These notes were composed for Lincoln’s 1858 debates with his Democratic rival, Stephen Douglas, in the race for the United States Senate. In this fragment, Lincoln forcefully asserts a politician’s obligation to provide moral leadership: “In this age, and this country, public sentiment is everything. With it, nothing can fail; against it, nothing can succeed. […]

News of Lincoln’s assassination took eleven days to reach London. This letter, by British actress and author Fanny Kemble, was written the day after she was told of Lincoln’s death. Through her marriage to Pierce Butler (1807–1867), heir to vast plantations in the Carolinas and Georgia, Kemble had witnessed the atrocity of slavery firsthand. Her […]

This letter reveals Lincoln’s determination to retain the original meaning of his Cooper Union Address. While accepting grammatical correction, Lincoln had been deliberate in his choice of words and so told Nott: “I do not wish the sense changed, or modified, to a hair’s breadth.” Even the smallest change in text would diminish the power […]

Viewed by many as Lincoln’s greatest speech, this address declared that slavery was the war’s essential cause and that the war was an expiation of the national sin of slavery. Speaking transcendently to history, President Lincoln explained the Civil War—its cause, its character, and its immediate consequences. Though he wanted to be clear that slavery […]

Lincoln appointed Johnson military governor of Tennessee in March 1862, when much of the eastern part of the state remained under the control of rebel forces. Although Johnson was initially reluctant to recruit former slaves for the Union army—believing that they should continue to perform menial tasks, thus allowing white men to fight—Lincoln was aware […]

As an overburdened national leader, Lincoln needed a discursive style that suited clear, brusque executive orders. In this brief memo, Lincoln tersely orders his secretary of war to grant leave for a soldier to go home and vote—presumably to reelect his commander in chief. “Sec. of War please give this man the proper directions to […]

Roosevelt protested the New York State Supreme Court’s decision that workman’s compensation was unconstitutional. He compared the decision to the U.S. Supreme Court’s Dred Scott decision of 1857, quoting Lincoln to support his argument: Have you forgotten what Lincoln wrote in his first inaugural; (in justifying the position he had repeatedly taken, that he would […]

Frustrated for years with the inaction and delays of his generals, Lincoln at last found a like-minded commander in Ulysses S. Grant. Writing tersely to avoid divulging details that could be intercepted, Lincoln telegraphed Grant to praise his strategy of total war: “I begin to see it. You will succeed.”

Although Lincoln was probably more deeply read in Shakespeare than any other author, quotations from the plays or other references to the Bard’s works are extremely rare in his letters. Lincoln drafted this letter, in haste, to a resident of Magnolia, Illinois, when serving as a first-term Whig congressman. Lincoln quotes lines from act 3, […]

Lincoln encouraged Americans to look beyond politics and persevere in a good fight for a noble cause. With this speech he positioned himself within the international struggle over slavery, citing the example of British abolitionists William Wilberforce and Granville Sharpe. Lincoln’s stark imagery subliminally links supporters of slavery with darkness and historical oblivion. But I […]