To fully understand Lincoln’s relationship with the Revolution we need to place him within its specific context. Though 1776 seems hazy and distant to us now, it was recent history when he was born in 1809. The Declaration of Independence was only 32 years old, and the Constitution was almost 20. Lincoln’s namesake grandfather had served as a captain in the colonial militia against the British, his father Thomas was born during the war, and both his mother Nancy and stepmother Sarah were born within 5 years of its end. The nation established by the Revolution was a radical experiment in self-government and the fire of liberty it ignited felt fresh to young Abraham’s generation.

Yet the Revolution’s legacy would also have seemed more fragile. Other democratic movements spurred by the same wave of classic liberalism had failed and would continue to do so through Lincoln’s lifetime. As a white man born in Kentucky, he reaped the full benefits of citizenship, but many others living within America’s borders lacked such freedoms and privileges, and they knew it. Lincoln repeatedly pointed to these inequalities in his writings and speeches, and worked to repair some of them, in no small part because he saw how they potentially endangered American democracy itself by embedding the seeds of despotism within its elaborate quilt.

Maintaining and furthering the Founders’ experiment in self-government was Lincoln’s life’s work. We hope you’ll enjoy our year-long exploration of these two quintessential American legacies.

Editor’s Note: This is the second installment of our monthly column commemorating America 250 by examining how the nation's founding generation shaped Abraham Lincoln.

Outside of the Gettysburg Address, Abraham Lincoln’s most well-known quote on the American Revolution is probably his 1861 statement that “I have never had a feeling politically that did not spring from the sentiments embodied in the Declaration of Independence.” A survey of his writings and actions shows this was true. America’s founding document fundamentally shaped his ideology.

Lincoln’s particular focus was on the Declaration’s central premise “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.” He applied an expansive view to this statement, leading him to believe that the United States, including its Constitution, was innately anti-slavery. As Lincoln argued in an 1854 speech: “The theory of our government is Universal Freedom. ‘All men are created free and equal,’ says the Declaration of Independence. The word ‘Slavery’ is not found in the Constitution.”

In effect, Lincoln did not believe there was an implied “white” in the phrase “all men are created equal.” There are even instances suggesting he thought the Declaration’s use of “men” wasn’t strictly gendered. Defending himself against Stephen A. Douglas’s racist attacks during the 1858 debates, Lincoln stated: “I protest, now and forever, against that counterfeit logic which presumes that because I do not want a negro woman for a slave, I do necessarily want her for a wife. My understanding is that I need not have her for either, but as God made us separate, we can leave one another alone and do one another much good thereby.” In other words, Black women are just as entitled to “the pursuit of happiness” as white men.

Thus did the Declaration of Independence provide the root of Lincoln’s political thought. By the time of his death, this was becoming the dominant way of thinking about the document and remains so today.

Editor’s Note: This is the third installment of our monthly column commemorating America 250 by examining how the nation's founding generation shaped Abraham Lincoln.

Abraham Lincoln’s reverence for America’s founders likely began when, as a young boy, he read Mason Locke “Parson” Weems’s biography of George Washington. First published only months after Washington’s 1799 death and revised over the next decade, The Life of George Washington was one of the most popular books on America’s first president.

In the 19th century, books about famous people, especially politicians, tended to depict their subjects in either the most positive or negative light. Weems was of the former camp, and his Washington was impossibly earnest and inspiring. It was Weems, for instance, who popularized the long-disproved story in which young Washington confessed to damaging his father’s cherry tree and said: “I cannot tell a lie.”

Washington doesn’t appear much in Lincoln’s pre-presidential papers, but after the 1860 election, Lincoln turned to the first president for inspiration. Indeed, it was during Lincoln’s inaugural rail tour to the Capitol that he first publicly mentioned his love of Weems, telling the New Jersey Senate at Trenton that “away back in my childhood, the earliest days of my being able to read, I got hold of a small book … ‘Weem’s Life of Washington.’ I remember all the accounts given of the battlefields and struggles for the liberties of the country.”

Ten days earlier, Lincoln had made his most poignant reference to Washington. In his farewell address to Springfield, Lincoln told the crowd, “I now leave, not knowing when, or whether ever, I may return, with a task before me greater than that which rested upon Washington.” Lincoln, of course, did not return to Springfield alive. In completing his task, however, Americans increasingly regarded Lincoln as the nation’s savior and placed him alongside Washington, its creator. 

