The Verb Test: What Lincoln’s 1864 State of the Union Reveals About Shared Power

"...to the support of the Constitution and Laws,
let every American pledge
his life, his property, and his sacred honor..." [1]

How a handful of working verbs reveal Abraham Lincoln’s comfort inside the Constitution’s design.

Writers have always leaned on verbs to understand texts. In rhetorical studies, linguistics, and literary criticism, verbs are treated as small but reliable indicators of tone, stance, and interpretive posture. A critic might say an author ridicules, mocks, or lionizes; a scholar might note that a speaker asserts, concedes, or qualifies. These verbs help students learn how to read and write analysis. They reveal attitude, agency, power, and relationship. But that's usually where the analysis stops.

What almost no one does — not historians, not rhetoricians, not political scientists — is push verb analysis into the constitutional realm. Verbs can tell us far more than tone. They can reveal how a president understands his own authority, how he positions himself relative to Congress, and whether he treats limits as obstacles or as the architecture he has sworn to inhabit. Verbs, in other words, can expose a president’s constitutional self‑understanding.

That is the premise of the “Verb Test.” Instead of treating verbs as stylistic choices, it treats them as constitutional tells — the small, workmanlike signals that reveal how a president narrates power. And when you apply that test to Abraham Lincoln’s last State of the Union message in December 1864, a pattern emerges immediately. His verbs are not the verbs of resentment or executive grievance. They are verbs like authorized, required, appropriated, provided — verbs that assume Congress acts, and the president carries out. Verbs that show comfort inside limits.

🏛️ Reading Power Through Verbs

The Verb Test starts with a simple premise: presidents reveal their constitutional posture in the verbs they choose. Verbs are where a president locates agency — in himself, in Congress, in “the nation,” or in some vague, unassigned actor. Track the verbs in any State of the Union and one can see, almost immediately, whether a president understands himself as an executor of laws or as a rival power center. Some verbs assume limits; others resent them. Some verbs distribute authority; others hoard it. The pattern is never accidental.

This becomes clearest when the test is applied to Lincoln’s 1864 State of the Union. Delivered in the middle of a civil war, it still reads like a president working inside a set of assigned boundaries. Once one examines the verb pattern, the architecture of shared power stands in high relief.

🔍 When You Track Lincoln’s Verbs, a Pattern Emerges

Once you follow the verbs through Lincoln’s 1864 State of the Union, four distinct clusters appear. Each one locates agency somewhere other than the presidency. The effect is cumulative: a wartime president, freshly re‑elected, repeatedly placing Congress at the center of national decision‑making.

🏛️ "What Congress Has Authorized"

Lincoln’s first pattern is the language of authorization — verbs that root his wartime actions in statutes rather than executive invention. He cites congressional authority for military organization, revenue measures, the national banking system, and wartime appropriations. These verbs mark the executive as derivative: he acts because Congress empowered him to act.

Count: 3 references

This is the executor‑of‑laws posture in its purest form — a president who insists that even in war, his power is borrowed, not self‑generated.

📜 "What Congress Has Required"

A second cluster centers on obligation. Lincoln notes what Congress has required of him: fiscal reporting, enforcement of existing laws, and administrative duties tied to wartime statutes. These verbs frame the presidency not as a source of national will but as an office bound to carry out mandates.

Count: 2 references

Here Lincoln presents himself as the constitutional workhorse — the officer who must do what Congress has required, not what he might prefer.

🧰 "What Congress Has Provided"

A third pattern highlights what Congress has provided: appropriations, taxation frameworks, the banking and currency system, and the legal basis for conscription. These verbs treat Congress as the supplier of national tools — the branch that furnishes the machinery of government.

Count: 3 references

Lincoln does not claim to create these instruments. He uses what Congress supplies, reinforcing a constitutional architecture in which legislative power builds the system and executive power operates it.

⚖️ "What Congress Alone May Decide"

The final cluster is the most revealing. Lincoln repeatedly marks off questions that Congress alone may decide: the Thirteenth Amendment, the legal framework for reconstruction, legislation on commerce and currency, and the shape of the postwar national order.

Count: 3–4 references

These are explicit separation‑of‑powers markers — a president refusing to claim unilateral authority even at the height of wartime power. Lincoln draws the boundary himself, and he draws it in Congress’s favor.

📊 The Constitutional Posture in Full

Across the 1864 message, Lincoln uses verbs that place Congress at the center of national authority 11–12 times, depending on how one counts the Reconstruction passages. The consistency is striking. The same patterns appear in his 1861 and 1862 messages, but here they carry added weight: a president at the peak of political strength still insisting on constitutional humility.

🧭 Conclusion: A President Who Knows Where Power Lives

Taken together, these verb clusters reveal a president who understands the presidency as an office of execution, not invention. Lincoln distributes agency outward — to Congress, to law, to the constitutional order itself. In a moment when wartime necessity could have tempted him toward unilateralism, his verbs show the opposite: a disciplined commitment to shared power. The architecture of the Constitution is not merely acknowledged in Lincoln's 1864 State of the Union; it is enacted in the grammar of his message.

