“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. […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]