Editor’s Note: This is the fourth installment of our monthly column commemorating America 250 by examining how the nation's founding generation shaped Abraham Lincoln.

Abraham Lincoln’s reverence for America’s founders was not just rooted in their ideals and actions but also in the system they created. Convinced that a democracy governed by a fair constitution was the best means of ensuring public liberty, Lincoln was committed to always achieving his political goals within the confines of the law. Indeed, it’s why his primary career was as a lawyer.

This political philosophy revealed itself fully in Lincoln’s first great speech: the “Lyceum Address” of January 27, 1838. Speaking to a gathering of Springfield’s rising young men, Lincoln—then a two-term state legislator and moderately established lawyer—chose to promote the power of law as the best means for citizens to influence their government and a constant check against violence and mob rule.

Lincoln famously asked his audience “At what point shall we expect the approach of danger?” and answered “If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher.” He pinpointed the greatest internal threat as “the growing disposition to substitute the wild and furious passions, in lieu of the sober judgement of Courts.” In particular, Lincoln voiced his concern over “mobs”—especially pro-slavery mobs—that increasingly sought justice through lynchings. Such actions, he feared, would topple the democratic order.

To convey these ideas, Lincoln turned to the Revolution’s legacy. He fretted that legacy was decaying because the Revolutionary generation, whose “destiny was inseparably linked” with the success of democracy, had passed. Therefore “as the patriots of seventy-six did to support the Declaration of Independence, so to the support of the Constitution and Laws, let every American pledge his life, his property, and his sacred honor;--let every American remember that to violate the law, is to trample on the blood of his father, and to tear the character of his own, and his children’s liberty.” It was a clear message in difficult times.

Editor’s Note: This is the fifth installment of our monthly column commemorating America 250 by examining how the nation's founding generation shaped Abraham Lincoln.

Abraham Lincoln revered America’s founders but he didn’t always follow their example or advice. One key area where he differed was his support of political parties. Many of the Founders believed political parties—or “factions” as they often called them—were corrosive to democracy. In Federalist 10, James Madison wrote that among the Constitution’s primary goals was “to break and control the violence of faction” and prevent the self-serving rule “by the superior force of an interested and over-bearing majority.” In George Washington’s Farewell Address, he famously ranked the “baneful effects” of political parties among the most dangerous to the new nation, concluding “the common and continual mischiefs of the spirit of party are sufficient to make it the interest and duty of a wise people to discourage and restrain it.” Yet the Founders themselves failed to live up to this standard. For instance, only a decade after contributing to the Federalist Papers, Madison was a leading member of Thomas Jefferson’s coalition in Congress and actively campaigning against an opposing coalition forming around Washington and Alexander Hamilton.

Lincoln was born into the factional world the Founders left behind and fully embraced it. He became one of Illinois’s leading Whigs, representing the party’s interests in the legislature and coordinating its rise (and later fighting its collapse) behind the scenes. After joining the new Republican Party in the mid-1850s, Lincoln made himself one of its most energetic organizers—positioning himself for his historic 1858 senate campaign against leading Democrat Stephen A. Douglas and presidential nomination two years later. Contrary to the Founders’ advice, Lincoln considered political parties the best agents for expressing public will and applying it to government. Instead of resisting or fearing their growth, he fostered and shaped it to create the most effective means of using government to support the common good and survival of the nation. For the most part, he succeeded.

Editor’s Note: This is the sixth installment of our monthly column commemorating America 250 by examining how the nation's founding generation shaped Abraham Lincoln.

As Abraham Lincoln himself reportedly predicted, the thing he’s most remembered for is the Emancipation Proclamation. While historians generally believe numerous social, cultural, military, and political forces combined to transform the Civil War from one to save the Union to one that would save it by destroying slavery, the Emancipation Proclamation still stands as its primary political turning point.

The Emancipation Proclamation also represents a critical moment for the broader American experiment and the legacy of those who started it. Their commitment to preserving or ending slavery has been long debated. Many were enslavers themselves, some wrote about their internal grief at owning human property, and a few even freed their slaves. Yet they did not impose a systematic policy for emancipation.