A borrowed lens repurposed for the archives of Abraham Lincoln, Storyteller.

Mac

If you're interested in learning more about the Verb Test, below the Works Cited section is a sidebar that explains the meta theory

📚 Works Cited

[1] Roy P. Basler, ed., The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1953–55), vol. 1, pp. 108–115.

[2] Roy P. Basler, ed., The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1953–55), vol. 8, pp. 150–166.

[3] The Author. “The Verb Test: What Lincoln’s 1864 State of the Union Reveals About Shared Power.” Abraham Lincoln, Storyteller, 2026.

Sidebar: How the Verb Test Works Across Presidential Speech

The Verb Test can work across all speeches of a president — but not in a mechanical, tally‑the‑verbs way. It is a pattern‑recognition instrument, and patterns only emerge when you read across genres, audiences, and constitutional moments. 

To see why, it helps to step back and look at what the method actually captures.

🧩 What carries across all speeches

Every president operates with a constitutional self‑understanding — a mental model of where his power comes from, what constrains him, how he relates to Congress and the courts, and what he believes the presidency is. That worldview leaks into every genre of presidential speech:

• State of the Union

• veto messages

• proclamations

• war messages

• inaugural addresses

• signing statements

• stump speeches

• crisis communications

Because verbs are the smallest unit of agency, they reveal who the president thinks acts, who decides, who authorizes, who must be obeyed, who is blamed, and who is credited. 

Those patterns tend to be remarkably stable across a presidency.

🏛️ Where the test is strongest

The Verb Test is most diagnostic in genres where the president must:

• describe legal authority

• explain actions taken

• justify actions not taken

• acknowledge limits

• assign responsibility

That’s why it works so well in:

• State of the Union messages

• veto messages

• war powers communications

• budget messages

• constitutional crises

These are the moments when verbs do the constitutional work — showing whether a president sees himself as an executor of laws, a generator of national will, a rival to Congress, or a partner in shared power.

⚠️ Where the test is weaker (but still useful)

Campaign speeches, eulogies, and ceremonial remarks are less revealing because they are aspirational, audience‑shaped, and not about constitutional mechanics. But even there, grammar still signals posture:

• “I” + verb vs. “we” + verb

• Congress as partner or obstacle

• law as constraint or instrument

• the people as agents or audience

The signal is softer, but it never entirely disappears.

🔍 The deeper truth: presidents don’t change their grammar

A president who sees himself as:

• executor of laws → uses verbs like authorized, required, provided, enacted, instructed.

• source of national will → uses verbs like directed, ordered, determined, decided, initiated.

• rival to Congress → uses verbs like blocked, hindered, prevented, refused.

• constitutional partner → uses verbs like worked with, consulted, submitted, recommended.

These patterns persist through crises, victories, defeats, reelection, war, and peace. 

Grammar is habit. Habit is worldview. Worldview is constitutional posture.

🧭 So does the Verb Test work across all speeches?

Yes — with genre awareness. It is not a universal meter; it is a constitutional stethoscope. It works best where the president is doing constitutional labor (like a State of the Union Address), but it reveals posture everywhere.

Its real power is comparative:

• the same president across different moments

• different presidents in the same genre

• presidents under stress vs. presidents at ease

Across all these forms, the Verb Test exposes a president’s constitutional posture — a worldview that persists through victories and defeats, war and peace, reelection and crisis. The most overlooked words on the page reveal the architecture of power a president believes he inhabits.

That is the theoretical chapter that sits behind this post.

“The Gentleman at Washington City”: Lincoln, Jackson, and the Echo of 2026

Illustration of Lincoln arguing
in the Illinois General Assembly

⚖️ A President Who Thinks He’s a Court 

On a raw January morning in 1837, the Illinois House of Representatives found itself arguing over a question that should have been settled already. The State Bank of Illinois had been declared constitutional by the Illinois Supreme Court and approved by the Council of Revision — the only bodies with the authority to decide the matter. Yet the chamber was in an uproar, not because of anything in the state constitution, but because of a rumor drifting west from Washington: that Andrew Jackson, in the final weeks of his presidency, had privately “almost decided” the Bank was unconstitutional. Jackson had no jurisdiction over Illinois, no case before him, no ruling to issue — but his personal opinions had become gospel among the Van Buren men who dominated Illinois politics. They treated his private judgment as if it carried the force of law.

Lincoln rose to confront that shadow. He wasn’t debating banking; he was debating the dangerous idea that a president’s personal view could override a court’s actual ruling - state or federal.

