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 […]

After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, many turned again to Lincoln for inspiration. This poster with its damaged but enduring star-spangled banner flying at half-staff features an excerpt from Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. The resilience and courage of Lincoln’s words were much needed as the nation stirred itself to overcome this shocking […]

Lincoln adored poetry and began composing poems in his teens. He remained an avid reader and writer of verse throughout his life; his last documented poem was written in 1863. He wrote this vivid and comic poem about a bear hunt a month after his election to the U.S. House of Representatives. It may well […]

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 […]

In his letter of 17 August 1863, Lincoln told the actor James H. Hackett: “Some of Shakespeare’s plays I have never read, whilst others I have gone over perhaps as frequently as any unprofessional reader. Among the latter are ‘Lear,’ ‘Richard Third,’ ‘Henry Eighth,’ ‘Hamlet,’ and especially ‘Macbeth.’ I think nothing equals ‘Macbeth.’” This book […]

When the English traveler George Borrett met the president in 1864, he recorded that Lincoln was “a great admirer of Pope, especially of his ‘Essay on Man;’ going so far as to say that he thought it contained all the religious instruction which it was necessary for a man to know.” Lincoln began reading Pope’s […]

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 […]

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 […]