Abraham Lincoln and the Search for American Identity

Abstract

The title of this essay may strike some as presumptuous, suggesting that Abraham Lincoln’s life (and the tragedy of his death) is fruitfully understood as an attempt to relocate and redefine American identity. But that is precisely what I mean to do. For an examination of Lincoln’s most important speeches, when placed in their appropriate context, appears to me to situate Abraham Lincoln among the great American thinkers of the second quarter of the nineteenth century, all of whom were concerned with answering the very same question: What does it mean to be an American?