📎 Sidebar: Jackson Was Gone — But Jacksonism Wasn’t

When Lincoln delivered this speech on January 11, 1837, Andrew Jackson was still in office, but his successor, Martin Van Buren, had already been elected but not yet inaugurated. Van Buren himself was quieter and more cautious, but his supporters in Illinois remained thoroughly "Jacksonian" in doctrine. They carried forward Jackson’s habit of turning private judgment into public authority. So when Lincoln mocked “the gentleman at Washington city,” he was using Jackson as a stand‑in for the Van Buren loyalists in the Illinois legislature who were recycling Jackson’s habit of using his personal opinions as if they were binding constitutional law.

🎯 Lincoln’s Razor‑Edged Mockery

With the stage set, Lincoln began with the rumor itself — and to the constitutional absurdity behind it.

He begins with a flourish that still stings:

“Some gentleman at Washington city was on the very eve of deciding our Bank unconstitutional… had not some one of the Bank officers placed his hand upon his mouth.” [1]

And then the knife turns:

“The extra‑judicial decision — not quite, but only almost made — by the gentleman at Washington… before whom, by the way, the question never has, nor never can come…” [1]

He refuses to call Jackson by name or title “the President.” He refuses to treat the rumor as serious. He refuses to accept that personal will is more powerful than constitutional judgment.

“Extra‑judicial” is Lincoln’s lawyerly way of saying: This is nonsense. It has no legal force whatsoever.

🏛️ The Real Constitutional Authority

Lincoln reminds his colleagues that the Illinois Supreme Court — the only tribunal with actual jurisdiction — had already ruled the Bank constitutional. The Governor and the Council of Revision had approved the charter. The matter was settled.

So what, he asks, are they to do with Jackson’s “almost‑decision”?

Nothing. Because it means nothing.

A president’s private view is not a legal ruling. Not in 1837. Not now.

🔥 Lincoln Goes on the Attack: Bribery, Hypocrisy, and Mobocracy

The chamber tried to shut him down. Mr. Linder called him to order; the chair overruled. Linder appealed, then withdrew the appeal with a sneer, saying he preferred to let Lincoln continue because politically — “he would break his own neck.” [1]

Lincoln did not flinch.

“I know I was not out of order; and I know every sensible man in the House knows it.” [1]

He then dismantled the insinuation that the twenty‑four Bank commissioners had been bribed. He listed them by name — Tilson, McLaughlin, Wann, Wight, Riley, Davidson, Wilson, Pierson, Green, Baker, Wren, Taylor, Christy, Roberts, Godfrey, Mather, Jenkins, Linn, Gilman, Prentice, Hamilton, Buckner, Thornton, and Taylor — and reminded the House that these were among the most respected men in the state. [1]

Then he flipped the accusation by say that there was less probability that these twenty‑four had been bribed than that any six democrat members of the House — “even though they were headed and led on by ‘decided superiority’ himself” — might be. [1]

With that sneering reference to the president, the room must have gone still.

Lincoln then exposed the hypocrisy of the resolution’s sponsor, who had recently argued that the legislature had no authority to interfere with contracts — yet now demanded an examination of the Bank without any legal basis.

“He must either abandon the position he then took, or he must now vote against his own resolution.” [1]

And then came Lincoln's warning that feels almost prophetic:

“I am opposed to encouraging that lawless and mobocratic spirit… already abroad in the land; and spreading with rapid and fearful impetuosity, to the ultimate overthrow of every institution… in which persons and property have hitherto found security.” [1]

Lincoln wasn’t defending a bank. He was defending the rule of law.

Lincoln then turned from the constitutional absurdity of Jackson’s “almost‑decision” to the practical consequences of the Van Buren men’s proposal. Even if the legislature had the authority — which it did not — he asked what good could possibly come from such an examination.

• Could they declare the Bank unconstitutional?
• Compel it to cease operations?
• Repair any injuries?

“Most certainly we can do none of these things.” The only real effect, he warned, would be to injure the Bank’s credit — and with it, the farmers and mechanics who held its notes, not the wealthy stockholders who were “beyond the power of fortune.” [1]

Reckless political theater, driven by loyalty to a president’s personal opinion rather than constitutional process, would land hardest on ordinary people.

🔁 The Pattern Lincoln Saw — and We Still See

Lincoln’s speech is not about 1837. It’s about a recurring American temptation:

When the law is inconvenient, when the courts rule the “wrong” way, when constitutional limits feel constraining, there is always a president who believes his own interpretation should prevail.

Jackson did it with the National Bank. He did it with Indian treaties. He did it with the federal Supreme Court itself. [**]

Lincoln’s sarcasm is aimed at the pattern, not the man — the belief that personal will can stand in for constitutional judgment.

📡 The Echo in 2026

Nearly two centuries later, a major Supreme Court ruling on tariffs drops in 2026 — and the reaction from Washington sounds eerily familiar.

A president dismisses the ruling. Treats his own view as superior. Signals that the Court is wrong, corrupt, or simply to be ignored. Encourages supporters to follow him, not the judicial process.

