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ABRAHAM

LINCOLN

a legacy of freedom

09-20167 AbrahamLincoln_cov.indd 1 
“As I would not be a slave, 

so I would not be a master. 

This expresses my idea of democracy. 

Whatever differs from this, 

to the extent of the difference, 

is no democracy.” 
Preface ............................................................................................................. 2

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What Lincoln Means to Me ....................................................................... 4

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What Abraham Lincoln Means to Americans Today ........................ 6

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Groundwork for Greatness: Abraham Lincoln to 1854 .................... 14

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Path to the White House: Abraham Lincoln From 1854 ................. 22

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A New Look for Lincoln ........................................................................ 31

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Lincoln as Commander-in-Chief .............................................................. 32

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Lincoln as Diplomat ..................................................................................... 40

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Lincoln as Emancipator .............................................................................. 46

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The Words That Moved a Nation ............................................................ 52

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Words of Wisdom ................................................................................... 61

Additional Resources .................................................................................. 62

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2  ABRAHAM LINCOLN: A LEGACY OF FREEDOM

8he year 2009 marks the 

200th anniversary of the 

birth of Abraham Lincoln, 

the U.S. president 

often considered the greatest of 

this country’s leaders. Americans’ 

reverence for Lincoln began with 

his tragic death by assassination 

in 1865, at the end of a brutal civil 

war in which 623,000 men died, 

the American Union withstood 

its greatest test, and slavery was 

banished. And his hallowed place 

in the iconography of America 

continues. More than 14,000 books 

have been published on Lincoln to 

date. Contemporary scholar Douglas 

L. Wilson calls Lincoln the “best 

known and most widely acclaimed of 

all Americans.”

Why add one more volume 

to the massive mound of Lincoln 

scholarship? Because we believe 

that Lincoln embodies fundamental 

American ideals that stretch from 

the founding of this nation down to 

the present. 

Among the Americans embracing 

this vision of our 16th president is 

the 44th president, Barack Obama. 

Writing in 2005, as a newly minted 

U.S. senator, Obama declared it hard 

to imagine a less likely scenario than 

his own rise — “except, perhaps, for 

the one that allowed a child born in 

the backwoods of Kentucky with less 

than a year of formal education to 

end up as Illinois’ greatest citizen and 

our nation’s greatest president.” 

In Lincoln’s biography, Obama 

continued, his “rise from poverty, his 

ultimate mastery of language and law, 

his capacity to overcome personal 

loss and remain determined in the 

face of repeated defeat ... reminded 

me of a larger, fundamental element 

of American life — the enduring 

belief that we can constantly remake 

ourselves to fit our larger dreams.”

By bringing together leading 

historians and asking them to 

consider Lincoln from different 

angles, we hope to help people 

around the world understand the 

sources of the man’s greatness as well 

as his place in Americans’ hearts. 

This volume, then, presents a sort 

of pointillist portrait of Lincoln. Our 

introduction presents a personal view 

of Lincoln, that of Eileen Mackevich, 

executive director of the Abraham 

Lincoln Bicentennial Commission. 

In our opening essay, “What 

Lincoln Means to Americans 

Today,” journalist Andrew 

Ferguson considers the libraries 

of Lincoln books, the collectors 

of Lincoln memorabilia, the 

actors who present a reenacted 

Lincoln to the masses, and 

the Lincoln Memorial in 

Washington, D.C., for what they 

say about Lincoln’s enduring 

appeal. Next, in “Groundwork 

for Greatness: Abraham Lincoln to 

1854,” historian Wilson recounts the 

story of a boy born to humble parents 

in a frontier cabin who wills himself 

to become that great archetype 

of this country — the self‒made 

man. In “The Words That Moved a 

Nation,” Lincoln biographer Ronald 

C. White limns another of Lincoln’s 

surpassing gifts — his eloquence, a 

mastery of words encompassing the 

soaring biblical cadences that inspire 

a nation and, equally, the homespun 

wisdom of the common man. 

Three essays examine Lincoln’s 

role as leader through the great 

national crisis of the Civil War. In 

“Path to the White House: Abraham 

Lincoln from 1854” and “Lincoln 

as Emancipator,” this book’s editor, 

Michael Jay Friedman, lays out the 

issues that led to the Civil War 

and the events that led Lincoln 

to order the 1863 Emancipation 

Proclamation, which freed the 

slaves of American South. Civil 

War historian Peter Cozzens, in 

“Lincoln as Commander-in-Chief,” 

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ABRAHAM LINCOLN: A LEGACY OF FREEDOM  3

considers the obstacles the president 

had to overcome in developing an 

effective Union army and a cadre 

of generals to command it. Finally, 

diplomatic historian Howard Jones, 

in “Lincoln as Diplomat,” describes 

the international pitfalls that Lincoln 

as a war president needed to navigate 

and how he did it.

Despite all the Lincoln books, 

articles, tributes, and conferences, 

a sense of a mystery remains. In the 

end the figure of Lincoln seems so 

grand, so varied, so susceptible to 

meaning that Americans of all stripes 

have often enlisted him in their 

causes. Perhaps Andrew Ferguson 

in a recent interview comes closest 

to getting at the power of the icon: 

“Lincoln also returns us to something 

essential in our national creed. The 

iconic Lincoln reminds us of the 

idea that the Union, by itself, is 

not enough. The Union has to be 

dedicated to a proposition: that all 

men are created equal.”

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4  ABRAHAM LINCOLN: A LEGACY OF FREEDOM

we seek his guidance. In truth, we can do no better 

than to emulate our 16th president: a man of dogged, 

so very American, ambition, but also one whose 

resolve was always tempered by an unswerving 

determination never to compromise his personal 

integrity. 

Never boring, our Lincoln. He is a simple man, 

a complex man, a roustabout, a jokester, a recluse, 

a man of action, a visionary. Just when we think we 

understand him, he eludes us. He is not a man to be 

pigeon-holed. There is a Lincoln for all seasons and 

all reasons.

Scholars find rich soil in Lincoln’s many 

manifestations. They debate the substance of his 

life and the larger meaning of his tragic death. How 

did his views on race evolve? Why did he move so 

cautiously on emancipation? Was he moved only 

by the imperative of battlefield success and the 

consequent need to gather support from abroad? 

When did he embrace the idea of full citizenship for 

the former slaves? Would his Reconstruction plan 

have successfully reunited North and South while 

ensuring the former slaves their full legal equality?

Only Lincoln could have steered us from the 

tragic course of race relations that followed his death. 

As John Hope Franklin, the African-American 

scholar often called the dean of American historians, 

put it, “Of all the American presidents, only Lincoln 

stayed up nights worried about the fate of my people.”

While Lincoln today enjoys the near-universal 

esteem of his countrymen, during his lifetime he was 

hardly a man for all seasons and all reasons. Many 

southerners and abolitionists disliked him. Frederick 

Douglass, the former slave turned abolitionist author, 

editor, and political reformer (also the most admired 

man in England), faulted Lincoln for failing to act 

swiftly on emancipation. Douglass felt that Lincoln 

was too solicitous of the slave-holding border states 

that refrained from joining the southern rebellion. 

Only later did Douglass perceive Lincoln’s political 

artistry: The president, he came to understand, was a 

masterfully pragmatic politician who knew just how 

fast and how far he could push the American people 

toward abolition.

Ever anxious to learn, Lincoln invited outspoken 

people to the White House. He respected their 

honesty. Douglass was one. Another was Anna 

Dickinson, a Quaker activist abolitionist, women’s 

rights advocate, and intense Lincoln admirer. But she 

turned against Lincoln because he would not support 

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%mong history’s heroes, Abraham Lincoln stands out as THE American 

original. Born to unaspiring parents on the hard-scrabble frontier, his 

meteoric rise was never less than inspiring. Lincoln continued to grow 

and remake himself anew throughout his lifetime. Even 200 years later, 
ABRAHAM LINCOLN: A LEGACY OF FREEDOM  5

her charge of treason against the pompous, politically 

scheming General George B. McClellan. Lincoln 

listened respectfully to Americans of different stripes, 

from Negro abolitionists to Quaker activists, to the 

talented, high-powered individuals he included in his 

cabinet, to his political rivals — but the important 

decisions always were Lincoln’s alone. As a leader, 

Lincoln moved deliberately, always testing the 

prevailing political winds. He changed his mind often. 

He was, in the modern jargon of the distinguished 

historian James Horton, the ultimate “flip-flopper.” 

But the great social scientist W.E.B. Du Bois may 

have reached the essential truth when he called 

Lincoln “big enough to be inconsistent.”

My great attraction to Lincoln rests on his 

nobility of character, his “self-making” in the larger 

19th-century sense described by historian John 

Stauffer. Because his thought was deeply grounded 

in a belief in equality and in the ideals of freedom, 

we can imagine all things from Lincoln. He might 

have solved the race problem; he might have extended 

female suffrage. He is, more than any other, the 

American hero.

On a sunny spring day shortly before his 

assassination, Abraham and his wife, Mary Todd 

Lincoln, took a carriage ride. The war was over. 

Optimism reigned. Abe contemplated the future. 

After his presidency, Lincoln told his wife, he hoped 

they would travel to Europe and beyond. That was not 

to be. But in the larger sense, Abraham Lincoln has 

traveled the world — his belief that the common 

man can make himself anew is inspiration enough 

for us all.

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6  ABRAHAM LINCOLN: A LEGACY OF FREEDOM

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ABRAHAM LINCOLN: A LEGACY OF FREEDOM  7

There was truth behind it. He didn’t 

know the numbers, but I did: Since 

that unfortunate mishap at Ford’s 

Theatre, where an assassin’s bullet 

claimed his life, more than 14,000 

books have been written about 

Abraham Lincoln, placing him 

second only to Jesus and Napoleon 

as an obsession of the world’s book 

writers. And the assembly line has 

never slowed, shows no signs of 

slowing even now — as the book you 

hold in your hand attests. I hadn’t 

been working on my own Lincoln 

book for very long when the point 

was pressed upon me.

I was in Lincoln’s hometown of 

Springfield, Illinois, one weekend, 

at a Lincoln conference. (It’s an 

odd weekend in Springfield when 

someone isn’t holding a Lincoln 

conference.) The audience was 

fairly large — roughly 100 scholars, 

authors, amateur historians, 

hobbyists, buffs, and, by the looks 

of it, a few vagrants in from the 

street. At one point, the moderator 

interrupted the proceedings to ask 

for a show of hands.

“Just out of curiosity,” he said, 

“how many people here are writing a 

book about Abraham Lincoln?”

And nearly half of the audience 

raised their hands. 

I was unnerved but not deterred, 

and before long I began bumping up 

against the practical difficulties the 

Lincoln glut creates for authors who 

are foolish enough to try to add to 

it. They include, but go far beyond, 

the problem of combing through a 

historical paper trail that has already 

been pulped for every conceivable 

fact and revelation. We still learn 

new things about Lincoln every 

once in a while, but the discoveries, 

tiny as they are, pique the interest 

of only professionals and the most 

hollow-eyed obsessives; the recent 

Lincoln books that have caught the 

public’s attention consist in taking 

old facts and arranging them in new 

ways. A more mundane and, for 

me, unforeseen problem involved 

the matter of a title. Let the writer 

beware: Somewhere in that pile 

of 14,000 volumes, one author or 

another has already given his or her 

Lincoln book the same title you’d 

chosen for yours.

“

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μI am a firm 

believer in the 

people. If given 

the truth, they 

can be depended 

upon to meet 

any national 

crisis. The great 

point is to bring 

them the 

real facts.¶

%h,” said a book-writing acquaintance, when I told him that I had signed up 

to write a book of my own. “A book about Abraham Lincoln. Just what 

America needs.” In fairness (to me), my book wasn’t exactly about Lincoln, at 

least not about Lincoln directly. Even so, my acquaintance’s sarcasm stung. 
8  ABRAHAM LINCOLN: A LEGACY OF FREEDOM

Lincoln in Print

Every phrase that can be detached 

from Lincoln’s most famous 

utterances has been stamped on a 

cover, from A New Birth of Freedom to 

With Malice Toward None, from With 

Charity for All to Of the People, By the 

People, For the People. I looked further 

and discovered a kind of verbal daisy 

chain, as though all Lincoln authors 

had been given a limited number of 

words and were forced to arrange 

them in a different order. There was 

The Sword of Lincoln and Lincoln’s 

Sword; Lincoln and the Generals and 

Lincoln’s Generals; The Inner World 

of Abraham Lincoln, The Intimate 

World of Abraham Lincoln, Abraham 

Lincoln’s World, and Abraham 

Lincoln’s Intimate World; Lincoln’s 

Virtues and the Virtuous Lincoln. 

There was In Lincoln’s Footsteps, 

In the Footsteps of the Lincolns, and 

— for variety’s sake — In Lincoln’s 

Footprints. By my count, there are 

three books called The Real Lincoln, 

each of which presents a real Lincoln 

utterly incompatible with the real 

Lincoln described in the other two. 

