Lincoln Speaks Online Exhibition: Sections

About the Exhibition

“Lincoln Speaks: Words that Transformed a Nation,” co-curated by The Gilder Lehrman Institute and The Morgan Library and Museum, presents a fascinating and varied look at how Abraham Lincoln’s language and words changed history. Abraham Lincoln delighted in the rich possibilities of language. Throughout his life, he strove to honor the written and spoken word. […]

Section VIII: Lincoln In the Eyes of the World

Lincoln’s horizons extended across the nineteenth-century world. Deeming the Union the “last, best hope of earth,” he defined the Civil War as more than an American crisis. The struggle presented “to the whole family of man, the question, whether a constitutional republic . . . can, or cannot, maintain its territorial integrity, against its own […]

Section IX: A Man for All Time

Lincoln’s words have lived on, thanks to their iteration by others as well as through their own intrinsic power. American political leaders, poets, playwrights, novelists, literary critics, theologians, journalists, and others have been inspired, challenged, and sometimes affronted by his sentiments. Lincoln has also spoken—and continues to speak—to people throughout the world. Karl Marx judged […]

Section I: Lincoln the Reader

The writings that gave Lincoln greatest pleasure also gave direction to his native talent. He read, reread, and absorbed the poetic language of the King James translation of the Bible. Lincoln revered Shakespeare’s plays and sonnets for their imagery, metrical rhythms, emotional range, and psychological perception. From memory he could recite long passages from the […]

Section II: The Politician

Lincoln’s public career coincided with the maturing of a democratic, two-party system marked by boisterous campaigning and torrents of rhetoric. Whether working for his own election or that of others, he showed an aptitude for the new politics and connected easily with the public. In the main he spoke extemporaneously, but he prepared notes for […]

Section III: National Leader

One of Lincoln’s greatest achievements was his articulation of a rationale for the Civil War and its sacrifices, shaped to inspire loyal Unionists. His leadership rested far less on coercion than on his faith in what he described as “the power of the right word from the right man to develop the latent fire and […]

Section IV: The Emancipator

Lincoln felt strongly the injustice of slavery. “I am naturally anti-slavery,” he wrote in 1864. “If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong. I can not remember when I did not so think, and feel.” Yet he was careful never to describe it as a sin: Southerners were the victims of their particular circumstances. During […]

Section V: Healing a Nation

Lincoln was a kindly man, who by his own estimate probably had “too little” of the feeling of personal resentment —“a man has not time to spend half his life in quarrels,” he reflected. He saw the irony that, as someone who did not bear a grudge, he had found himself at the center of […]

Section VI: The Commander in Chief

Lincoln was not a natural warrior. He had to learn about military command. As a lawyer, he knew how to draft lucid and cogent directions. As commander in chief, however, he was uncompromisingly clear in laying out strategy. When the security of Washington, DC, was threatened, Lincoln erupted at the bureaucratic delay and angrily ordered […]

Section VII: Lincoln Among Friends

Over the course of his career, Lincoln made many political and legal acquaintances, with some of whom he established close working relationships. His engaging conversation, capacious memory, and skillful storytelling made him entertaining company: more often than not he was the center of a crowd. As a private and self-reliant man, however, he had few […]