The issue is different. The behavior is not.

Lincoln’s 1837 question becomes the question again:

“What will their decision amount to?”

And his answer, delivered with that dry frontier finality in 1837, still applies:

“Certainly none.”

🧭 Lincoln’s Remedy: Institutions Over Individuals

Lincoln’s entire argument rests on one principle:

Constitutional authority belongs to institutions, not personalities.

Not to rumor. Not to private opinion. Not to political pressure. Not to a president’s decision or “almost‑decision.”

The law is the law because it is made through the process — not because someone powerful declares it so.

That was true in 1837. It is true in 2026.

📜 Closing: The Warning That Still Echoes

Lincoln’s sarcasm in 1837 wasn’t petty. It was protective.

He mocked the idea that a president could act as a one‑man Supreme Court because he understood how fragile constitutional norms become when personal will tries to replace legal judgment.

The names change. The issues change. The temptation doesn’t. And neither does the remedy: Institutions, not individuals, decide the law.

From the archives of Abraham Lincoln, Storyteller.

Mac

For readers who want the constitutional backstory behind this debate, here’s a brief backgrounder on the Bank War and Jackson’s doctrine.

[**] FYI: For readers who want the constitutional backstory behind this debate, here’s a brief backgrounder on the Bank War, Indian Removal and the Jackson - Supreme Court struggle.

Andrew Jackson’s presidency produced one of the earliest and sharpest clashes between the executive branch and the Supreme Court. Jackson believed the president also had the power to interpret the Constitution — a doctrine called presidential departmentalism. (Jefferson imagined "departmentalism" as a Constitutional dialogue among branches; Jackson treated it as a license to act on his own.) This put him at odds with Chief Justice John Marshall, whose landmark decision in McCulloch v. Maryland (1819) upheld the national bank and affirmed broad federal power. Jackson rejected that ruling outright, vetoing the Bank’s recharter in 1832 on constitutional grounds and insisting that the Court’s decisions did not bind the executive. 

The conflict deepened during the Indian removal crisis, when the Court ruled in Worcester v. Georgia (1832) that Georgia had no authority over Cherokee lands and could not seize their territory or force their removal. Jackson, however, sided with Georgia, and although the exact wording is debated, he challenged the court to a power struggle with the sentiment: “John Marshall has made his decision; now let him enforce it.” 

But the Court had already spoken; it was the administration that ignored the ruling and proceeded with the Indian removal anyway. Jackson’s stance — that presidential will could override judicial authority — became a defining feature of Jacksonian “democracy” and, as history shows, cast a long constitutional shadow, effectively discrediting "departmentalism.”

Marshall recognized immediately that Jackson had precipitated a Constitutional crisis by refusing to enforce Worcester v. Georgia. But Marshall also understood something deeper:

The Supreme Court had no enforcement power. The Constitution gave him no army, no marshals, no executive muscle.

If Marshall had tried to force the issue — by ordering federal marshals into Georgia, or by issuing contempt orders — he would have triggered a confrontation between his branch of the government and the executive branch that he could not win. Jackson would have ignored him, Georgia would have resisted, and the Court’s authority would have been shattered in real time — forever.

So Marshall chose the only strategy available to him: He let the ruling stand on the books, knowing it would outlive Jackson.

And he was right.

• Worcester became a foundational precedent for tribal sovereignty.

• It was cited for generations after Jackson was gone.

• It became part of the long arc of constitutional law that Jackson could not erase.

Marshall was playing the long game — the institutional game — not the political one. 

Just like Lincoln.

Mac

📚 Works Cited

[1] Lincoln, Abraham. The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln. Edited by Roy P. Basler. Vol. 1. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1953, 57–65.

Abraham Lincoln One‑Liners from His “Fragment: Notes for Speeches,” 1858

Life-sized statues of both Lincoln and Stephen A. Douglas
(by noted sculptor, Lily Tolpo)
depicting their debate at Freeport, Illinois on August 27, 1858.

This fragment of notes for speeches in the Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln is a treasure-trove of one-liners. It shows Lincoln completely unvarnished. He’s sarcastic, morally furious, legally precise, and funny in a way only a frontier lawyer could be. 

There’s no marble here, no mythmaking—just a man figuring out how to dismantle his debate adversary, Stephen Douglas with logic, contempt, and deadpan humor. This is the Lincoln who jokes that trying to reason with his adversary is like 'preaching Christianity to a grizzly bear.' These are sentences sharper than knives, written by a man who is clearly done playing games.

Read on and enjoy the view from Lincoln’s back room on the eve of the 1858 debates.

From “Fragment: Notes for Speeches,” c. Aug. 21, 1858 (Collected Works, Vol. II, pp. 547–553).

____________

1. “...not by argument, but by mere burlesque on the art and name of argument — by such fantastic arrangements of words as prove ‘horse‑chestnuts to be chestnut horses.’”