This surprised me less than it 

might have, for the other thing that 

struck me as I researched my own 

book, Land of Lincoln — not to be 

confused with The Living Land of 

Lincoln, by Thomas J. Fleming, which 

was published in 1980 — was just 

how many Lincolns were running 

around. I had been a boy in the 

early 1960s when Lincoln loomed 

large and inescapable, a common 

possession, a touchstone for the 

country at large. Now everyone 

seemed to have his own Lincoln. 

It was as if this great piece of our 

national patrimony had been broken 

up and privatized. 

Again the books told the story. 

Just in recent years we’ve had a book 

proving Lincoln was a fundamentalist 

Christian — this was written by a 

fundamentalist Christian. Another 

proved that Lincoln’s greatness 

arose from his struggle with clinical 

depression; the book was written by 

a journalist who has struggled with 

clinical depression. Most notoriously, 

a gay activist published a book in 

2005 asserting that Lincoln, though 

not a gay activist himself, was at 

least actively gay. Conservatives 

have written books about Lincoln’s 

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ABRAHAM LINCOLN: A LEGACY OF FREEDOM  9

conservatism. Liberals have claimed 

him in books describing the liberal 

Lincoln. And in 2003, a book was 

published proving that if Lincoln 

were alive today, his political 

opinions would be indistinguishable 

from those of the former governor of 

New York State, Mario Cuomo. Two 

guesses as to who wrote that one.

Understanding the Lincoln 

Infatuation

Agog at this exfoliation of Lincolns, 

you might be tempted to answer 

our title question — What 

does Abraham Lincoln mean to 

Americans today? — with a glib 

counterquestion: What doesn’t 

Lincoln mean to Americans today? 

He seems to mean all things all at 

once, which might lead a cynic to 

conclude that Lincoln has ceased to 

have any particular meaning at all. 

But that really is too glib. For there 

is something peculiarly American 

in the sheer excess and exuberance 

of our Lincoln infatuation. 

Understanding the infatuation, I 

came to believe, might be a way not 

only of understanding Lincoln but of 

understanding the country itself.

The passion was undeniable, also 

surprising for a country supposedly 

indifferent to its own history. No 

other American has been so swarmed 

by curiosity seekers, so coddled and 

picked at and pawed; indeed — again 

with the possible exception of 

Napoleon — no other human being 

in modern history has shared a fate 

so implausibly extravagant.

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10  ABRAHAM LINCOLN: A LEGACY OF FREEDOM

Yet not even Napoleon has ever 

inspired a group of men who make 

a living pretending to be him, as 

Lincoln has. In some respects, the 

Association of Lincoln Presenters 

(known as the ALP) is merely a 

trade association like any other 

— the Teamsters, for example, 

or the National Association of 

Manufacturers, or Petsitters 

International. Like them, the ALP 

holds an annual convention where 

members gather to socialize, swap 

professional tips, and hear expert 

speakers give advice on how to 

improve business. Unlike those other 

trade conventions, however, every 

member of the ALP is dressed in a 

black frock coat and stovepipe hat 

and sports a coal-black beard, real 

or otherwise. After the convention 

they return home and, refreshed, 

begin again the work of school 

appearances, Kiwanis club talks, 

Chautauqua presentations, walkthroughs at county fairs — the work 

of evangelizing Lincoln to a country 

that they believe needs him more 

than it needs anything. I asked their 

founding president why they do it, 

why they bother. “Lincoln,” he told 

me, “reminds us of what we need to 

know but might have forgotten.”

It’s hard to describe the effect of 

seeing more than 100 men dressed 

like Abraham Lincoln gathered 

in a hotel ballroom, listening to a 

public relations expert discourse 

on “Making Local Media Work for 

You,” but I got used to such oddities 

as I looked for Lincoln.

There are perhaps as many as 

15,000 Americans who are serious 

collectors of Lincoln memorabilia, 

even though in recent years the price 

of Lincoln documents and other 

firsthand artifacts — what one 

collector called “the really good stuff” 

— has soared into a stratosphere 

accessible only to the wealthiest 

connoisseurs.

But collectors of more modest 

means are undeterred. With typical 

ingenuity, they have defined quality 

downward, to cover commodities 

that can be more reasonably 

priced: the “good stuff” now might 

include, for example, matchbook 

covers from the old Lincoln Life 

Insurance Company, which sell for 

under $10. The online auction eBay 

has proved that anything with a 

Lincoln association can find a buyer. 

Documents in Lincoln’s hand now go 

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ABRAHAM LINCOLN: A LEGACY OF FREEDOM  11

for tens of thousands of dollars; so 

non-rich Lincoln lovers have begun 

trading in forged Lincoln documents, 

particularly those of such celebrated 

forgers as Joseph Cosey, a scam 

artist who prospered in the 1930s. A 

Cosey-forged “Lincoln letter” might 

sell for $2,500. “But you’ve got to 

make sure it’s a real forgery, a real 

Cosey,” one collector told me. “The 

market’s so hot now we’re seeing a lot 

of fakes.”

Expressing the American 

Experiment

For nearly a century, historians and 

sociologists have tried to explain 

the historical infatuation that could 

result in such endearing absurdities. 

The reasons they’ve come up with 

are often clever and sometimes 

even plausible. Lincoln continues 

to fascinate his countrymen like no 

other historical personage, we’ve 

been told, because he was the first 

such personage to be commonly 

photographed: He is thus more 

real to us than great figures from 

earlier times can be. And it’s true 

that Lincoln was exquisitely sensitive 

to the ways in which he presented 

himself to the public, including 

through the use of the then-new 

photographic art. He seldom passed 

up a chance to have his likeness 

made. Thanks to that craftiness, we 

seem to know him in a way we could 

never know George Washington or 

Thomas Jefferson.

Even so, goes another argument, 

no matter how familiar we are 

with his face, with the sad eyes and 

tousled hair, Lincoln is tantalizingly 

and finally unknowable; it’s this 

mystery that draws us back to the 

melancholy, humorous, intelligent, 

reserved, distant, and kindly man 

that his acquaintances described. 

Other historians have said our 

infatuation with him is rooted in the 

drama of his personal story: Born in 

abject poverty to become one of the 

great men of human history, Lincoln 

embodies the “right to rise” that 

Americans claim as their birthright. 

Still others credit his enduring fame 

to his assassination on Good Friday, 

a shock from which the country 

never quite recovered. The most 

sober-minded of our theorists say 

we’re obsessed with Lincoln because 

he presided over, and somehow 

exemplifies, the greatest trauma of 

American history, a civil war that 

reinvented the United States into the 

country we know today. 

There’s truth in all these 

explanations, I suppose, but it’s the 

last one, in my opinion, that comes 

closest to being the comprehensive 

truth. I live not far from the Lincoln 

Memorial in Washington, D.C., 

that grand, photogenic temple on 

the banks of the Potomac River 

that is home to the “iconic Lincoln.” 

Researching my Lincoln book, 

spending time with scholars and 

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12  ABRAHAM LINCOLN: A LEGACY OF FREEDOM

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ABRAHAM LINCOLN: A LEGACY OF FREEDOM  13

collectors and obsessives and being 

introduced by each of them to yet 

another privatized Lincoln, a Lincoln 

pieced together from their own 

preoccupations, I was always glad to 

return home and pay the memorial 

a visit: to see this singular and solid 

Lincoln, the enduring Lincoln that 

every American can lay claim to.

The memorial is the most visited 

of our presidential monuments. The 

strangest thing about it, though, 

is the quiet that descends over the 

tourists who climb the wide sweeping 

stairway and step into the cool of the 

marble chamber. Before long their 

attention is drawn to one or both of 

the two Lincoln speeches etched in 

the walls on either side of the famous 

statue. After all this time I am still 

astonished at the number of visitors 

who stand still to read, on one stone 

panel, the Gettysburg Address, 

and, on the other, Lincoln’s second 

inaugural address.

What they’re reading is a summary 

of the American experiment, 

expressed in the finest prose any 

American has been capable of writing. 

One speech reaffirms that the country 

was founded upon and dedicated to a 

proposition — a universal truth that 

applies to all men everywhere. The 

other declares that the survival of the 

country is somehow bound up with 

the survival of the proposition — 

that if the country hadn’t survived, 

the proposition itself might have been 

lost. Sometimes the tourists tear up as 

they read; they tear up often, actually. 

And watching them you understand: 

Loving Lincoln, for Americans, is a 

way of loving their country.

That’s what Lincoln means to 

Americans today, and it’s why he 

means so much.

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ABRAHAM LINCOLN: A LEGACY OF FREEDOM  15

deeply ingrained in the American 

imagination. What Americans 

generally know about their 16th 

president is admittedly more legend 

than biography, but the outlines of 

this familiar story are, for the most 

part, historical.

Lincoln was born in 1809 

in a log cabin to very humble, 

uneducated parents; he did grow 

up in a backwoods settlement that 

was virtually a wilderness; there, 

beginning at the age of seven, he 

did help his father to hew a farm 

out of that wilderness with an 

axe; with the benefit of only a few 

months of schooling, he did study 

diligently on his own to acquire 

basic skills in reading, writing, and 

arithmetic; as a young man out on 

his own and working at menial jobs, 

he did teach himself from books 

such subjects as English grammar, 

sufficient mathematics to learn 

surveying, and enough law to enter 

the legal profession at the age of 

27. And, of course, he did perform 

triumphantly in the United States’ 

most severe crisis, saving his country 

from dissolution, presiding over the 

destruction of slavery, and dying an 

authentic American martyr.

While Lincoln’s worldwide 

fame is a result of his decisive and 

statesman-like conduct as president 

during the great Civil War of 1861-

%braham Lincoln is the best-known and most widely acclaimed of all 

Americans, and the only American statesmen whose life story is generally 

familiar. Lincoln’s status as the quintessential self-made man and his 

legendary rise from obscure backwoods beginnings to the presidency are 

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μ Whenever 

I hear any 

one arguing 

for slavery 

I feel a strong 

impulse to see 

it tried on him 

personally.¶
16  ABRAHAM LINCOLN: A LEGACY OF FREEDOM

1865, the legend that surrounds him, 

and that Americans know so well, 

is anchored in familiar images from 

his early years — the poor Indiana 

frontiersman’s son with an axe in 

his hands, the boy in the log cabin 

reading by the firelight, the honest 

store clerk and village postmaster, 

the fearless newcomer who stands up 

to bullies, the self-taught surveyor 

with compass and chain, the diligent 

student preparing himself for the 

practice of law.

Not generally part of the popular 

legend, although crucial aspects of 

his development, are such things 

as the rational and keenly skeptical 

cast of his mind and the very real 

difficulties he had to contend with in 

his formative years.

A Mind Ripe for Learning

From the very beginning, Abraham 

Lincoln was different, and in a way 

that many of his neighbors — and 

especially his father — did not 

approve. Unlike almost everyone 

else he grew up with, Lincoln was 

intensely interested in words and 

meanings. He learned to read and 

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ABRAHAM LINCOLN: A LEGACY OF FREEDOM  17

write at a very early age, actively 

seeking out books to borrow and 

taking notes on what he read. To his 

father and most of his peers, this was 

regarded as little more than sloth, a 

way of avoiding his farm chores.

But Lincoln was encouraged in his 

studies by his stepmother, who later 

told Lincoln’s former law partner, 

William H. Herndon, that while 

the boy “didn’t like physical labor,” 

he was not lazy, but was “diligent for 

Knowledge — wished to Know and 

if pains and Labor would get it he 

was sure to get it.”

While his youthful reading has 

always been a prominent feature of 

the Lincoln legend, it was probably 

not as important in the long term 

as his writing. After Lincoln’s 

assassination, Herndon sought 

out and interviewed the president’s 

former Indiana neighbors, many of 

whom remembered that the young 

Lincoln had distinguished himself 

as a talented writer of essays and 

poems. And in the end, his writings 

would prove at least as important 

as his deeds, for they are among the 

most familiar, as well as the most 

influential, in all of American letters.

When he left home and struck out 

on his own at the age of 22, Lincoln 

settled in the small village of New 

Salem, Illinois, where he spent six 

eventful years. Unprepossessing 

in appearance, he was frequently 

described as gawky and ill-dressed, 

but the other residents soon 

discovered he had many assets. In 

addition to being intelligent and 

surprisingly well informed, he 

was unusually good-natured and 

friendly. He excelled in popular 

athletic contests such as running, 

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18  ABRAHAM LINCOLN: A LEGACY OF FREEDOM

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ABRAHAM LINCOLN: A LEGACY OF FREEDOM  19

jumping, and throwing weights; he 

was unusually strong and a nearly 

unbeatable wrestler; and though he 

did not drink, he was convivial and 

had great ability as a storyteller. He 

was thus well liked, and when the 

militia was called out to fight Indians 

during his first year in New Salem, 

he was elected captain of the local 

company. In recalling this honor 

many years later, he allowed that 

he had “not since had any success 

in life which gave him so much 

satisfaction.”