How then did Lincoln maintain his admiration for the Founders as his own antislavery beliefs increased over his lifetime? As discussed here previously, Lincoln rooted America’s founding ideology in the Declaration of Independence, especially its maxim that “all men are created equal.” What’s more, Lincoln defined “all men” literally and did not believe it implied only white men were equal under the law. This put him in the minority, even among abolitionists who often rejected America’s founding documents as upholding slavery.

This is vital context for Lincoln’s view of America, slavery, and emancipation. Lincoln had an almost spiritual attachment to the United States and believed maintaining the Union was critical to the nation’s success. He also, however, consistently believed that Union would be stronger without slavery. His journey as president was coming to the realization that the Union could only be preserved if slavery was eliminated and, once he found his opportunity to do so, he took it. So too did he use his 1864 re-election as a springboard to begin pushing for a 13^th Amendment that would remove any doubt American slavery was permanently dead. In all this, Lincoln believed he was fulfilling the Founders’ promise, if not their actions.

Editor’s Note: This is the seventh installment of our monthly column commemorating America 250 by examining how the nation's founding generation shaped Abraham Lincoln.

There are a lot of myths about the kinds of armies that fought in the American Revolution and the Civil War. Those myths have power, though, and are deeply intertwined with America’s self-image.

In popular imagination, American forces won the Revolution because they fought an unconventional war—using their knowledge of geography and frontier tactics to confuse the overly-regimented British forces. This isn’t how things actually played out but it fostered a reverence for an idealized citizen volunteer, whose individualism and love of country made him superior to his imperial counterpart. Years of observing how King George III used the military to suppress his colonies and impose his will had made the Founders suspicious of standing armies. Their victory in the Revolution, and subsequent discharging of most of its volunteer forces, reinforced the idea that a democratic citizenry could best defend itself through an as-needed volunteer military.

Abraham Lincoln and his generation subscribed to that idea. It’s part of why the American military only consisted of just over 16,000 soldiers at the outbreak of the Civil War. Only three days after Confederate forces fired on Fort Sumter Lincoln increased that number almost 500% by calling for 75,000 volunteers—laying the foundation for what would eventually be over two million enlisted men fighting against the Confederacy. Not all those men were volunteers, especially considering both sides’ use of conscription to fill their ranks, but the overall idea of a courageous, volunteer citizenry fighting to preserve its nation against foreign and domestic foes persisted. It lay at the center of Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, which is, at its core, a consideration of what those soldiers were fighting for and how best to honor them. “The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated [this battlefield], far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here.

Editor’s Note: This is the eighth installment of our monthly column commemorating America 250 by examining how the nation's founding generation shaped Abraham Lincoln.

Alongside America’s founding ideals of democracy and individual freedom was the vision that the nation was destined to expand westward. After all, one of the core issues turning Americans against the Crown was Britain’s exclusion of colonial settlement beyond the Appalachians following the 1763 Treaty of Paris. Once the new United States secured its independence through the subsequent 1783 Treaty of Paris, a new wave of white settlement ensued—further spurred in 1803 by President Thomas Jefferson’s Louisiana Purchase.

Abraham Lincoln was born six years later and, throughout his entire life, every major American political party embraced westward expansion. They differed on how that expansion should be achieved—opposing or endorsing the Mexican War, for example—and what the new states created through that expansion should look like—especially if they should allow slavery—but America’s leaders almost unanimously believed the United States was destined to extend its borders. They also overwhelmingly assumed that the people who already inhabited those regions—various Indigenous Peoples who had either always lived there or had already been displaced by previous colonial movements—would inevitably cede their land to American settlers, either voluntarily or by force.