Lincoln’s perfect demolition of Douglas’s verbal gymnastics — a whole logic lesson in one joke.

2. “I shall trust an intelligent community to learn my objects and aims from what I say and do myself, rather than from what Judge Douglas may say of me.”

Lincoln telling voters to judge him by his own words and actions, not Douglas’s distortions.

3. “Judge Douglas has a greater conscience than most men.”

Lincoln flatters him the way a cat “flatters” a mouse.

4. “He might very well go out of the Senate on his qualifications as a false prophet.”

A biblical‑sounding insult delivered with lawyerly calm.

5. “I call him, and take a default upon him.”

Courtroom humor — and somehow it lands like a punchline.

6. “It only makes him the dupe, instead of a principal, of conspirators.”

Lincoln’s version of “you’re not one of the leaders, just a gullible follower.”

7. “I might as well preach Christianity to a grizzly bear...”

Frontier deadpan at its finest — and devastatingly dismissive.

8. “He remembers to forget it.”

A perfect, six‑word indictment.

9. “...he cooks up two or three issues upon points not discussed by me at all, and then authoritatively announces that these are to be the issues of the campaign.”

Lincoln calling out Douglas for inventing arguments or "disinformation" as we call it today.

10. “Public sentiment is every thing.”

A political philosophy distilled to five words.

11. “Whoever moulds public sentiment, goes deeper than he who enacts statutes, or pronounces judicial decisions.”

A Lincoln masterclass on the real power in politics. Today, we call them "influencers".

12. “...he who affirms what he does not know to be true falsifies as much as he who affirms what he does know to be false...”

Lincoln’s moral geometry — crisp, cold, and airtight.

13. “And then — the slave being doomed, and damned, and forgotten, to everlasting bondage — is the white man quite certain that the tyrant demon will not turn upon him too?”

A warning wrapped in a prophecy — and chillingly prescient.

14. “Still I have the right to prove the conspiracy, even against his answer...”

Lincoln reminding Douglas that denial is not a defense.

15. “From warp to woof, his handiwork is everywhere woven in.”

A metaphor from the textile industry that quietly accuses Douglas of being in the fabric of the scheme.

16. “...he is conscientious... he is more conscientious... he is most conscientious... he is absolutely bursting with conscience.”

Lincoln building a staircase of sarcasm and then kicking Douglas down every step.

From the archives of Abraham Lincoln. Storyteller.

Mac

📜 Abraham Lincoln’s Unsent Memorandum: The Hinge of a Career

History isn't just in the leather-bound books;
it’s hidden on the scraps and in the margins of the things we almost threw away.

In 1849, Abraham Lincoln drafted a memo he never sent — a small act of restraint that quietly redirected his entire career.

🧭 The Backstory

Zachary Taylor entered the White House in 1849 as a national war hero but a political novice. He had never held elected office, had little patience for party machinery, and barely knew the factions inside his own Whig Party. Illinois politics were a blur to him. Patronage appointments — normally handled through predictable party channels — suddenly became chaotic, because Taylor didn’t trust the Whig establishment and didn’t feel bound by its expectations. For ambitious Whigs in the states, this meant uncertainty, improvisation, and a scramble for influence.

Lincoln was one of those Whigs. Fresh out of his controversial stint in Congress, with no clear next step in his career, he quietly hoped to secure the position of Commissioner of the General Land Office — a respectable federal post that would stabilize his finances and keep him in public life. But he also wanted to appear loyal to the party and above petty self‑promotion. So when Chicago Whigs pushed Justin Butterfield for the job, Lincoln initially supported him — a gesture of unity he soon realized might have been a mistake.

As letters poured in from across Illinois, it became clear that Lincoln, not Butterfield, was the preferred Whig candidate. Butterfield’s support looked thinner than advertised; his Whig loyalty was questioned; and Chicago elites seemed to be overstating his backing. Lincoln suddenly found himself in an awkward position: he had already recommended Butterfield, but now believed he should have recommended himself. The political math had changed, and Lincoln needed to untangle his own misstep — privately, on paper — before deciding what to do next.

📜 The Scrap Itself

In June 1849, Lincoln drafted a short memorandum [*] to President Zachary Taylor — a document he never sent, never polished, and never even dated with confidence. It survives only because someone, at some point, thought the paper was worth saving.

The memo is brief, but the internal argument is unmistakable. Lincoln is imagining what the Illinois Butterfield Whigs will say to Taylor — and then quietly building the counter‑case.

Here’s the heart of it:

“Nothing in my papers questions Mr. B.’s competency or honesty… Being equal so far, if it does not appear I am preferred by the Whigs of Illinois, I lay no claim to the office.”

“But if it does appear I am preferred… I only ask that Illinois be not cut off with less deference.”

It’s a strange little piece — part argument, part rehearsal, part self‑justification — written by a man trying to talk himself into asking for a federal appointment he badly wanted but felt awkward claiming.