Supporting himself with a variety 

of jobs, Lincoln studied assiduously 

during his New Salem years to make 

up for his lack of formal education, 

of which he remained painfully 

conscious all his life. Borrowing 

books wherever he could, he 

studied history and biography, and 

he displayed an eager appetite for 

literature, being particularly fond of 

Shakespeare and of the Scottish poet 

Robert Burns.

Though raised in a Baptist and 

church-going family, he resisted 

making a religious commitment, 

and under the influence of such 

18th-century rationalists as the 

Comte de Volney and Thomas 

Paine, Lincoln developed a skeptical 

view of basic Christian doctrines. 

If his childhood church-going did 

not implant religious belief, it did 

stimulate an early interest that would 

have lifelong consequences, namely, 

public speaking. Having entertained 

his playmates in backwoods Indiana 

with imitations of sermons and 

stump speeches, he now joined a 

New Salem debating society to 

develop his abilities as a speaker.

Early Politics

If Lincoln was not caught up in 

the religious fervor and sectarian 

disputes that characterized the 

frontier culture he grew up in, he 

did take an early interest in politics. 

As with most things he set his mind 

to, Lincoln soon proved himself a 

notably effective speaker, a talent 

directly related to his subsequent 

political success. Before his first year 

in New Salem was out, he declared 

himself a candidate for the state 

legislature, and this was to be, as he 

later said, “the only time I ever have 

been beaten by the people.”

When he ran again at the next 

election, he won handily, and 

served four successive terms. In his 

second term, in spite of being one 

of the youngest legislators, he was 

chosen as his Whig Party’s floor 

leader, an honor that reflected his 

effectiveness as a speaker, his energy, 

and his organizational and leadership 

abilities.

The character of Lincoln’s early 

politics is quite instructive. Coming 

of age at a time and place where 

enthusiastic supporters of the populist 

Andrew Jackson and his Democratic 

Party were an overwhelming majority, 

Lincoln here again proved to be 

different, for he very early identified 

himself as “anti-Jackson” in politics. 

Clearly, he was attracted by the 

economic development measures 

favored by Jackson’s Whig opponents, 

such as government-sponsored 

banks and internal improvements. If 

Lincoln’s only aim in politics was to 

get elected to office, he had chosen 

the wrong party.

When he moved to New Salem, 

Lincoln continued to be surrounded 

by Jacksonian Democrats, though the 

issues dominating state legislature 

campaigns tended to be local rather 

than national. Nonetheless, it says 

much about the budding politician 

that Lincoln could get himself 

elected, and by a good margin, by a 

strongly Jacksonian electorate.

While campaigning for the 

legislature, Lincoln was encouraged 

by John Todd Stuart, a lawyer in the 

Illinois state capital of Springfield, to 

study for the bar. Lincoln, writing in 

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20  ABRAHAM LINCOLN: A LEGACY OF FREEDOM

the third person, later described how 

this was managed: “He borrowed 

books of Stuart, took them home 

with him, and went at it in good 

earnest. He studied with nobody. He 

still mixed in the surveying to pay 

board and clothing bills. When the 

legislature met, the law books were 

dropped, but were taken up again at 

the end of the session.”

After receiving his law license two 

years later, Lincoln joined Stuart as a 

junior partner, moving to Springfield 

in 1837. Soon afterward, Stuart was 

elected to the U.S. Congress and sent 

to Washington, D.C., leaving Lincoln 

to manage the firm and learn how 

to practice law on his own. A few 

years later, Lincoln joined the firm of 

Stephen T. Logan, the leader of the 

Springfield bar. Lincoln’s preparation 

in the law was limited, Logan later 

recalled, “but he would get a case and 

try to know all there was connected 

with it; and in that way before he 

left this country, he got to be quite a 

formidable lawyer.”

Lincoln in Love

Lincoln’s friends and relatives seem 

to agree that he was never much 

interested in girls when growing up, 

but when he got to New Salem he 

fell in love with the tavern-keeper’s 

daughter, Ann Rutledge. Not long 

after they had become engaged, 

she was stricken with what was 

called “brain fever” and died within 

a few weeks. Already Lincoln’s 

mother had died quite suddenly 

when he was nine years old. These 

deaths may have contributed to the 

emotional turmoil that Lincoln now 

suffered. Alarmed friends feared 

that his excessive bereavement and 

despondency might end in suicide.

But slowly Lincoln recovered, and 

slightly more than a year later he 

was involved in another courtship, 

this time with Mary Owens, a welleducated and refined woman from a 

wealthy Kentucky family. We know 

from surviving letters that, having 

involved himself to the point of 

engagement, Lincoln decided that he 

did not love Mary Owens and hoped 

to avoid marriage by convincing her 

that he was unworthy. When she 

proved noncommittal, he finally felt 

honor-bound to propose, and much 

to his astonishment and chagrin, she 

turned him down. He confessed to a 

confidante: “Others have been made 

fools of by the girls; but this can 

never be with truth said of me. I most 

emphatically, in this instance, made a 

fool of myself.”

Less than a year later, he found 

himself involved with another 

Kentucky belle, this one even better 

educated, more refined, and from an 

even wealthier family — Mary Todd 

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ABRAHAM LINCOLN: A LEGACY OF FREEDOM  21

of Lexington. She had many suitors, 

but for reasons that are unclear, she 

set her sights on Lincoln. Again he 

decided in due course that he did 

not love Mary Todd and, attracted 

to someone else, wanted to end their 

relationship, but again, things were 

not so simple.

Another episode of melancholy 

followed. Lincoln wrote to his law 

partner in Washington: “I am now 

the most miserable man living. If 

what I feel were equally distributed 

to the whole human family, there 

would not be one cheerful face on the 

earth.” Lincoln told his roommate, 

Joshua Speed, that he was not afraid 

of death, but “that he had done 

nothing to make any human being 

remember that he had lived.” Lincoln 

recalled this remark 23 years later 

in the White House when he told 

Speed that, having authored the 

Emancipation Proclamation (freeing 

the African-American slaves in the 

rebellious Confederacy), he hoped he 

had finally done something for which 

he would be remembered.

Lincoln eventually recovered, and 

he and Mary Todd got back together. 

On November 4, 1842, to the 

surprise of their closest friends and 

relatives, they announced they were 

to be married the same day. That 

they were not a perfectly matched 

couple was well understood by their 

associates before the marriage, and 

their differences in upbringing and 

expectations soon made themselves 

felt. Lincoln did not know or care 

very much about appearances and 

proprieties, but his new wife did, 

and she had difficulty controlling 

her volatile temper when they 

disagreed. Raised in an aristocratic 

southern household, where slaves 

performed the menial tasks, the 

new Mrs. Lincoln was ill-suited to 

middle-class housekeeping. Lincoln’s 

political and legal careers required 

much travel. His time away from 

home — sometimes for weeks at a 

time — only deepened the domestic 

challenges. But the couple’s shared 

adoration of their children helped to 

create a lasting bond that grounded 

their growing family.

As a Member of Congress

At about the time of his marriage, 

Lincoln declined to run for a fifth 

term in the state legislature and 

began angling for election to the U.S. 

Congress. When he finally succeeded 

and took his seat in the House of 

Representatives in December 1847, 

the Mexican War was coming to a 

victorious conclusion, and Lincoln 

lost no time in joining other Whig 

members in attacking President 

James K. Polk for unconstitutionally 

provoking an unjust war for the 

purpose of acquiring new territory. 

This earned Lincoln considerable 

criticism back home, where the war 

was very popular.

Even as Lincoln contradicted his 

pro-war Democratic constituents 

on a matter of principle, he offended 

some of his fellow Whigs with his 

practicality. Even as many important 

Whigs favored their party’s 

dominant figure, Henry Clay, for the 

presidency in 1848, Lincoln instead 

supported the war hero General 

Zachary Taylor. Taylor had no 

political record or party connection, 

but Lincoln argued that the party 

had lost too many elections and 

needed, more than anything else, 

to win. Ironically, when Lincoln’s 

congressional term was over, the 

victorious Taylor ignored his 

recommendations for government 

appointments and denied Lincoln the 

one he sought for himself: head of 

the General Land Office.

As his brief congressional career 

ended, Lincoln returned to Illinois, 

his political ambitions frustrated and 

his energetic performance on behalf 

of his party unrewarded.

“Upon his return from Congress,” 

Lincoln would later write in a thirdperson narrative, “he went to the 

practice of the law with greater 

earnestness than ever before.” 

With this greater attention to his 

legal profession, Lincoln’s skill and 

reputation as a lawyer rose, and his 

firm gained a prominent position 

in the Illinois bar. He was “losing 

interest in politics,” he said of this 

period, and was interesting himself 

in other intellectual pursuits, such as 

the mastery of Euclid’s geometry.

But as the slavery issue heated up 

in the 1850s, Lincoln’s long-standing 

affinity for political controversy 

unexpectedly revived. “In 1854,” 

he wrote in his narrative, “his 

profession had almost superseded 

the thought of politics in his mind, 

when the repeal of the Missouri 

compromise aroused him as he had 

never been before.”

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22  ABRAHAM LINCOLN: A LEGACY OF FREEDOM

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ABRAHAM LINCOLN: A LEGACY OF FREEDOM  23

&y 1854, Abraham Lincoln could be forgiven for believing his political career 

had reached an end. Lincoln had secured his party’s congressional nomination 

in part by pledging to serve only one term, thus allowing other members of 

the local Whig Party the chance to serve. Lincoln came to regret this pledge, 

μI happen 

temporarily to 

occupy this big 

White House. 

I am living 

witness that 

any one of your 

children may 

look to come 

here as my 

father ’s child 

has.¶

advising his law partner, William 

Herndon, “If it should so happen 

that nobody else wishes to be 

elected, I could not refuse the people 

the right of sending me again.” 

Lincoln had enjoyed his two years in 

Washington and had begun to make 

a name for himself as an opponent of 

the Mexican War, but there was no 

great public clamor for his continued 

service. Disappointed, he returned to 

Springfield and began rebuilding his 

legal practice.

But 1854 also saw new fissures in 

the delicate sectional compromises 

over slavery. Increasingly the free 

North and slaveholding South each 

saw the other’s customs and practices 

as a lethal threat to its own way 

of life. Lincoln was drawn to this 

debate, and thus gradually back to 

public life. Whether Lincoln seized 

events or they instead propelled him 

forward, there can be little doubt 

over the nation’s good fortune: In its 

time of greatest need, America found 

its greatest leader.

Free Labor

Abraham Lincoln had always 

championed “free labor,” the principle 

that a man — and in Lincoln’s day 

this meant males only — could work 

how and where he wanted, could 

accumulate property in his own 

name, and, most importantly, could 

rise freely as far as his talents and 

abilities might take him. Lincoln 

himself was a model of this self-made 

man. As he wrote in 1854:

There is no permanent class of hired 

laborers amongst us. Twenty-five 

years ago, I was a hired laborer. The 

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24  ABRAHAM LINCOLN: A LEGACY OF FREEDOM

hired laborer of yesterday, labors on 

his own account today; and will hire 

others to labor for him tomorrow. 

Advancement — improvement in 

condition — is the order of things in 

a society of equals.

Along with many northerners, 

Lincoln believed that free labor 

was both economically and morally 

superior to the slave-based southern 

alternative. Free labor, he asserted,

has the inspiration of hope; pure 

slavery has no hope. The power of 

hope upon human exertion and 

happiness is wonderful. The slavemaster himself has a conception of it. 

... The slave whom you cannot drive 

with the lash to break seventy-five 

pounds of hemp in a day, if you will 

task him to break a hundred, and 

promise him pay for all he does over, 

he will break you a hundred and 

fifty. You have substituted hope for 

the rod.

Lincoln believed that slavery 

would over time prove economically 

untenable, but he also understood 

that, in the short-term, individual 

wage-earners could not — indeed 

would not — compete with slave 

laborers. Along with many other 

Americans, Lincoln drew two 

political conclusions: Confined to its 

existing southern redoubt, slavery 

would wither away; but if slavery 

expanded into new territories, it 

could displace free laborers and gain 

a new lease on life.

Compromise Fails

As the young nation grew westward, 

the terms on which new states 

would be admitted to the Union, 

that is, as “slave” or “free” states, 

thus assumed decisive importance. 