Lincoln was a product of this expansionist culture. Born in the then-frontier state of Kentucky, he spent his formative years in Indiana and Illinois, on the forefront of westward expansion. His only military experience prior to the American Civil War was to serve as a volunteer militia captain in the Black Hawk War, in which the U.S. repelled an effort by a group of Indigenous nations attempting to reclaim their land in Iowa and Illinois. His anti-slavery stance similarly aligned with others in the movement, envisioning a growing western frontier where American settlers were free of competition from forced labor. As president, he supported various policies designed to develop the American West, including the creation of the transcontinental railroad and land-grant colleges. In the midst of all this, clashes continued with Indigenous nations. One of the most notable examples is the 1862 Dakota War, which drew President Lincoln’s direct intervention as he evaluated the fate of the 303 Dakota men who had been sentenced by execution by a military commission. Lincoln overturned the vast majority of the death sentences—resulting in both the largest single-day mass execution and mass pardon in American history. Though Lincoln’s presidential priorities were focused on maintaining the Union and ending slavery, by embracing the expansion and development of the West, Lincoln again aligned himself with the Founders’ vision for America.

Editor’s Note: This is the ninth installment of our monthly column commemorating America 250 by examining how the nation's founding generation shaped Abraham Lincoln.

Although the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution are commonly cited as the twin documents sparking and concluding the creation of the United States, the first ten amendments—collectively known as the Bill of Rights—were the third pillar. The product of a compromise to sway Anti-Federalists leery of the new constitution, the amendments enshrined federal rights of citizenship, such as freedom of speech and religion, protection from unreasonable searches and seizures, and due process.

While Lincoln rarely mentioned the Bill of Rights directly, its scope and mission were foundational to his understanding of American government. His fundamental belief in the Declaration of Independence’s statement that “all men are created equal” dovetailed with the Constitution’s power to help make that a civic reality. Nevertheless, Lincoln expressed reluctance to use the amendment process too frequently, in part because he so thoroughly respected the Founders’ work crafting the core document and the Bill of Rights. “It can scarcely be made better than it is,” Representative Lincoln told Congress in 1848. “The men who made it, have done their work, and have passed away. Who shall improve, on what they did?”

The Bill of Rights, however, was also potentially a source of substantial friction between Lincoln and the Founders. The First Amendment, with its protection of free speech and the press, is frequently cited by Lincoln’s critics due to his administration’s suppression of newspapers and anti-war politicians. Lincoln’s suspension of Habeas Corpus and use of military trials are also sometimes viewed as violations of the 5^th Amendment’s guarantee of due process and the 6^th Amendment’s guarantee of a speedy trial. Debates over the use of these powers have been raging since the war itself but Lincoln clearly saw himself as operating within the confines of the Constitution and the spirit of the Bill of Rights. In this sense, at least, he again viewed himself in step with the Founders.

Editor’s Note: This is the tenth installment of our monthly column commemorating America 250 by examining how the nation's founding generation shaped Abraham Lincoln.

Abraham Lincoln regarded the Declaration of Independence as his North Star, so it’s no surprise he revered its primary author, Thomas Jefferson. Labeling him “the chief actor in the revolution,” Lincoln interpreted Jefferson’s maxim that “all men are created equal” literally. What’s more, Lincoln mobilized Jefferson’s memory to combat his political opponents noting, for instance, Jefferson’s reluctance to expand slavery expressed through the Northwest Ordinance and his fears of a tyrannical judiciary.

Lincoln’s most thorough statement on Jefferson came in response to an invitation to attend an 1859 commemoration of Jefferson’s birthday in Boston. Lincoln declined but took the time to note how Jefferson founded the Democratic Party “upon their supposed superior devotion to the personal rights of men” but Lincoln observed that, like two men wearing large coats in a fistfight who only managed to work themselves into each other’s coats, “it will be equally interesting to note” how Republicans and Democrats “have changed hands as to the principle upon which they were originally supposed to be divided.” To Lincoln, the Democrats of the 1850s had strayed as far as possible from Jefferson’s original vision in holding “the liberty of one man to be absolutely nothing, when in conflict with another man’s right of property.”

Jefferson’s star shines less brightly today as his slaveholding practices and sexual relations with Sally Hemings, a woman he enslaved, have become more widely known. Lincoln understood the irony of an enslaver declaring the universal equality of men but likely did not know the depth of Jefferson’s hypocrisy. When, in their fifth debate, Stephen A. Douglas attacked Lincoln’s racially-inclusive view of the Declaration of Independence by noting its author was an enslaver, Lincoln retorted that Jefferson “in speaking upon this very subject . . . used the strong language that ‘he trembled for his country when he remembered that God was just.‘” This was how Lincoln balanced the two side of Jefferson and remained an apostle for his entire life.