🔍 What’s Actually Happening Here

This is the lawyer‑Lincoln mode, and the full version of the memo shows the unmistakable structure of a miniature legal brief. He lays out the anticipated objections and then answers each one in turn.

1. He states the anticipated objection

“It will be argued that the whole Northwest, and not Illinois alone, should be heard.” [1]

2. He answers it point‑by‑point

“I answer I am as strongly recommended by Ohio and Indiana…” “…Illinois was not consulted…” “…Of none of these have I ever complained…” [1]

He’s building precedent. He’s citing cases. He’s establishing a pattern of practice.

3. He states the second anticipated objection

“It will be argued that all the Illinois appointments, so far, have been South…” [1]

4. He answers it with geographic evidence

“…every part has had its share, and Chicago far the best share of any.” “…neither of these is within a hundred miles of me…” “I am in the center. Is the center nothing?” [1]

He marshals facts, distances, and precedent to dismantle the claim.

This is Lincoln doing exactly what he did in court: laying out counter‑arguments based on an anticipated set of objections. It’s the same mental machinery he uses in the Cooper Union Address eleven years later — but here it’s raw, unpolished, private, and slightly anxious.

This isn’t a speech. It isn’t a letter. It isn’t a public argument.

It’s a private legal brief against his own party faction — ambition wrapped in humility wrapped in insecurity. The early Lincoln in all his awkward, earnest complexity, but already thinking like the president he would become.

🧩 Why This Scrap Matters

This memorandum sits at a fascinating crossroads in Lincoln’s life:

• He’s no longer a young striver.

• He’s not yet the Lincoln we know.

• He’s a former congressman with no clear path forward.

• He wants a patronage appointment but hates asking for favors.

• He’s trying to justify ambition without appearing ambitious.

This is the Lincoln who hasn’t yet found his purpose — the Lincoln who still thinks his career might be over at 40.

And that’s what makes this scrap so revealing.

It shows a man who is:

• politically savvy

• personally insecure

• morally earnest

• and deeply uncomfortable with self‑promotion

It’s a portrait of Lincoln before the myth hardens — Lincoln as a working politician, not a marble figure.

🔒 Conclusion: The Private Lincoln

What I love about this memorandum is how un‑Lincoln it feels at first glance.

No soaring rhetoric. No moral clarity. No biblical cadence. No “better angels.”

Just a man trying to talk himself into asking for something he wants.

And yet — this is exactly the Lawyer Lincoln who becomes the President Lincoln we know. The one who thinks before he speaks. The one who drafts before he decides. The one who argues with himself before he argues with the world.

And here’s the kicker: Lincoln never sent the memo.

This failure changed his life. This tiny scrap is the hinge of a career.

He withdrew his name, the appointment went to Butterfield, and the moment passed. But the loss kept Lincoln in Illinois — and kept his political future alive. Had he won the job he wanted — that land office — he might never have become the Lincoln we know.

This small scrap shows Lincoln thinking in the quiet, when no one was watching — a private mind at work on a public life. And there are more of these raw glimpses tucked throughout the archives of Abraham Lincoln, Storyteller.

Mac

[*] Below the Works Cited section is the fill memorandum.

📚 Works Cited

[1] Abraham Lincoln, Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, ed. Roy P. Basler (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1953–55), 2. Accessed February 16, 2026.

Full Memorandum

MEMORANDUM TO ZACHARY TAYLOR

June [15?] 1849

Nothing in my papers questions Mr. B.'s competency or honesty, and, I presume, nothing in his questions mine. Being equal so far, if it does not appear I am preferred by the Whigs of Illinois, I lay no claim to the office. But if it does appear I am preferred, it will be argued that the whole Northwest, and not Illinois alone, should be heard. I answer I am as strongly recommended by Ohio and Indiana, as well as Illinois; and further, that when the many appointments were made for Ohio, as for the Northwest, Illinois was not consulted. When an Indianian was nominated for Governor of Minnesota, and another appointed for Commissioner of Mexican claims, as for the Northwest, Illinois was not consulted. When a citizen of Iowa was appointed Second Assistant Postmaster General and another to a Land Office in Minnesota, Illinois was not consulted. Of none of these have I ever complained. In each of them, the State whose citizen was appointed was allowed to control, and I think rightly. I only ask that Illinois be not cut off with less deference. It will be argued that all the Illinois appointments, so far, have been South, and that therefore this should go North. I answer, that of the local appointments every part has had its share, and Chicago far the best share of any. Of the transitory, the Marshall and Attorney are all; and neither of these is within a hundred miles of me, the former being South and the latter North of West. I am in the center. Is the center nothing?---that center which alone has ever given you a Whig representative? On the score of locality, I admit the claim of the North is no worse, and I deny that it is any better than that of the center.