It first arose during 1820 and 1821, 

with the application of Missouri 

for statehood. Thomas Jefferson 

likened the sectional tension to “a 

firebell in the night.” It eased only 

through a grand compromise in 

which Congress admitted Missouri 

as a slave state, Maine as a free state, 

and barred slavery from all Louisiana 

Purchase territories north of 36° 30 ́, 

Missouri’s southern border. With the 

acquisition of new, formerly Mexican 

territories, a carefully crafted 
ABRAHAM LINCOLN: A LEGACY OF FREEDOM  25

“Compromise of 1850” mated the 

admission of a free California with 

a new Fugitive Slave Law, one that 

obliged northern courts to enforce 

the seizure and return of slaves who 

had escaped northward to freedom.

Meanwhile, Stephen A. Douglas, 

a Democrat and a United States 

Senator from Lincoln’s Illinois, 

offered a new formula to bridge 

the sectional gap. Under Douglas’s 

“popular sovereignty” doctrine, 

western territories would join 

the Union as free or slave states 

according to the wishes of their 

residents. In 1854, the KansasNebraska Act repealed the Missouri 

Compromise 36° 30 ́ line and 

mandated the organization of the 

Nebraska and Kansas territories 

under popular sovereignty rules.

Many northerners met these 

developments with a combination of 

anger and fear. It was one thing to 

expect that slavery would be limited 

to the South, another entirely to 

watch as a pro-slavery mob killed 

an abolitionist publisher in Alton, 

Illinois — free territory — and 

destroyed his printing press; to 

witness pro- and antislavery forces 

battling openly in what soon became 

known as Bloody Kansas; to stand 

aside as slave owners enforced their 

Fugitive Slave Law rights in the very 

heart of the North. Not only were 

northerners forced to confront ever 

more squarely the immorality of 

slavery; the free labor beliefs that 

underlie much of northern life now 

seemed under direct attack.

Lincoln declared himself 

“thunderstruck” and “stunned” 

by the Kansas-Nebraska Act’s 

passage. With powerful October 

1854 addresses at Springfield and 

Peoria, Illinois, he emerged as a 

leading opponent of that law and of 

Douglas: He understood that the 

“revolutionary fathers” had found 

it politically necessary to accept 

slavery in the southern states, but 

they “hedged and hemmed it in to 

the narrowest limits of necessity.” 

Indeed, the Constitution’s authors 

used every euphemism they could 

devise to avoid even the word ‘slavery’: 

“The thing is hid away, ... just as an 

afflicted man hides away a wen or a 

cancer, which he dares not cut out 

at once, lest he bleed to death; with 

the promise, nevertheless, that the 

cutting may begin at the end of a 

given time.” 

During the next two-and-a-half 

years, Lincoln helped establish 

the new Republican Party in 

Illinois. With sectional differences 

deepening, Lincoln’s Whig Party 

had collapsed, unable to paper over 

differences between its northern and 

southern wings. The Republicans, 

by contrast, were more forthrightly 

sectional and antislavery. Some 

northern Democrats, but not 

Stephen Douglas, joined up with 

the Republicans. Lincoln’s efforts for 

his new party earned him valuable 

political capital for the future, but 

for now he concentrated on his 

legal practice.

A House Divided

In March 1857, the U.S. Supreme 

Court’s much-criticized Dred Scott

decision further enflamed sectional 

tensions. Scott, an African-American 

slave whose master had taken him 

to the free Wisconsin territory then 

back to Missouri, had sued for his 

freedom, arguing that residence in 

Wisconsin had made him a free man. 

The Court ruled otherwise, and its 

broad (unnecessarily broad, many 

felt) decision increased northern 

fears. Congress, a majority of justices 

held, lacked the constitutional 

authority to prohibit slavery in 

the territories. The 36° 30 ́ line 

(still in force when the case began) 

was thus unconstitutional, and 

slavery was permissible in all the 

territories, the Kansas-Nebraska Act 

notwithstanding. Chief Justice Roger 

B. Taney also held that African 

Americans were not U.S. citizens, 

were excluded from the protections 

of both the Declaration of 

Independence and the Constitution, 

and possessed “no rights which any 

white man was bound to respect.” 

Dred Scott, accordingly, could not 

even sue in federal court.

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26  ABRAHAM LINCOLN: A LEGACY OF FREEDOM

Much of the North reacted with 

fury. The Chicago Tribune flatly 

predicted that it would force the 

free states to accept slavery, and 

that Chicago, Illinois’ largest city, 

would against its will become a 

slave market. Lincoln feared that 

the Court next would bar state 

prohibitions of slavery. He decided 

to run against Senator Douglas, who 

had endorsed the Dred Scott decision, 

in the 1858 election. Lincoln 

accepted the Republican nomination 

with his famous “House Divided” 

address:

A house divided against itself cannot 

stand.

I believe this government cannot 

endure, permanently half slave and 

half free.

I do not expect the Union to be 

dissolved — I do not expect the 

house to fall — but I do expect it 

will cease to be divided.

It will become all one thing or all 

the other.

Either the opponents of slavery, will 

... place it where the public mind 

shall rust in the belief that it is in the 

course of ultimate extinction; or its 

advocates will put it forward, till it 

shall become alike lawful in all the 

States, old as well as new — North 

as well as South.

The New York Times swiftly 

pronounced the Lincoln-Douglas 

contest “the most interesting political 

battle-ground in the Union.”

Lincoln challenged Douglas to a 

series of seven debates in different 

parts of Illinois. Together these 

Lincoln-Douglas debates emerged 

as an iconic moment in American 

democracy. Citizens converged in 

towns large and small, from Freeport 

to Jonesboro, Galesburg to Alton. 

They arrived on horseback, by canal 

boat, or simply walked for miles to 

witness the two champions address 

the greatest divide in their nation’s 

history. The contrast between 

the candidates was apparent. 

Douglas was smartly dressed and 

flowery of speech — the picture of 

sophistication. Lincoln was gangly, 

far less polished in appearance and 

mannerism. But the country lawyer 

scored real blows, holding Douglas 

to the contradiction between popular 

sovereignty and the Dred Scott

decision, which forbade antislavery 

settlers from prohibiting slavery 

in their territories. In the very last 

debate, Lincoln memorably framed 

the dispute as a conflict

on the part of one class that looks 

upon the institution of slavery as a 

wrong, and of another class that does 

not look upon it as a wrong. ... That 

is the issue that will continue in this 

country when these poor tongues 

of Judge Douglas and myself shall 

be silent. It is the eternal struggle 

between these two principles — right 

and wrong — throughout the world. 

They are the two principles that have 

stood face to face from the beginning 

of time; and will ever continue to 

struggle. The one is the common 

right of humanity and the other the 

divine right of kings.

In this era, United States senators 

were not directly elected but rather 

chosen by the state legislatures. When 

that vote was counted, it was Douglass 

who prevailed, by 54 votes to 46 for 

Lincoln. But Lincoln’s effort against 

one of the Senate’s leading figures 

had been noticed by many. Nor was 

Lincoln willing to abandon the field. 

As he told a friend: “The fight must go 

on. The cause of civil liberty must not 

be surrendered at the end of one or 

even one hundred defeats.”

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ABRAHAM LINCOLN: A LEGACY OF FREEDOM  27

Alabama

Washington 

Territory

Virginia

Vermont

Utah 

Territory

Texas

Tennessee

SouthCarolina

Rhode Island

Arkansas

California

Connecticut

Delaware

Florida

Georgia

Oregon

Territory

Illinois

Wisconsin

Indiana

Iowa

Kansas

Territory Kentucky

Louisiana

Maine

Massachusetts

Michigan

Mississippi

Missouri

Nebraska

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New York

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Territory

Missouri Compromise Line (36° 30’N)

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THE THREAT TO FREE LABOR (1857)

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28  ABRAHAM LINCOLN: A LEGACY OF FREEDOM
ABRAHAM LINCOLN: A LEGACY OF FREEDOM  29

To the White House

Throughout 1859, Lincoln toured 

a number of midwestern states, 

speaking against Douglas’s popular 

sovereignty doctrine and warning 

against slavery’s further spread. 

Probably he already was thinking 

about a long-shot run for the 

presidency: He authorized the 

compilation and publication of 

his debates with Douglas and, in 

December 1859, began to prepare his 

autobiography.

In February 1860, Lincoln 

traveled to New York, the nation’s 

leading city, not least to meet and 

address the civic and financial leaders 

who would have a large say in naming 

the Republican Party’s presidential 

nominee. Many who gathered at the 

Cooper Union expected to witness 

a rough, uncultivated midwesterner. 

At first, they were not disappointed. 

One recalled Lincoln’s 

long, ungainly figure, upon which 

hung clothes that, while new for the 

trip, were evidently the work of an 

unskilled tailor; the large feet; the 

clumsy hands ... the long, gaunt 

head capped by a shock of hair that 

seemed not to have been thoroughly 

brushed out, made a picture which 

did not fit in with New York’s 

conception of a finished statesman.

But then Lincoln spoke. In 

measured words calibrated to assure 

the audience he was no radical, 

Lincoln demonstrated definitively 

that a majority of the signers of the 

U.S. Constitution had believed the 

federal government could indeed 

prohibit slavery in the territories. 

The true radicals were instead 

the southerners who threatened 

secession if their interpretation 

was not accepted: “Your purpose, 

then, plainly stated, is that you will 

destroy the government, unless you 

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30  ABRAHAM LINCOLN: A LEGACY OF FREEDOM

be allowed to construe and enforce 

the Constitution as you please, on all 

points in dispute between you and 

us. You will rule or ruin in all events.” 

Lincoln called for northerners to 

confine slavery to the states where 

it already existed, and to oppose 

fervently its extension to the national 

territories.

The Cooper Union address was 

extremely well received. Several 

New York newspapers published the 

entire text. One reporter proclaimed 

Lincoln “the greatest man since St. 

Paul.” Horace Greeley, editor of 

the influential New York Tribune, 

deemed Lincoln “one of Nature’s 

orators.” And Lincoln himself, 

discussing with a friend a possible 

presidential candidacy, admitted that 

“the taste is in my mouth a little.”

Many Republicans assumed 

that the powerful William Seward 

of New York would capture their 

party’s presidential nomination. But 

Seward was weak in Pennsylvania, 

Indiana, and Illinois, crucial states 

where a midwesterner might have 

more appeal. Were Seward unable to 

capture the nomination on the first 

ballot, Republicans might well seek 

a candidate from one of those states. 

“My name is new in the field, and I 

suppose I am not the first choice of a 

very great many,” Lincoln explained. 

“Our policy, then, is to give no 

offence to others — leave them in a 

mood to come to us, if they shall be 

compelled to give up their first love.” 

This proved a sound analysis. Seward 

fell short on the first ballot, then 

faded as midwestern states shifted 

their votes to Lincoln, securing him 

the nomination on the third ballot.

The Republican candidate 

possessed real advantages in the 

1860 general election. Like the now 

dissolved Whigs, the Democratic 

Party was crippled by its own 

sectional divisions. Its northern and 

southern wings nominated rival 

candidates, allowing Lincoln, who 

won less than 40 percent of the 

popular vote in a four-way race, to 

capture a majority of the electoral 

votes and the presidency.

The South would not accept a 

Lincoln presidency. As Lincoln later 

would put it, “the war came.” Only 

then would the nation truly witness 

the wisdom, the strength, and, 

ultimately, the magnanimity of 

the man it had chosen during its 

greatest trial.

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8he billions of U.S. pennies that will be 

produced in 2009 are getting a makeover. 

The Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial 

Commission (ALBC) and the U.S. Mint 

recently unveiled four new designs for the reverse side of 

the one-cent coin to celebrate Lincoln’s 200th birthday.

The new pennies will be released periodically 

throughout the year. The obverse side, or “heads,” will 

remain the same: Victor David Brenner’s profile of 

Lincoln has been on the front of the penny since the 

1909 centennial of Lincoln’s birth. The reverse side, or 

“tails,” has been redesigned twice since that time. But in 

2009 the design will change four times to represent four 

periods in Lincoln’s life: his early childhood in Kentucky, 

his young adulthood in Indiana, his career as a lawyer 

and legislator in Illinois, and his time as president in 

Washington, D.C. 

The U.S. Congress, which is the only body that 

can authorize changes to coins, passed legislation for 

the redesign in 2005. Designs for the pennies were 

submitted by sculptor-engravers at the U.S. Mint and 

through the Artistic Infusion Program, a group of 

outside artists under contract to the Mint. The designs 

were reviewed by the ALBC, the Citizen Coin Advisory 

Committee, and the U.S. Commission on Fine Arts. 

Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson reviewed their 

recommendations and selected the final designs.

Richard Masters’ depiction of a log cabin was one of 

the designs selected by Secretary Paulson for the series. 

Masters had been a coin enthusiast as a boy and had also 

collected coins for the Cub Scouts while working for 

a merit badge. But he never pictured himself as a coin 

designer, much less a master designer with the Artistic 

Infusion Program, which he is today. 

Nor as a child did Masters think about the design 

process, figuring the renderings on the coins just 

magically appeared. “Someone, somewhere decides what 

to put on these,” he remembers thinking. 

