Don’t you wish you could have been a fly on the wall of President Obama’s speechwriters, when their Blackberries went off at 6:00 one recent morning with the message: “Uh, guys? The President has just been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. We’ll need a statement by 10 this morning.”

I’ve enjoyed the clever folks who have been commenting on the President’s award. One political cartoon has the Obamas sitting at a table, and Barack says to Michelle, “Let me write the Christmas cards this year. I want to win a Pulitzer Prize.” A wag wrote in to the “Last Word” in our local rag: “Since President Obama threw out the first pitch of the baseball season, he should win the Cy Young award.”

Meanwhile, it’s fashionable for 2008 Obama supporters to say, in 2009, that they made a big mistake. (Well, what do you expect? They’ve given the guy all of nine months! That’s enough time, isn’t it?)

I wonder how President Obama will be judged by history? Of course, none of us will live long enough to know.  But I’ve been thinking about this since reading about “Lincoln and New York,” the current exhibit at the New-York Historical Society. In 2009, the judgment of history is that Lincoln was one of our greatest presidents, if not the greatest. That was far from the case when he was president, when he inspired conspiracies and hatreds — one of which, of course, motivated John Wilkes Booth.

According to Edward Rothstein’s review of the exhibit in the New York Times, in New York City, by “substantial margins,” voters favored Lincoln’s opponents in the the elections of 1860 and 1864. And (whether this is comforting or frightening), the polarization in journalism was at least as great as it is today. Rothstein writes:

“Lincoln’s distinghished Cooper Union speech, for example, in which he suggested that disapproval of slavery was inscribed in the Constitution and that the practice should be strictly contained, was hailed by Horace Greeley, the editor in chief of the New-York Tribune, ‘No man ever before made such an impression on his first appeal to a New-York audience.’ But the Democratically aligned New-York Herald described it as ‘unmitigated trash, interlarded with coarse and clumsy jokes.’”

Rothstein writes, “Lincoln’s supporters formed an organization, the Wide Awakes, with its own paramiltary uniforms and songs. In 1860, 30,000 Wide Awakes marched in a five-hour torchlight parade through New York City streets; one of their torches, amazingly, is on display here. But the same numer of marchers gathered in 1863 for a demonstration against Lincoln and his policies.”

“By 1863, the exhibition shows, there was a full-fledged propaganda war, as opposing organizations published pamphlets and staged demonstrations, disputing the prosecution of the war, Lincoln’s suspension of habeas corpus and the growing powers of the federal government. [Ardent defender of slavery, Samuel F.B.] Morse declared for the [opposition group] Copperheads, ‘It may be necessary to destroy the Administration in order to preserve the Government.’ Henry Bellows for the Loyalists called support of Lincoln, ‘the first and most sacred duty of loyal citizens.’

“But in July 1863, that war of words turned bloody….In four days of riots, partly inspired by opposition to military conscription and its exemptions for the wealthy, looting and destruction were aimed not only at Republicans like Greeley but also at black New Yorkers….An order from Lincoln (displayed here), following close on the heels of the battle at Gettysburg, declared martial law.

“Calm was restored, but with 120 dead and 2,000 injured, the exhibition notes, it was ‘the worst civil disorder in the nation’s history — except for the Civil War itself.’”

Whoo boy. Political polarization, provoked by the media. An unpopular war. Racial animosity. Angry words that become violent actions.

Are we Americans becoming a better people? I pray that we are.