This is a beautifully loaded question — the kind that sounds simple until you tug on it and realize it’s actually a philosophical trapdoor.

Back in graduate school, a professor posed that question to us. The room went silent. It was one of those moments where you realize you’ve been studying facts, but you haven't been studying the force behind them.

So let me give you the answer historians eventually learn to see.

Is the history of History the future?

In a sense, yes — and not because history repeats, but because the way we tell history shapes what comes next.

Here’s the deeper truth:

1. Every generation rewrites its past to explain its present.

What we choose to remember — and what we quietly let fade — becomes the moral vocabulary of the future.

We revise textbooks, rename holidays, elevate new heroes, retire old ones. That’s not distortion. It’s interpretation.

The Founders did it. Lincoln did it. We do it now.

So the “history of History” is really the story of how each era reinterprets the same events to answer new questions.

2. The future is built out of the stories we decide are true.

Not “true” in the archival sense — documents, dates, evidence — but “true” in the sense of binding, identity‑forming, morally operative.

Lincoln understood that a nation is held together not just by laws, but by the stories it chooses to believe about itself. The “electric cord” reference in his 1858 Chicago speech is a perfect example. He wasn’t merely describing the past. He was constructing a future in which belonging was chosen, not inherited.

3. History is the raw material of national imagination.

If you want to know where a country is going, look at which parts of its past it is polishing, and which parts it is burying.

That’s the real weather vane.

If we polish stories of industrial triumph while burying the stories of labor struggle, we’re imagining a future that prizes production over people. If we polish the “Great Man” theory while burying the grassroots movements, we’re imagining a future where only the elite have agency.

4. So yes — the history of History is the future.

The future is shaped by the stories we elevate, the myths we dismantle, the documents we return to, and the principles we decide still matter.

That’s why the work of history — myth‑busting and document‑driven — is never just about looking backward. We don’t go to the archives to find out who we were. We go to the archives to decide who we’re going to be.

It’s about the future we’re willing to imagine.

From the archives of Abraham Lincoln, Storyteller.

Mac

🇺🇸 Who Counts As “Us”? Lincoln Answers the Question

"The New Americans"
Immigrants as they catch their first glimpse
of the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor. (1915)
[Edwin Levick/Getty Images]

In the heat of the 1858 Senate race, Abraham Lincoln delivered a speech in Chicago that almost no one cites today — yet it contains one of his clearest statements about national identity. At a moment when the country was fracturing over race, immigration, and belonging, Lincoln offered a definition of “American” that had nothing to do with ancestry and everything to do with moral principle. The passage is startling in its generosity — and uncomfortably relevant to the arguments we keep hearing now.

To understand how radical this was, we have to remember the atmosphere of 1858. The "Know-Nothing" movement—a powerful, secretive, anti-immigrant party—had recently swept through the North, fueled by a deep-seated fear that Irish and German newcomers were a threat to the American way of life. Many of Lincoln’s own political allies were former Know-Nothings. The easiest move for a politician in a tight race like Lincoln's would have been to pivot toward nativism or, at the very least, stay quiet. Instead, Lincoln walked into the heart of Chicago and told his audience that their family trees were irrelevant.

🧬 Lincoln’s "Moral Genealogy"

Lincoln told his audience:

“We have… among us perhaps half our people who are not descendants at all of these men [the Founders]… German, Irish, French and Scandinavian… If they look back through this history to trace their connection with those days by blood, they find they have none… but when they look through that old Declaration of Independence they find that those old men say that ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal,’ and then they feel… that they have a right to claim it as though they were blood of the blood, and flesh of the flesh of the men who wrote that Declaration… That is the electric cord… that will link those patriotic hearts as long as the love of freedom exists.” [1]

⚖️ Inherited or Chosen: Lincoln's View

Lincoln is doing something extraordinary here. He acknowledges that millions of Americans — recent immigrants from Germany, Ireland, France, Scandinavia — had no ancestral tie to the Founders. They could not “carry themselves back into that glorious epoch” by blood. Instead of treating that as a deficiency, Lincoln reframes the entire question.

Belonging, he argues, is not inherited. It is chosen.

The Declaration’s moral principle — all men are created equal — becomes the “electric cord” that binds newcomers to the nation. Anyone who embraces that principle becomes, in Lincoln’s words, “blood of the blood, and flesh of the flesh” of the Founders. This is not sentimentality. It is a deliberate rejection of nativism at a time when anti‑immigrant politics were surging.

Lincoln is redefining American identity as a creed, not a lineage.

👥 The "Definition of Us" Debate

When you observe patterns in human language and history, the parallels are hard to ignore. Lincoln’s “electric cord” argument lands squarely in the middle of 2026.

We are once again in a moment when national identity is being contested. Is being “American” a matter of shared ancestry and cultural lineage, or is it a shared commitment to a set of ideas? Lincoln’s answer — that a creed is the only thing strong enough to hold a diverse people together — stands as a direct counter‑argument to modern “blood and soil” rhetoric.