Decades later, he is that someone. Masters used the 

historical narrative provided by the Abraham Lincoln 

Bicentennial Commission as a starting point to craft his 

image illustrating Lincoln’s birth and early childhood 

in Kentucky. “I thought it [the log cabin] would be an 

image most Americans recognized,” says Masters, who 

is also an associate professor of art at the University of 

Wisconsin-Oshkosh. 

One of the most difficult parts of the design was 

the scale. An artist’s vision may have to be shrunk to 

fit within a coin’s small diameter. “The challenge here 

was really to stay focused on the primary element,” says 

Masters. 

Still other changes are to come. Congress has 

mandated that, beginning in 2010, the reverse side of the 

penny feature a yet-to-be-determined image of Lincoln’s 

“preservation of the United States of America as a single 

and united country.”

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ABRAHAM LINCOLN: A LEGACY OF FREEDOM  31
32  ABRAHAM LINCOLN: A LEGACY OF FREEDOM

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ABRAHAM LINCOLN: A LEGACY OF FREEDOM  33

Lincoln replied: “I don’t care so much 

for brigadiers; I can make them. But 

horses and mules cost money.”

That jest had a bitter undertone, 

borne of Lincoln’s long frustration 

with mediocre generals and the 

burden of having had to run the war 

effort almost single-handedly for 

three years. 

The American Civil War was the 

first modern total war — a conflict 

waged not only between armies, 

as had long been the tradition in 

Western warfare, but also between 

societies, their economic resources, 

and their very ways of life. 

Abraham Lincoln had entered the 

presidency with no military training 

or experience except as a militia 

captain in a minor Indian war three 

decades earlier. The standing army 

Lincoln inherited in March 1861 

numbered just 16,000 men who were 

dispersed in small garrisons from the 

Atlantic Coast to California. Lincoln 

had no modern military command 

system on which to rely for advice 

or to communicate his instructions 

effectively to field commanders. Not 

only was there no general staff when 

war broke out a month later, but 

only two regular army generals had 

3ne day toward the end of the Civil War, a high-ranking military visitor 

to the White House told President Lincoln that two of his fellow generals 

had been captured while visiting lady friends outside their camps. 

Along with them, several hundred horses and mules had been swept up. 

μ America 

will never be 

destroyed from 

the outside. 

If we falter 

and lose our 

freedoms, it 

will be because 

we destroyed 

ourselves.¶

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34  ABRAHAM LINCOLN: A LEGACY OF FREEDOM

ever commanded units larger than 

a brigade — one was so corpulent 

that he could not walk across a room 

without exhausting himself; the 

other so senile that he needed help 

putting on his hat. Subordinate 

officers knew little of 

the higher art of war 

because the United 

States Military 

Academy taught 

engineering, 

mathematics, and horsemanship at 

the expense of strategy.

The Union army’s swift wartime 

expansion did not solve this 

leadership crisis. In less than a 

year, the northern army swelled to 

600,000 men, and by the war’s end 

it had climbed to a million. Regular 

army captains became generals 

overnight. In order to unify the 

North and rally its large European 

immigrant population, Lincoln 

was compelled to appoint volunteer 

generals from civilian life. Most 

“earned” their stars because of their 

political influence or their standing 

among their ethnic community 

(Germans and Irish in particular), 

rather than for any military potential 

they might possess. 

The crisis extended to the nation’s 

political leadership. Lincoln lacked 

the support of a united cabinet. 

ever commanded units larger than

a brigade — one was so corpulent 

that he could not walk across a room 

without exhausting himself; the

other so senile that he needed help

putting on his hat. Subordinate 

officers knew little of

the higher art of war 

because the United

States Military

Academy taught 

engineering, 

34  ABRAHAM LINCOLN: A LEGACY OF FREEDOM

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ABRAHAM LINCOLN: A LEGACY OF FREEDOM  35

While later presidents possessed 

the luxury of appointing talented 

but usually pliant subordinates, 

then-existing custom and political 

reality required that Lincoln fill his 

cabinet with willful politicians of 

national prominence. Among them 

were Secretary of State William H. 

Seward, whom Lincoln had defeated 

for the Republican presidential 

nomination in a stunning upset; 

Secretary of the Treasury Salmon P. 

Chase, a founder of the Republican 

Party who fancied himself a future 

president; and Secretary of War 

Edwin M. Stanton, a Democrat 

who had bested Lincoln in a major 

court case when both were lawyers. 

In the early months of the conflict, 

these men all considered themselves 

intellectually superior to Lincoln, 

equally if not more capable of 

steering the ship of state through the 

treacherous waters of civil war.

A Challenge From the 

Incompetents

Despite these liabilities, by the power 

of his mind and force of character 

Lincoln became a brilliant strategist, 

with a better grasp on the nature and 

objectives of civil war than any of the 

long line of generals who commanded 

Union armies, Ulysses S. Grant not 

excepted. From the start, Lincoln 

recognized the value of the North’s 

overwhelming naval power, and he 

employed it relentlessly to choke 

the Confederacy, closing southern 

ports to prevent the export of its 

only commodity of international 

value — cotton — and to prevent 

the import of badly needed arms and 

other war supplies from Europe. He 

also understood the importance of 

seizing the Mississippi River to cut 

the South in half, as well as the need 

to maintain pressure on the whole 

strategic line of the Confederacy, 

something his generals proved 

singularly incapable of doing until 

General Grant assumed the role of 

general-in-chief in February 1864. 

To Lincoln’s constant frustration, his 

generals consistently failed fully to 

press the North’s large advantages in 

manpower and industrial capacity.

Lincoln knew there could be no 

half measures, that the issues of 

national union and emancipation 

could be settled only in such a way 

that they could never be reopened. 

This required both the total 

destruction of the Confederate army 

and of the capacity of the South to 

wage war. 

As the war dragged on, Lincoln 

rid the army of scores of incompetent 

political generals at great risk to 

his reelection. He asked only for 

commanders who would fight, and 

he willingly discarded his strategic 

judgments when he thought he 

had found an able general. But all 

too often he instead encountered 

inaction, delay, and excuses. 

He relieved the most popular 

commander of the first year and a 

half of the war — Major General 

George B. McClellan, a man fiercely 

idolized by his men — because he 

suffered from what Lincoln termed 

“the slows.” He showed similar, and 

proper, impatience with generals who 

were too timid to follow up battlefield 

victories decisively. Unfortunately for 

the North, every army commander 

in the war’s first three years displayed 

this shortcoming.

Lincoln also faced an internal 

challenge to his commander-in-chief 

authority. Today, of course, the 

principle of absolute civilian control 

over the military is universally 

accepted. It had not been when 

Lincoln took office. Since the nation’s 

founding it had been acceptable 

for army commanders to pass 

judgment on political questions — a 

brand of insubordination that was 

comparatively harmless during the 

war with Mexico, but that could 

threaten the fabric of the nation in a 

struggle for national survival as did 

the Civil War.

When Lincoln relieved 

McClellan of command, a number of 

McClellan’s subordinate generals in 

the Army of the Potomac discussed 

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36  ABRAHAM LINCOLN: A LEGACY OF FREEDOM

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ABRAHAM LINCOLN: A LEGACY OF FREEDOM  37
38  ABRAHAM LINCOLN: A LEGACY OF FREEDOM

abandoning the battle against the 

Confederacy and instead marching 

on Washington to unseat the 

president. As late as April 1863, 

Major General Joseph Hooker, the 

commander of that critical army, 

advocated replacing the presidency 

with a military dictatorship. Lincoln 

responded in a measured but firm 

manner. After he was removed from 

command for losing the battle of 

Chancellorsville against an enemy 

whom he had outnumbered more 

than two to one, Hooker recognized 

how restrained had been the 

president’s reaction to Hooker’s 

political blustering and how prudent 

had been Lincoln’s counsel in 

military matters. Tearfully he told 

fellow generals that Lincoln had 

treated him as a caring father would 

an errant son. 

A Shift in Sentiment

By the time of the 1864 presidential 

campaign, the common soldiers also 

had come to recognize the greatness 

of Lincoln’s strategic leadership. 

Their votes went overwhelmingly to 

Lincoln, ensuring his victory over 

George B. McClellan. After being 

sacked by Lincoln, the former general 

had emerged as the president’s 

Democratic opponent and, as a 

proponent of sectional reconciliation, 

the most prominent challenger to his 

political vision.

The significance of this shift in 

military sentiment from McClellan 

to Lincoln cannot be overstated. 

Lincoln had at last found his 

fighting general, Ulysses S. Grant, 

a rough-hewn commander who 

shared his chief ’s determination to 

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ABRAHAM LINCOLN: A LEGACY OF FREEDOM  39

press the North’s real advantages in 

manpower and resources. The Army 

of the Potomac had suffered nearly 

55,000 casualties during the first 

month and a half of Grant’s tenure 

as general-in-chief. Decisive victories 

in the Shenandoah Valley and the 

capture of Atlanta, Georgia, fruits of 

Lincoln’s vision of relentless pressure 

on the entire military front, offered 

hope for ultimate victory.

But the South showed no signs 

of surrendering. Grant’s superior 

generalship and Lincoln’s policy 

of simultaneous offensives were 

being sorely tested in a bitter and 

stalemated siege of General Robert 

E. Lee’s army at Petersburg, Virginia. 

In the Western Theater (as the area 

between the Appalachian Mountains 

and the Mississippi River was called), 

a weakened but still formidable 

Confederate army roamed, and 

west of the Mississippi, a large and 

virtually untested enemy force held 

Louisiana and Texas. Lincoln’s 1864 

electoral triumph thus represented a 

national consensus to wage the war 

to its finish.

Politically secure as a secondterm president, Lincoln persisted 

with the same firmness of purpose 

he had shown during an unpopular 

first term. His appointment of the 

dependable Grant as general-in-chief 

had eased much of the daily pressure 

on Lincoln, who found he could 

safely yield to Grant the day-to-day 

management of the war. But even 

Grant faced hard questions from 

Lincoln when the president doubted 

the wisdom of his decisions. 

Road to Reunion

In the first week of April 1865, final 

victory was at last in sight. After 

smashing much of what remained 

of Lee’s once seemingly unbeatable 

Army of Northern Virginia, 

Major General Philip H. Sheridan 

telegraphed Grant: “If the thing be 

pressed I think Lee will surrender.”

Grant passed Sheridan’s dispatch 

to Lincoln. The president told Grant: 

“Let the thing be pressed.” It was 

Lincoln’s last important order, and 

like most of his orders a good one. 

Three days after writing it, Lincoln 

was dead, the victim of an assassin’s 

bullet. The United States had lost 

its greatest war president and a great 

natural strategist. But more than 

any other factor, his strategic vision 

and firmness of purpose had won the 

Civil War and started the nation on 

the road to reunion. 

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40  ABRAHAM LINCOLN: A LEGACY OF FREEDOM

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ABRAHAM LINCOLN: A LEGACY OF FREEDOM  41

the president himself — these 

matters draw the most interest when 

one studies the nation at war with 

itself from 1861 to 1865.

Yet when Lincoln declared that 

he waged the war to preserve the 

Union, he necessarily also accepted 

challenges from beyond the nation’s 

borders. Had the rebellious South 

won diplomatic recognition from 

England and other European 

nations, especially during the 

war’s crucial first 18 months, the 

Confederate States of America might 

have won its independence. Lincoln’s 

leadership on this diplomatic front 

proved as important as his command 

of the armed forces in securing the 

Union’s ultimate victory. 

Lincoln was the very prototype 

of a diplomatist. Although he 

admitted to knowing little or nothing 

about foreign affairs, he possessed 

the characteristics common to the 

best statesmen: humility, integrity, 

wisdom combined with common 

sense, a calm demeanor in the 

hardest times, and a willingness 

to learn. Furthermore, he had 

the courage to appoint advisers 

of stature: His secretary of state, 

William H. Seward, earlier had been 

one of Lincoln’s most bitter political 

rivals, but more importantly, Seward 

was knowledgeable and experienced 

in foreign affairs. Their relationship 

did not start out well. Seward fancied 

himself a prime minister or head 

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4resident Abraham Lincoln as diplomatist? Hardly a subject at the top of the 

list in examining a presidency that spanned the U.S. Civil War. His search for 

military leaders, his quest for victory on the battlefield, his personal trials, his 

difficulties with advisers who vied for influence with each other and even with 

μ Nearly all 

men can stand 

adversity, but 

if you want to 

test a man ’s 

character, give 

him power.¶
42  ABRAHAM LINCOLN: A LEGACY OF FREEDOM

of government and Lincoln a mere 

symbolic leader, if not a buffoon. But 

when Seward rashly proposed to 

unite North and South by instigating 

a war with foreign powers, Lincoln 

quietly killed the idea, established his 

primacy, and soon won his secretary’s 

respect and admiration.

