February 11, 2026

February 11th, 2026.

On February 12th, 1809, Nancy Hanks Lincoln gave birth to her second child, a son, Abraham.

Abraham Lincoln grew up to become the nation's 16th president, leading the country from

March 1861 until his assassination in April 1865, a little over a month into his second

term.

He piloted the country through the Civil War, preserving the concept of American democracy.

It was a system that had never been fully realized, but that he still saw as the last best

hope of Earth to prove that people could govern themselves.

The first score and seven years ago, he told an audience at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania,

in November 1863, our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived

in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Lincoln dated the founding of the nation from the Declaration of Independence rather than

the Constitution, the document in Slavers preferred because of that document's protection

of property.

In the Declaration, the founders wrote that they held certain truths to be self-evident,

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,

that to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just

powers from the consent of the governed.

But in Lincoln's day, fabulously wealthy and Slavers had gained control over the government

and had begun to argue that the founders had gotten their worldview terribly wrong.

They insisted that their system of human enslavement, which had enabled them to amass

fortunes previously unimaginable, was the right one.

Most people were dull drudges who must be led by their betters for their own good,

stubborn leaders said, as South Carolina senator and enslaver James Henry Hammond put it,

I repudiate as ridiculously absurd, that much lauded, but nowhere accredited, dogma

of Mr. Jefferson, that all men are born equal.

In 1858, Abraham Lincoln, a venecandidate for the Senate, warned that arguments limiting

American equality to white men were the same arguments that kings have made for enslaving

the people in all ages of the world, turn it in whatever way you will, whether it come from

the mouth of a king, and excuse for enslaving the people of his country, or from the mouth of

men of one race as a reason for enslaving the men of another race, it is all the same old serpent.

Either people, men in his day, were equal, or they were not.

Lincoln went on, I should like to know if taking this old declaration of independence,

which declares that all men are equal upon principle, and making exceptions to it, where will it stop?

Lincoln had thought deeply about the logic of equality.

In his 1860 campaign biography, he permitted the biographer to identify six books that had influenced

him. One was a book published in 1817, and wildly popular in the Midwest in the 1830s,

Captain Riley's Narrative. The book was written by James Riley, and the full title of the book was,

An Authentic Narrative of the Laws of the American Brighamers, wrecked on the Western coast of

Africa in the month of August 1815, with the sufferings of her surviving officers and crew,

who were enslaved by the wandering Arabs on the Great African Desert or Zahara.

The story was exactly what the title indicated, the tale of white men enslaved in Africa.

In the 1850s, on a fragment of paper, Lincoln figured out the logic of a world that permitted

the law to sort people into different places in a hierarchy, applying the reasoning he heard around him.

If A can prove, however conclusively, that he may of right enslaved B,

why may not B snatch the same argument and prove equally that he may enslaved A? Lincoln wrote,

You say A is white and B is black. It is color then, the lighter having the right to enslave the

darker? Take care. By this rule, you are to be slave to the first man you meet with a fairer skin

than your own. You do not mean color exactly. You mean the whites are intellectually the

superiors of the blacks and therefore have the right to enslave them? Take care again. By this

rule, you are to be slave to the first man you meet with an intellect superior to your own.

But say you, it is a question of interest and if you can make it your interest, you have the right

to enslave another. Very well. And if he can make it his interest, he has the right to enslave you.

Lincoln saw clearly that if we give up the principle of equality before the law, we have given up

the whole game. We have admitted the principle that people are unequal and that some people are

better than others. Once we have replaced the principle of equality with the idea that humans

are unequal, we have granted approval to the idea of rulers and ruled. At that point,

all any of us can do is to hope that no one in power decides that we belong in one of the lesser

groups. In 1863, Lincoln reminded his audience at Gettysburg that the founders had created a nation

dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. But it was no longer clear

whether any nation so conceived and so dedicated can long endure. During the Civil War,

the people of the United States were defending that principle against those who were trying to

create a new nation based as the Confederacy's Vice President Alexander Stevens said,

upon the great truth that men were not, in fact, created equal, that the great physical,

philosophical, and moral truth was that there was a superior race.

In the midst of the Civil War, Lincoln called for Americans to understand what was at stake

and to highly resolve that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom

and that government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth.

Letters from an American was written and read by Heather Cox Richardson. It was produced at

Soundscape Productions, Dead of Massachusetts, recorded with music composed by Michael Moss.