PENGUIN BOOKS LINCOLN SPEECHES ABRAHAM LINCOLN was born in a log cabin in Kentucky in 1809 and was largely self-educated. As his family moved to Indiana and then Illinois, he worked as a hired hand, clerk, and surveyor until, in his twenties, he began to study law. He was elected to the Illinois House of Representatives in 1834. After marrying Mary Todd, Lincoln set up his own law practice and was elected to the U.S. Congress in 1846. As a candidate for the U.S.
Senate in 1858, he debated Senator Stephen A. Douglas across the state and became a national figure. Nominated for president by the Republican Party, Lincoln was elected in November 1860 and took office in March 1861. Commander in chief of the Union forces during the Civil War, he issued the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863. Reelected in 1864, Abraham Lincoln was shot to death by an embittered Southern actor, John Wilkes Booth, in April 1865, five days after General Lee''s surrender at Appomattox. ALLEN C. GUELZO is Henry R. Luce Professor of the Civil War Era and Director of Civil War Era Studies at Gettysburg College.
He is the author of Lincoln: A Very Short Introduction , as well as two winners of the Lincoln Prize: Lincoln''s Emancipation Proclamation: The End of Slavery in America and Abraham Lincoln: Redeemer President . RICHARD BEEMAN, the John Welsh Centennial Professor of History Emeritus at the University of Pennsylvania, has previously served as the Chair of the Department of History, Associate Dean in Penn''s School of Arts and Sciences, and Dean of the College of Arts of Sciences. He serves as a trustee of the National Constitution Center and on the center''s executive committee. Author of seven previous books, among them The Penguin Guide to the United States Constitution and Plain, Honest Men: The Making of the American Constitution , Professor Beeman has received numerous grants and awards, including fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, and the Huntington Library. His biography of Patrick Henry was a finalist for the National Book Award. LINCOLN SPEECHES ABRAHAM LINCOLN EDITED WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY ALLEN C. GUELZO SERIES EDITOR RICHARD BEEMAN PENGUIN BOOKS LINCOLN SPEECHES SERIES INTRODUCTION We introduce the Penguin Civic Classics series by presenting our readers with a paradox. On the one hand, there is an abundance of evidence establishing that the vast majority of Americans, whatever their political differences, have an intense love of their country, believing that it has been one of the most successful experiments in human freedom and opportunity that the world has ever seen.
And Americans are similarly united in having a deep reverence for their Constitution, for their institutions of government, and for the system of free enterprise that has been such a powerful engine for our economic growth. Americans see all of these as playing a vital role in making the nation as successful as it has been. But there is an equally large body of evidence suggesting that Americans'' knowledge of their history and of the way in which their institutions have worked over the course of that history is embarrassingly meager. For example, a third of Americans believe that the Declaration of Independence was written after the end of the Civil War, and fewer than half can identify the three branches of our federal government. Nearly 40 percent of the students at fifty-five of America''s elite colleges and universities could not place the Civil War in the correct half century, and fewer than half of them, when presented with the text of the Gettysburg Address, were able to identify it. Nor does it appear that our knowledge improves much as we move closer to the present. Another survey has revealed that more than half of high school seniors thought that Italy, Germany, or Japan was a U.S.
ally during the Second World War, and only 14 percent of those seniors could name any relevant fact about U.S. involvement in the Korean War. As the distinguished historian David McCullough has lamented, "While the clamorous popular culture races on, the American past is slipping away, out of sight and out of mind. We are losing our story, forgetting who we are and what it''s taken to come this far." With these discouraging results in front of us, it is no wonder that there is a growing clamor for an increased emphasis on "civic education," defined by one leading authority as "the cultivation of the virtues, knowledge, and skills" necessary for carrying out one''s role as a citizen. That very phrase, "civic education," sounds to many like a doctor''s prescription: "You need to take your medicine! It may not be very pleasant, but it is something you need to do in order to ensure not only your own health, but also the health of the body politic." It is our hope that reading these volumes in the Penguin Civic Classics series will be much more pleasant than taking medicine, for although these volumes will indeed help improve the reader''s civic knowledge , we also hope that they will provide some civic inspiration --a genuine appreciation for, even an excitement about, some of the words, ideas, and actions that have shaped American society and government since their founding.
The history represented in these volumes, from the founding of the American colonies in the seventeenth century to the adoption of America''s Declaration of Independence to Abraham Lincoln''s inspiring Gettysburg Address to Barack Obama''s inaugural address as the first African American president in American history, is not merely a collection of names and dates to be memorized but, rather, a set of stories to be absorbed and enjoyed. And they are stories that have a real relevance and meaning to our lives today, whether we are debating the nature of America''s immigration laws, the extent to which the federal government should be involved in decisions relating to our health care, or, getting even closer to home, whether local schools and school districts have the constitutional right to search a student''s school locker. In these volumes, the reader will encounter nearly all of the central themes in American history, as well as the dilemmas and conflicts that have provided much of the dynamism and excitement of that history. The central themes and ideas of American public life--democracy, equality, economic opportunity, the role of government in maintaining that delicate balance between public order and personal freedom, and the government''s responsibility to protect certain individual rights--have never remained static, nor have they ever elicited uniform agreement among American citizens. The very first item in Terry Golway''s collection of important American speeches is a sermon given by Massachusetts governor John Winthrop, aboard the ship Arbella , as it transported the first Puritan settlers to the new colony. In that sermon, Winthrop described the Puritans'' mission in Massachusetts Bay as one of creating a "city upon a hill," a model of virtue and purity for all others in the world to follow. But his vision of that society was in some important respects very much at odds with the values that guide America today. In the opening words of his sermon, Winthrop reminded his fellow colonists that "GOD ALMIGHTY in His most holy and wise providence, hath so disposed of the condition of mankind, as in all times some must be rich, some poor, some high and eminent in power and dignity; others mean and in submission.
" Hardly a prescription for the democratic society that we claim to be today. Fast-forward 136 years to the promise contained in Thomas Jefferson''s Declaration of Independence that "all men are created equal"--a view of society very different from that articulated by Winthrop. Jefferson''s city upon a hill was to be a nation dedicated to equality and the pursuit of happiness, not to a divinely ordained, inegalitarian social hierarchy. But, of course, in a world in which Africans were enslaved, women were considered legally subordinate to men and, indeed, in which many free white males were denied the right to vote because they did not own the requisite amount of property, Jefferson''s promise of equality fell far short of an accurate description of the reality of American society in 1776. Still, words have power, and Abraham Lincoln, for one, knew the power of those words. As is amply displayed in Allen Guelzo''s volume containing many of Lincoln''s principal speeches, time and time again Lincoln invoked Jefferson''s preamble as a pledge that Americans of his age were honor-bound to fulfill, describing the preamble as "the electric cord in that Declaration that links the hearts of patriotic and liberty-loving men together, that will link those patriotic hearts as long as the love of freedom exists in the minds of men throughout the world." Alas, Americans would fight a horrific, bloody civil war in which more than 600,000 people, slave and free, lost their lives before the nation was able to take the steps necessary to forge the link to which Lincoln had referred. Beginning in December of 1865, with the adoption of the Thirteenth Amendment, eliminating the institution of slavery; continuing with the adoption of the Fourteenth Amendment (July 1868), with its guarantee of "equal protection under the laws"; and culminating with the adoption of the Fifteenth Amendment (February 1870), asserting that the right to vote could not "be abridged.
on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude," those ideas of democracy and equality began to be incorporated into our constitutional system. But although those three amendments represented an important st.