A Two-Front War Averted

The outbreak of war in April 1861 

presented the new president with his 

first foreign affairs crisis. From the 

perspective of the Union (the North), 

the conflict was not a war between 

nations but rather an internal 

rebellion to be suppressed without 

interference from other nations. But 

to Britain and France, each of which 

hoped to continue trading with the 

Confederacy (the South), Lincoln’s 

decision to blockade southern ports 

allowed them under international 

law to acknowledge that a state of 

war existed, proclaim their neutrality, 

and recognize the Confederacy as 

a belligerent. Together these moves 

bestowed a legitimacy on the South 

that was one step short of outright 

recognition as a nation.

Lincoln’s diplomacy thus focused 

on preventing outside powers from 

recognizing southern independence. 

He continued to oppose any foreign 

involvement, whether by a nation’s 

making its good offices available to 

promote peace talks or by proposing 

a mediation, an arbitration, or an 

armistice. Yet Lincoln also toned 

down (but never renounced) 

Seward’s warnings that the United 

States would go to war with any 

nation that interfered. The president 

also moderated the secretary’s 

dispatches and relied on his mildmannered yet stern minister to 

England, Charles Francis Adams, to 

resolve other problems. 

The recognition issue flared up 

repeatedly during the course of the 

Civil War. The Union’s humiliation 

at the battle of Bull Run in July 1861 

convinced some Europeans that 

Confederate independence was a 

fait accompli. How could the Union 

force reconciliation onto 11 states 

and millions of people? The following 

November, a U.S. naval vessel seized 

a British mail ship, the Trent, and 

illegally removed two southern 

commissioners, James Mason and 

John Slidell, who had run the Union 

blockade and were en route to 

England. Lincoln wisely freed the 

captives and authorized a loosely 

worded admission of error that 

salvaged American face and narrowly 

averted a two-front war pitting the 

United States against Great Britain 

as well as the South.

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ABRAHAM LINCOLN: A LEGACY OF FREEDOM  43

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44  ABRAHAM LINCOLN: A LEGACY OF FREEDOM

An Act of Military Necessity

One tool Lincoln employed in 

his quest to forestall diplomatic 

recognition of the Confederacy 

was antislavery sentiment among 

Europeans. Soon after the Union’s 

razor-thin victory at Antietam in 

the fall of 1862, Lincoln exercised 

his military powers as commanderin-chief to declare that as of January 

1, 1863, all slaves in states still in 

rebellion were free. He characterized 

this landmark Emancipation 

Proclamation as an act of “military 

necessity,” intended to encourage 

slaves to abandon the plantations 

and band with the advancing 

Union armies.

As always, Lincoln had carefully 

balanced competing objectives while 

advancing toward a greater purpose. 

The Emancipation Proclamation 

remained silent on slaves in border 

states such as Kentucky, Missouri, 

Maryland, and Delaware that had 

not joined the Confederacy (as well 

as parts of Tennessee already under 

Union occupation). Lincoln thus 

retained the support of those crucial 

states, and he avoided alienating 

conservative northerners and possible 

Union loyalists in the South. Even so, 

Lincoln knew that his Emancipation 

Proclamation was morally just. He 

also recognized that it would lift 

Union morale by elevating the war 

into a humanitarian crusade. And, of 

course, he counted on emancipation 

preventing the British and French, 

both opposed to slavery, from 

entering the war on the South’s side.

The president’s diplomatic 

instincts proved sound. A number 

of British and French leaders had 

calculated that the division of the 

United States into two rival nations 

would best serve their own nations’ 

objectives. The Emancipation 

Proclamation was a potent tool in 

overcoming this sentiment. At first, 

some British statesmen considered 

the document a hypocritical Union 

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ABRAHAM LINCOLN: A LEGACY OF FREEDOM  45

effort to snatch victory from certain 

defeat by inciting slave rebellions. If 

the war concerned slavery, why had 

Lincoln declared its purpose was to 

preserve the Union?

Indeed, in the following 

November, the British cabinet under 

Prime Minister Lord Palmerston 

considered an interventionist 

proposal to recognize the 

Confederacy and thus force the 

Union to discuss peace. The cabinet 

overwhelmingly voted against this, 

not least because it did not wish 

Britain to be seen on the side of 

slaveholders against Lincoln and 

emancipation. Together with the 

Russians, Britain then rejected 

the proposal by French Emperor 

Napoleon III for an armistice 

demand backed by multilateral force 

should either American belligerent 

reject the demand (in reality this 

was a threat aimed at the North, 

since an armistice effectively would 

ratify southern independence). By 

the close of 1862, the Palmerston 

ministry came to realize that 

whatever blend of realpolitik and 

moral instinct drove Lincoln’s 

proclamation, however less than 100 

percent pure his motives, the results 

would be desirable and just.

A New Birth of Freedom

And so it was. When northern 

victory finally came in April 1865, 

it was clear that the president had 

saved the Union, but not the Union 

of 1861. As the postwar amendments 

to the U.S. Constitution assured 

that Americans would never again 

permit slavery in their land, the true 

breadth of Lincoln’s vision became 

clear. Lincoln had midwived a new 

birth of freedom based on the natural 

rights underlying the Declaration 

of Independence. He had destroyed 

slavery and the Old South, and he 

emerged with a better Union. And 

Lincoln’s role as skillful diplomatist 

was an indispensable ingredient in 

forestalling European intervention 

and prevailing in one of the oftenforgotten yet crucially decisive battles 

of the Civil War. 

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46  ABRAHAM LINCOLN: A LEGACY OF FREEDOM

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ABRAHAM LINCOLN: A LEGACY OF FREEDOM  47

Which is it? A fair answer requires 

that we evaluate Lincoln in the 

context of his times and of his role in 

public life.

“I have always hated slavery as 

much as any abolitionist,” Lincoln 

said in 1858. But when political 

opponent Stephen A. Douglas 

charged that Lincoln favored racial 

equality, he responded that “I am 

not, nor have ever been, in favor 

of bringing about in any way the 

social and political equality of the 

white and black races.” Lincoln 

also attacked “that counterfeit logic 

which presumes that, because I do 

not want a Negro woman for a slave, 

I must necessarily want her for a 

wife.” And shortly before signing the 

Emancipation Proclamation freeing 

slaves in the Confederate South, 

President Lincoln invited a visiting 

free black delegation to consider 

emigrating to Haiti or Central 

America, saying, “It is better for us 

both ... to be separated.”

Many of Lincoln’s actions are 

best understood by recalling that his 

chosen career was not moral prophet 

but instead, as the leading historian 

James M. McPherson has written,

a politician, a practitioner of the art 

of the possible, a pragmatist who 

subscribed to [abolitionist] principles 

but recognized that they could only 

be achieved in gradual, step-by-step 

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μ Nearly all 

men can stand 

adversity, but 

if you want to 

test a man’s 

character, give 

him power.¶

*or some Americans, Abraham Lincoln remains the Great Emancipator, 

the man who freed the African-American slaves. For others, Lincoln was an 

opportunist who lagged behind the abolitionist movement, an advocate of 

black Americans’ voluntary emigration, and even a white supremacist. 
48  ABRAHAM LINCOLN: A LEGACY OF FREEDOM

fashion through compromise and 

negotiation, in pace with progressive 

changes in public opinion and 

political realities.

However much Lincoln bowed 

to public opinion, he always held 

fast to a core belief that, under the 

Declaration of Independence, all men 

possessed equally the inalienable 

rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit 

of happiness. Lincoln also remained, 

for a man of the early- and mid-19th 

century, free of social prejudice. 

Frederick Douglass, the great 

African-American thinker, publisher, 

and abolitionist, met with Lincoln 

at the White House in 1864 and 

reported that “in his company I was 

never in any way reminded of my 

humble origin, or of my unpopular 

color.” The president had received 

Douglass “ just as you have seen one 

gentleman receive another.” Lincoln, 

Douglass concluded, was “one of 

the very few Americans who could 

entertain a Negro and converse with 

him without in anywise reminding 

him of the unpopularity of his color.”

The Real Issue Defined

Before attaining the presidency, 

Abraham Lincoln’s signature political 

issue was a determined opposition 

to the extension of slavery into the 

western territories. The issue was for 

Lincoln a moral one, and in his final 

1858 Senate campaign debate with 

Stephen A. Douglas, he made that 

point with stunning clarity, defining 

“the real issue” as a conflict

on the part of one class that looks 

upon the institution of slavery as 

a wrong, and of another class that 

does not look upon it as a wrong. 

... It is the eternal struggle between 

these two principles — right and 

wrong — throughout the world. 

They are the two principles that have 

stood face to face from the beginning 

of time; and will ever continue to 

struggle. The one is the common 

right of humanity, and the other the 

divine right of kings.

But Lincoln’s ultimate political 

loyalty was to the Union. As the Civil 

War raged, Lincoln wrote Horace 

Greeley, influential editor of the New 

York Tribune: “My paramount object 

in this struggle is to save the Union, 

and is not either to save or destroy 

slavery. [If] I could save the Union 

without freeing any slave I would do 

it; and if I could save it by freeing 

all the slaves I would do it; and if 

I could save it by freeing some and 

leaving others alone I would also do 

that.” To that end, Lincoln allowed 

the slaveholding border states that 

sided with the Union to retain their 

slaves until the war’s end. When a 

Union general took it upon himself 

to declare slavery abolished in parts 

of the South, the president swiftly 

rescinded the order, reserving to 

himself the authority for such an act.

The problem, from the perspective 

of Abraham Lincoln the wartime 

political leader, was that northern 

public opinion still was not ready for 

emancipation. But as the historian 

James Oakes has documented, 

Lincoln’s rhetoric during the war’s 

early years prepared the nation 

for that step. Even as he rescinded 

General David Hunter’s May 1862 

liberation order, Lincoln carefully 

included a paragraph asserting his 

authority to issue a similar order. 

In June, he began quietly to draft 

that order.

In July, with Union armies 

stalled, the president quietly 

informed leading cabinet members 

that he now viewed emancipation 

as a military necessity. This was 

arguably quite true, and it also was 

politically shrewd. Enslaved blacks 

now comprised a majority of the 

Confederacy’s labor force. Drawing 

them to the Union cause would 

simultaneously strengthen the 

North’s war effort and weaken that 

of its Confederate opponent. Even as 

a growing number of northern whites 

came to support abolition, many 

who opposed it and fought only to 

preserve the Union could see how 

freeing the slaves might prove decisive 

on the battlefield.

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50  ABRAHAM LINCOLN: A LEGACY OF FREEDOM

A Promise Kept

On September 22, 1862, Lincoln 

issued what became known as 

the Preliminary Emancipation 

Proclamation. It announced his 

intent on January 1, 1863, to issue 

another order that “all persons 

held as slaves within any state or 

designated part of a state, the people 

whereof shall then be in rebellion 

against the United States, shall 

be then, thenceforward, and 

forever free.”

With the new year, Lincoln kept 

his promise. The Emancipation 

Proclamation declared that all slaves 

within the Confederacy “are, and 

henceforward shall be free; and that 

the Executive government of the 

United States, including the military 

and naval authorities thereof, will 

recognize and maintain the freedom 

of said persons.” It also announced 

the Union’s intent to recruit and field 

black soldiers.

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The future African-American 

leader Booker T. Washington was 

about seven years old when the 

Emancipation Proclamation was 

read on his plantation. As he recalled 

in his 1901 memoir Up From Slavery:

As the great day grew nearer, 

there was more singing in the slave 

quarters than usual. It was bolder, 

had more ring, and lasted later 

into the night. Most of the verses 

of the plantation songs had some 

reference to freedom. ... Some 

man who seemed to be a stranger 

(a U.S. officer, I presume) made a 

little speech and then read a rather 

long paper — the Emancipation 

Proclamation, I think. After the 

reading we were told that we were all 

free, and could go when and where 

we pleased. My mother, who was 

standing by my side, leaned over and 

kissed her children, while tears of joy 

ran down her cheeks. She explained 

to us what it all meant, that this 

was the day for which she had been 

so long praying, but fearing that she 

would never live to see.

On the political front, Lincoln 

continued to defend emancipation on 

military grounds. “No human power 

can subdue this rebellion without 

using the Emancipation lever as I 

have done,” he wrote.

If they [African Americans] stake 

their lives for us they must be 

prompted by the strongest motive. 

... And the promise being made, 

must be kept. ... Why should they 

give their lives for us with full notice 

of our purpose to betray them? ... I 

should be damned in time and in 

eternity for so doing. The world shall 

know that I will keep my faith to 

friends and enemies, come what will.

More than a decade after Lincoln’s 

death, Frederick Douglass tried to 

explain Lincoln’s relation to the cause 

of emancipation. Compared to the 

abolitionists, “Lincoln seemed tardy, 

cold, dull, and indifferent,” he wrote. 

