and guarded. Most of Darwin’s friendships were conducted through the mail, and after his five-year voyage on HMS Beagle as a young man, he rarely left his home in the English countryside. Lincoln, though a much more public man, carefully cultivated a bumpkin persona that encouraged both friends and enemies to underestimate his considerable, almost Machiavellian skill as a politician.

Lincoln and Darwin

A nice homage to Mr. Darwin by Olivia Judson in the Times.

…while many of his contemporaries approved of slavery, Darwin did not. He came from a family of ardent abolitionists, and he was revolted by what he saw in slave countries: “Near Rio de Janeiro I lived opposite to an old lady, who kept screws to crush the fingers of her female slaves. I have stayed in a house where a young household mulatto, daily and hourly, was reviled, beaten and persecuted enough to break the spirit of the lowest animal …. It makes one’s blood boil, yet heart tremble, to think that we Englishmen and our American descendants, with their boastful cry of liberty, have been and are so guilty.”