Jones was a Union soldier in the Illinois infantry fighting the Confederates in Tennessee. In this letter he responds enthusiastically to news of President Lincoln’s preliminary Emancipation Proclamation: “The ‘year of Jubilee’ has indeed come to the poor Slave. . . . The name of Abraham Lincoln will be handed down to posterity as one […]

Born in czarist Russia in 1899, Marcus Feinstein attended a high school where he read Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. He was forced to enlist in the army during the Russian Revolution and fled Russia to immigrate to America in 1921. In later years, he inscribed this book to his daughter with the explanation “He is why […]

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 […]

The Emancipation Proclamation was shaped by both pragmatic considerations and Lincoln’s lifelong disdain for slavery. As a legal document, it aspires to precision rather than eloquence. Lincoln’s use of county-specific terminology identified areas in rebellion, securing his proclamation as a wartime measure that would not be subject to judicial overthrow.

At the greatest moment of his presidency—the fall of the Confederate capital, Richmond—Lincoln chose to write to his wife before writing to any public official. “Last night Gen. Grant telegraphed that Sheridan with his Cavalry and the 5th Corps have captured three brigades of Infantry, a train of wagons, and several batteries, prisoners amounting to […]

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.”

This letter, written on customary mourning stationery less than two months after her husband’s death, begins with an expression of Mrs. Lincoln’s gratitude for the letter of condolence she had received from the wife of Senator Henry Wilson of Massachusetts. It provides a vivid insight into Mrs. Lincoln’s emotional state early in her widowhood. She […]

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 […]

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 […]

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, […]