But “measure him by the sentiment 

of his country, a sentiment he was 

bound as a statesman to consult,” 

and Lincoln “was swift, zealous, 

radical, and determined.” Perhaps no 

statesman could accomplish more.

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52  ABRAHAM LINCOLN: A LEGACY OF FREEDOM

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ABRAHAM LINCOLN: A LEGACY OF FREEDOM  53

Fascinated by the sound of 

words, Lincoln wrote for the ear. He 

whispered or spoke a word out loud 

before putting his pencil to paper. 

Lincoln’s pattern then was to speak 

or read his addresses slowly.

Let us examine three speeches 

Lincoln offered as president of the 

United States between 1861 and 

1865. I encourage you to speak 

Lincoln’s words aloud, an exercise 

that will help you enter more fully 

into the meaning of the words that 

moved a nation.

First Inaugural Address (1861)

March 4, 1861, dawned windy 

and cool. A crowd of more than 

25,000 arrived early at the U.S. 

Capitol, hoping for places from 

which they could hear Abraham 

Lincoln’s inaugural address. No 

president had ever been inaugurated 

in such turbulent times. Lincoln’s 

election had raised the all too real 

possibility of southern secession from 

the Union. Rumors of threats to 

Lincoln’s life were racing through the 

capital city.

In his inaugural address Lincoln 

sought to balance conciliation with 

strength. After speaking for nearly 

30 minutes, the president reached his 

concluding paragraph. Lincoln’s early 

drafts ended with a question: “Shall 

it be peace or a sword?” Secretary 

of State William Seward urged 

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*rom all around the world, people come to see the Lincoln Memorial in 

Washington, D.C. In this sacred space, visitors stand in awe as they read 

the eloquent words of Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address and 

his second inaugural address.

μWhen I am 

getting ready to 

reason with a 

man, I spend 

one-third of my 

time thinking 

about myself 

and what I 

am going to say 

and two-thirds 

about him 

and what he is 

going to say.

¶
54  ABRAHAM LINCOLN: A LEGACY OF FREEDOM

Lincoln instead to conclude with 

“some words of affection — some 

of calm and cheerful confidence.” A 

comparison illustrates how Lincoln 

transformed Seward’s words into his 

own remarkable prose poetry. 

t4FXBSEI close.

 Lincoln: I am loath to close.

t4FXBSEWe are not, we must not 

be, aliens or enemies, but fellow 

countrymen and brethren.

 Lincoln: We are not enemies, but 

friends. We must not be enemies.

t4FXBSEAlthough passion has 

strained our bonds of affection too 

hardly, they must not, I am sure they 

will not, be broken.

 Lincoln: Though passion may have 

strained, it must not break our bonds 

of affection.

t4FXBSEThe mystic chords which, 

proceeding from so many battlefields 

and so many patriot graves, pass 

through all the hearts and all the 

hearths in this broad continent of 

ours, will yet again harmonize in 

their ancient music when breathed 

upon by the guardian angel of 

the nation.

 Lincoln: The mystic chords of 

memory, stretching from every 

battlefield, and patriot grave, to 

every living heart and hearthstone, 

all over this broad land, will yet swell 

the chorus of the Union, when again 

touched, as surely they will be, by the 

better angels of our nature.

Lincoln pared away extraneous 

words. He brought together words 

or syllables with related sounds. 

He employed alliteration, placing 

together the same consonant and 

sound five times in the final two 

sentences, encouraging the listener to 

link those words:

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ABRAHAM LINCOLN: A LEGACY OF FREEDOM  55

break

bonds

battlefield

broad

better

Lincoln used powerful images 

to remind the nation of its past and 

announce his political vision for 

the future.

Gettysburg Address (1863)

On July 1-3, 1863, Union and 

Confederate forces fought a great 

battle in the small Pennsylvania 

village of Gettysburg. After three 

days, nearly 50,000 dead, wounded, 

and missing lay among the peach 

orchards and farm pastures.

On November 19, nearly 15,000 

people gathered at Gettysburg to 

dedicate the nation’s first national 

military cemetery. Edward Everett, 

former president of Harvard 

University, was invited to be the 

featured speaker for the event. 

President Lincoln, at the last 

moment, was asked to offer “a few 

appropriate words.” After Everett 

had spoken for two hours and seven 

minutes, President Lincoln would 

address the ceremony for two-and-ahalf minutes, a mere 272 words.

Four score and seven years ago 

our fathers brought forth, upon this 

continent, a new nation: conceived 

in Liberty, and dedicated to the 

proposition that all men are 

created equal.

“Four score and seven” was not 

a simple way to say eighty-seven. 

Lincoln asked his audience to 

calculate backwards to discover that 

the United States began not with the 

1787 Constitution that established 

its federal government, but instead 

in 1776, with the signing of the 

Declaration of Independence, a 

proclamation of the universal truths 

to which its founders subscribed. 

Lincoln also chose his words with 

confidence that biblically literate 

Americans would link his “four 

score” passage to Psalm 90, in which 

a dying man looks back over his life 

and hopes that the short time spent 

in this world has been meaningful:

The days of our years are threescore 

years and ten; 

And if by reason of strength they be 

fourscore years.

Lincoln built his Gettysburg 

Address on a structure of past, 

present, and future time. He started 

in the past by placing the dedication 

of the battlefield within the larger 

story of American history. In 

speaking of “our fathers,” Lincoln 

invoked a heritage common to both 

North and South, that of the nation’s 

Founding Fathers. 

Lincoln’s first sentence concluded 

with another reference to the 

Declaration of Independence: the 

truth that “all men are created equal.” 

By affirming this truth, Lincoln 

defined the Civil War as a contest 

both to secure liberty — for the slaves

— and to preserve a united nation.

Now we are engaged in a great civil 

war, testing whether that nation, 

or any nation so conceived, and so 

dedicated, can long endure. We are 

met on a great battle-field of that 

war. We have come to dedicate 

a portion of that field, as a final 

resting-place for those who here 

gave their lives, that that nation 

might live.

After his long introductory 

sentence, Lincoln led his audience 

rapidly forward from the American 

Revolution to the Civil War. With 

quick brushstrokes he summarized 

the war’s meaning. Unlike Edward 

Everett, Lincoln spent none of his 

words on the details of the recent 

battle. Rather, he transcended it, 

linking the dedication to the larger 

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56  ABRAHAM LINCOLN: A LEGACY OF FREEDOM

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ABRAHAM LINCOLN: A LEGACY OF FREEDOM  57

purpose of the “nation,” a word he 

would use five times in his address. 

The Civil War was a “testing” of the 

nation’s founding ideals, one that 

would determine whether they could 

“endure.”

It is altogether fitting and proper 

that we should do this. But, in a 

larger sense, we cannot dedicate — 

we cannot consecrate — we cannot 

hallow — this ground. The brave 

men, living and dead, who struggled 

here, have consecrated it far above 

our poor power to add or detract.

These words signaled Lincoln’s 

transition from the events on the 

battlefield to the events of the future. 

But before he lifted their eyes beyond 

that battlefield, Lincoln told his 

audience what they could not do.

we cannot dedicate 

we cannot consecrate

we cannot hallow

In the last three sentences of the 

address Lincoln shifted his focus a 

final time.

The world will little note, nor long 

remember what we say here, but it 

cannot forget what they did here. 

It is for us the living, rather, to be 

dedicated here to the unfinished 

work which they who fought here 

have thus far so nobly advanced. It 

is rather for us to be here dedicated 

to the great task remaining before 
58  ABRAHAM LINCOLN: A LEGACY OF FREEDOM

us—that from these honored dead 

we take increased devotion to that 

cause for which they gave the last 

full measure of devotion—that we 

here highly resolve that these dead 

shall not have died in vain—that 

this nation, under God, shall have 

a new birth of freedom—and that 

government of the people, by the 

people, for the people, shall not 

perish from the earth.

Lincoln now laid out his vision of 

the future and of the responsibility 

of his listeners — and by extension 

the responsibility of every American 

— to bring that vision to fruition. 

Lincoln pointed away from words 

and toward deeds. He contrasted 

“what we say here” with “what they 

did here.”

At this point Lincoln uttered his 

only addition to his written text. He 

added the words “under God.” It was 

an uncharacteristically spontaneous 

revision for a speaker who did 

not trust extemporaneous speech. 

Lincoln had added impromptu words 

in several earlier speeches, but always 

offered a subsequent apology for the 

change. In this instance, he did not. 

And Lincoln included “under God” 

in all three copies of the address he 

prepared at later dates.

“Under God” pointed backward 

and forward: back to “this nation,” 

which drew its breath from both 

political and religious sources, but 

also forward to a “new birth.” Lincoln 

had come to see the Civil War as a 

ritual of purification. The old Union 

had to die. The old man had to die. 

Death became a transition to a new 

Union and a new humanity.

As Lincoln approached the climax 

of his unexpectedly short address, 

he uttered the words that would be 

most remembered: 

and that government 

of the people,

by the people, 

for the people, 

 shall not perish from the 

earth.

Lincoln was finished. He had 

not spoken the word “I” even once. 

It was as if Lincoln disappeared so 

Americans could focus unhindered 

upon his transcendent truths.

Second Inaugural Address 

(1865)

President Abraham Lincoln had 

every reason to be hopeful as 

Inauguration Day, March 4, 1865, 

approached. After four years of war, 

the Confederacy was splintered if 

not yet shattered. Yet apprehension 

intruded upon this hopeful spirit. 

Rumors flew about the capital that 

desperate Confederates, realizing 

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ABRAHAM LINCOLN: A LEGACY OF FREEDOM  59

that defeat was imminent, would 

attempt to abduct or assassinate 

the president.

Lincoln’s second inaugural 

address is 701 words long, 505 of 

only one syllable. Lincoln began in a 

subdued tone. In the highly charged 

atmosphere of wartime Washington, 

with soldiers everywhere, it is as if he 

wanted to lower anticipations.

In his second paragraph, Lincoln 

employed the image of war in every 

sentence. The tension mounts 

throughout the paragraph, building 

to a crescendo in the final sentence: 

“And the war came.” In four words, 

four syllables, Lincoln acknowledged 

that the war came in spite of the 

best intentions of political leaders. 

Lincoln wants his listeners to 

understand that this war cannot be 

understood simply as the fulfillment 

of human plans.

“Both read the same Bible 

and pray to the same God.” This 

introduction of the Bible marks 

new territory. The Bible had been 

quoted only once in the previous 18 

inaugurals. Lincoln thus signaled 

his intent to examine the war from 

both a theological and a political 

perspective.

After recognizing that soldiers 

on both sides of the conflict read 

the Bible and prayed similar 

prayers, Lincoln probed the Bible’s 

appropriate use. Lincoln suggests 

that some wielded the Bible and 

prayer almost as weapons to curry 

God’s favor for one side or the other. 

But this only produced contrary 

readings of the same book. On 

one side stood those who read a 

Bible that they steadfastly believed 

sanctioned slavery. On the other 

were those who understood it to 

encourage the abolition of slavery. 

(“Both read the same Bible and pray 

to the same God, and each invokes 

His aid against the other.”) Lincoln 

instead builds a case for an inclusive 

God, one who does not take the side 

of a particular section or party.

As the address builds toward 

its final paragraph, it takes an 

unexpected turn. When many 

expected Lincoln to celebrate the 

successes of the Union, he instead 

pointed courageously to the malady 

that long had resided at the very 

center of the American national 

family, with the acquiescence of far 

too many Americans. If God now 

willed slavery’s end, “this terrible war” 

appeared as “the woe due to those by 

whom the offense came.”

Lincoln had come to believe that 

where there was evil, judgment would 

surely follow. He saw this judgment 

in the death of 623,000 Union 

and Confederate soldiers, and he 

accepted this judgment:

Fondly do we hope, fervently do we 

pray, that this mighty scourge of 

war may speedily pass away. Yet, if 

God wills that it continue ... until 

every drop of blood drawn with the 

lash, shall be paid by another drawn 

with the sword, as was said three 

thousand years ago, so still it must be 

said ‘the judgments of the Lord, are 

true and righteous altogether.’

Lincoln invited his countrymen to 

weigh their own history on the scales 

of justice. He did this knowing that 

no nation is comfortable facing up to 

its own misdeeds.

With malice toward none, with 

charity for all ... 

Lincoln closed by asking the 

nation to enter a new era, armed not 

with enmity but with forgiveness. 

These words immediately became the 

most memorable expressions of the 

second inaugural. Well aware that 

the nation was nearing the close of 

its most destructive armed conflict, 

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60  ABRAHAM LINCOLN: A LEGACY OF FREEDOM

one that pitted brother against 

brother, the president was about to 

ask Americans for acts of incredible 

compassion. He would summon 

them to overcome the boundaries of 

sectionalism and come together again 

in reconciliation.

Lincoln ends his second inaugural 

address with a coda of healing: 

to bind up ...

to care for ...

to do all which may achieve and 

cherish a just and a lasting peace, 

among ourselves, and with 

all nations.

Lincoln had defined winning the 

peace as achieving reconciliation. 

In this final paragraph he declares 

that the true test of the aims of 

war would be how Americans then 

treated the defeated. 

Sometimes the modern shibboleth 

“it’s only words” seems to win the 

day. This portrait of Abraham 

Lincoln is based instead in the 

premise that words matter. Lincoln 

led America through the Civil War 

with words that galvanized his 

nation’s courage.

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“ I claim not to have controlled events, 

but confess plainly that events have 

controlled me.” 

“ Public sentiment is everything. With 

public sentiment, nothing can fail; 

without it nothing can succeed.” 

“ Discourage litigation. Persuade your 

neighbors to compromise whenever 

you can. Point out to them how the 

nominal winner is often a real loser 

— in fees, expenses, and waste of 

time. As a peacemaker the lawyer 

has a superior opportunity of being a 

good man. There will still be business 

enough.” 

“ It is said an Eastern monarch once 

charged his wise men to invent him 

a sentence to be ever in view, and 

which should be true and appropriate 

in all times and situations. They 

presented him the words: ‘And this, 

too, shall pass away.’ How much it 

expresses! How chastening in the hour 

of pride! How consoling in the depths 

of affliction!” 

“ Ballots are the rightful and peaceful 

successors to bullets.” 

“ Character is like a tree and reputation 

like its shadow. The shadow is what we 

think of it; the tree is the real thing.” 

“ Every man is said to have his peculiar 

ambition. Whether it be true or not, 

I can say for one that I have no other 

so great as that of being truly esteemed 

of my fellow men, by rendering myself 

worthy of their esteem.” 

“ Every one desires to live long, but no 

one would be old. ” 

“ I don’t like that man. I must get to 

know him better.” 

“ If you look for the bad in people 

expecting to find it, you surely will.” 

“ It has been my experience that 

folks who have no vices have very 

few virtues.” 

“ Most folks are about as happy as they 

make their minds up to be.” 

“ The assertion that ‘all men are created 

equal’ was of no practical use in 

effecting our separation from Great 

Britain and it was placed in 

the Declaration not for that, but for 

future use.” 

“ The ballot is stronger than the bullet.” 

“ The best way to destroy an enemy is to 

make him a friend.” 

“ The best way to get a bad law repealed 

is to enforce it strictly.” 

“ The probability that we may fail in the 

struggle ought not to deter us from the 

support of a cause we believe to 

be just.” 

“ To stand in silence when they should 

be protesting makes cowards out 

of men.” 

“ What kills a skunk is the publicity it 

gives itself.” 

“ Whatever you are, be a good one.” 

“ With Malice toward none, with 

charity for all, with firmness in the 

right, as God gives us to see the right, 

let us strive on to finish the work we 

are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds.” 

“ You can fool all the people some of the 

time, and some of the people all the 

time, but you cannot fool all the people 

all the time.” 

“ You cannot build character and 

courage by taking away a man’s 

initiative and independence.” 

“ You cannot escape the responsibility of 

tomorrow by evading it today.” 

“If I were to try to read, much less 

answer, all the attacks made on me, 

this shop might as well be closed for any 

other business. I do the very best I know 

how — the very best I can; and I mean 

to keep doing so until the end. If the 

end brings me out all right, what’s said 

against me won’t amount to anything. 

If the end brings me out wrong, ten 

angels swearing I was right would make 

no difference.”

“ Those who deny freedom to others, 

deserve it not for themselves; and, 

under a just God, can not long 

retain it.” 

“ Common looking people are the best in 

the world: that is the reason the Lord 

makes so many of them.” 

ABRAHAM LINCOLN: A LEGACY OF FREEDOM  61

MEH:IE<M?I:EC
62  ABRAHAM LINCOLN: A LEGACY OF FREEDOM

8EEAI

Carwardine, Richard. Lincoln: A Life of Purpose and 

Power. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006. 

Cozzens, Peter. Shenandoah 1862: Stonewall Jackson’s 

Valley Campaign. Chapel Hill, NC : University of North 

Carolina Press, 2008.

Donald, David H., and Harold Holzer. Lincoln in 

The Times: The Life of Abraham Lincoln, as Originally 

Reported in the New York Times. New York: St. 

Martin’s Press, 2005.

Donald, David H. Lincoln. New York: Simon and 

Schuster, 1995.

Ferguson, Andrew. Land of Lincoln: Adventures in 

Abe’s America. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press; 

distributed by Publishers Group West, 2007.

Goodwin, Doris Kearns. Team of Rivals: The Political 

Genius of Abraham Lincoln. New York: Simon and 

Schuster, 2005. 

Herndon, William H., and Jesse W. Weik. Herndon’s 

Lincoln; edited by Douglas L. Wilson and Rodney O. 

Davis. Galesburg, IL: Knox College Lincoln Studies 

Center; Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2006. 

(Published in association with the Abraham Lincoln 

Bicentennial Commission.)

Holzer, Harold and Sara V. Gabbard, eds. Lincoln and 

Freedom: Slavery, Emancipation, and the Thirteenth 

Amendment. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois 

University Press, 2007. (Published in conjunction with 

the Lincoln Museum, Fort Wayne, Indiana.)

Holzer, Harold. Lincoln President-Elect: Abraham 

Lincoln and the Great Secession Winter 1860-1861. New 

York: Simon and Schuster, 2008. 

Holzer, Harold. Lincoln Revisited: New Insights From the 

Lincoln Forum; edited by John Y. Simon, Harold Holzer, 

and Dawn Vogel. New York: Fordham University, 2007. 

(Essays originally delivered as Lincoln Forum lectures 

between 2003 and 2005.)

Jones, Howard. Abraham Lincoln and a New Birth of 

Freedom: The Union and Slavery in the Diplomacy of the 

Civil War. Lincoln : University of Nebraska Press, 1999.

Lincoln, Abraham. The Lincoln-Douglas Debates; edited 

by Rodney O. Davis and Douglas L. Wilson. Urbana, 

IL: Knox College Lincoln Studies Center, University of 

Illinois Press, 2008. 

Lincoln, Abraham. Selected Speeches and Writings. 1st 

Vintage Books, Library of America ed. New York: 

Vintage Books, 1992. 

[The texts are selected from The Collected Works of 

Abraham Lincoln, edited by Roy Basler (1953), and 

its supplement (1974), and annotated by Don E. 

Fehrenbacher.]

Sandburg, Carl. Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years and 

the War Years. San Diego: Harcourt, Brace Jovanovich, 

c1982. 

White, Ronald C. The Eloquent President: A Portrait 

of Lincoln Through His Words. New York: Random 

House, 2005. 

Wilson, Douglas L. Lincoln’s Sword: The Presidency and 

the Power of Words. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006. 

%HHMXMSREP6IWSYVGIW
ABRAHAM LINCOLN: A LEGACY OF FREEDOM  63

OEKD=7:KBJ

Herbert, Janis. Abraham Lincoln for Kids: His Life and 

Times With 21 Activities. Chicago: Chicago Review 

Press, 2007.

Mayer, Cassie. Abraham Lincoln. Chicago: Heinemann 

Library, 2008.

Pascal, Janet B. Who Was Abraham Lincoln? New York: 

Grosset and Dunlap, 2008. 

Trumbauer, Lisa. Abraham Lincoln and the Civil War. 

Chicago, IL: Heinemann Library, 2008. 

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Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Commission

^jjf0%%mmm$b_dYebdX_Y[dj[dd_Wb$]el

Abraham Lincoln Papers

Library of Congress 

The complete Abraham Lincoln Papers at the Library of 

Congress consists of approximately 20,000 documents, 

organized into three “General Correspondence” series 

that include incoming and outgoing correspondence and 

enclosures, drafts of speeches, and notes and printed 

material. Most of the 20,000 items are from the 1850s 

through Lincoln’s presidential years, 1860-1965. The 

collection encompasses approximately 61,000 images 

and 10,000 transcriptions. 

^jjf0%%c[ceho$beY$]el%Wcc[c%Wb^jcb%cWb^ec[$^jcb

Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum

The Presidential Library is a public, non-circulating 

research library specializing in Abraham Lincoln and 

Illinois history. Collections include books, pamphlets, 

maps, and periodicals; photographs, films, tapes, and 

broadsides; manuscripts; and Illinois newspapers on 

microfilm. The library contains extensive resources 

on the Civil War and many publications useful for 

genealogical research, as well as the renowned Henry 

Horner Lincoln collection.

^jjf0%%mmm$Wbfb$eh]%^ec[$^jcb

797:;C?97D:FH?L7J;

Abraham Lincoln Association

The Abraham Lincoln Association has made 

significant contributions to keeping alive his unique 

story and ideals. Those contributions have taken many 

forms, including the publication of scholarly works, 

providing teaching materials to students, and providing 

preservation assistance for Lincoln sites. 

^jjf0%%mmm$WXhW^Wcb_dYebdWiieY_Wj_ed$eh]%

Abraham Lincoln Book Shop

Established in 1938, the Abraham Lincoln Book Shop 

serves the needs of collectors and scholars, professional 

historians and independent writers, dedicated first 

edition hunters, and casual history enthusiasts. 

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X_Xb_e]hWf^_[i$^jc

Lincoln Institute

The Lincoln Institute concentrates on providing support 

and assistance to scholars and groups involved in the 

study of the life of America’s 16th president and the 

impact he had on the preservation of the Union, the 

emancipation of black slaves, and the development 

of democratic principles that have found worldwide 

application. 

^jjf0%%mmm$WXhW^Wcb_dYebd$eh]
64

 ABRAHAM LINCOLN: A LEGACY OF FREEDOM

Miller Center of Public Affairs: Abraham Lincoln 

(1809-1865)

University of Virginia 

The Miller Center of Public Affairs is a national 

nonpartisan center to research, reflect, and report on 

American government, with special attention to the 

central role and history of the presidency. 

^jjf0%%c_bb[hY[dj[h$l_h]_d_W$[Zk%WYWZ[c_Y%

Wc[h_YWdfh[i_Z[dj%b_dYebd

Northern Illinois University

Lincoln Digitalization Project

Before Abraham Lincoln became the nation’s chief 

executive, he led a fascinating life that sheds considerable 

light upon significant themes in American history. This 

World Wide Web site presents materials from Lincoln’s 

Illinois years (1830-1861), supplemented by resources 

from Illinois’ early years of statehood (1818-1829). The 

collection provides a record of Lincoln’s early career and 

helps readers fix his experiences within Lincoln’s social 

and political milieu.

^jjf0%%b_dYebd$b_X$d_k$[Zk

Presidential Papers of Abraham Lincoln

A collaborative project of the Abraham Lincoln 

Association, the Lincoln Studies Center, the Library 

of Congress, the Lehrman Institute, and the Lincoln 

Institute, this effort supplements and coordinates a 

number of other efforts to create an authoritative, 

comprehensive, on-line version of Lincoln’s words and his 

incoming correspondence. 

^jjf0%%mmm$fh[i_Z[dj_WbfWf[hie\WXhW^Wcb_dYebd

edb_d[$eh]%_dZ[n($^jcb

GPS Printed by Global Publishing Solutions (A/ISS/GPS) © (09-20167-E-1.0)
Photo credits:

Picture credits for illustrations appearing from top to bottom 

are separated by dashes and from left to right by semicolons.

Cover: Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division. 

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Presidential Library and Museum. 26: Picture History; Library 

of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division. 28: AP Images; 

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29: Picture History. 30: Library of Congress, Prints & 

Photographs Division. 31: AP Images. 32: Library of Congress, 

Prints & Photographs Division. 33: Courtesy Fenimore Art 

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Prints & Photographs Division(2). 35: Picture History. 

36-38: Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division; 

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Court House National Historic Park. 40: Picture History. 

41: Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division. 

42: © Illustrated London News Ltd./Mary Evans Picture 

Library. 43: Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs 

Division. 44: © Bettmann/CORBIS — The Granger Collection, 

New York. 45: © Bettmann/CORBIS. 46, 47: Library of 

Congress, Prints & Photographs Division (2). 48: © CORBIS. 

49: The Granger Collection — Illinois State Historical Library; 

Military and Historical Image Bank www.historicalimageba

nk.com. 50: The Granger Collection, New York — Chicago 

Historical Museum. 51, 52, 53, 54: Library of Congress, Prints 

& Photographs Division (4). 55: © Bettmann/CORBIS. 

56: Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division (2); 

North Wind Picture Archives. 58: Courtesy Gettysburg 

National Military Park, National Park Service. 

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Executive Editor: George Clack

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U. S. DEPARTMENT OF STATE

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http://www.america.gov
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U.S. Department of State

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ABRAHAM

LINCOLN

a legacy of freedom

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