He also understood the danger of grounding rights in genealogy. If citizenship depends on who your grandparents were, you create a hierarchy of belonging. By shifting the foundation to the Declaration of Independence, Lincoln effectively leveled the field. Today, as people feel increasingly divided by background, he offers a way to look forward to a shared principle rather than backward at competing lineages.

In 1858, Lincoln said the “electric cord” was what kept the country from flying apart before the war. Now, as digital echo chambers and permanent outrage strain our social fabric, his idea suggests something quietly radical: we don’t have to share origins to be bound together — we only have to believe in the same self‑evident truths.

This is why the passage feels almost unnervingly current. Today’s debates about immigration often hinge on who is “really” American — whether identity is inherited, cultural, ethnic, or ideological. Lincoln cuts through all of it with a clarity that still stings.

He refuses to divide the country into “us” and “them.” He refuses to weaponize contempt against newcomers. He refuses to treat ancestry as the measure of belonging.

Instead, he insists that the American story is open to anyone who embraces its founding moral idea. That was a radical position in 1858. It remains radical now.

✍️ Final Thoughts

Lincoln’s Chicago speech reminds us that the American experiment was never meant to be a closed inheritance. It was meant to be a shared commitment — a moral bond strong enough to link strangers across time, language, and origin. The “electric cord” he described still threads through the American story. But two questions now press on us: Do we still recognize it — and do we still believe that all men are created equal?

A timely reminder for us, from the archives of Abraham Lincoln, Storyteller.

Mac

📚 Works Cited

[1] Lincoln, Abraham. “Speech at Chicago, July 10, 1858.” In The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, edited by Roy P. Basler, vol. 2, 499–500. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1953.

Abraham Lincoln and the Weaponization of Contempt: Insights from the Springfield Scott Club Speech

Contempt is the growing fracture.
Lincoln warned that a republic survives disagreement,
but it cannot survive the erosion of respect.

Americans like to imagine that our politics only recently descended into circus acts and character assassination, but Abraham Lincoln saw the danger long before cable news, social media, or the age of permanent outrage. In 1852, standing before the Springfield Scott Club, he warned that a republic can survive disagreement — what it cannot survive is the slow erosion that sets in when contempt replaces argument and ridicule becomes a tool for policing public life. His target wasn’t policy or ideology. It was something deeper: a deliberate strategy to make public service look so foolish, so disrespected, that serious people would think twice before stepping forward.

The occasion was the 1852 presidential campaign, with Winfield Scott carrying the Whig banner against Democrat Franklin Pierce. Lincoln was speaking to a room full of Whigs trying to rally behind Scott — a decorated general whose military reputation was supposed to be the party’s greatest asset.

But Democrats had begun circulating stories that didn’t attack Scott’s record so much as mock the very idea of military heroism itself. And they weren’t sparing their own candidate either. A letter attributed to General James Shields told a tale of Pierce choosing the wrong horse, failing to anticipate danger, and tumbling into a canal — a joke that, beneath the laughter, suggested he lacked the judgment a general must possess. Lincoln understood immediately what was happening: if you can’t defeat a man’s achievements, you can make the public laugh at the entire category of achievement he represents. Ridicule becomes a shortcut — a way to neutralize strength without ever engaging it.

The moment demanded not solemn rebuttal, but a sharper tool — a way to expose the tactic by mirroring it. And so, for one of the few times in his political life, Lincoln answered satire with satire. Not to entertain, but to reveal a strategy designed to make politics so ridiculous, so contemptible, that no one with dignity or seriousness would care to serve.

🎭 When Absurdity Becomes Strategy

Lincoln didn’t begin this episode laughing. His first reaction to the strange, almost slapstick stories circulating about Franklin Pierce was suspicion — surely these tales were the work of overeager Whigs trying to embarrass the Democratic nominee. But when Stephen Douglas repeated the same themes in a public speech, and a Democratic newspaper printed an even more theatrical version in a letter from General James Shields, Lincoln recognized the pattern.

This wasn’t rumor. It wasn’t mischief. It was a coordinated attempt to use humor as a form of contempt — to turn a candidate’s military experience into a punchline and make the very idea of service look foolish. And Lincoln, who rarely indulged in satire, understood that the only way to expose a tactic built on ridicule was to let its absurdity speak for itself.

He began with the Shields letter. Rather than summarize it, he read it aloud, allowing the audience to hear how the Democrats’ own account transformed Pierce into a figure of slapstick. Shields described the two men approaching the enemy under fire and encountering “a deep narrow, slimy canal.” Both plunged in, but because Pierce rode a heavy American horse, “man and horse both sank down and rolled over in the ditch.” Pierce struggled so long to get free that Shields “was compelled to leave him.” Lincoln didn’t need to embellish a word; the contempt was already baked into the story.

Then came the line that cracked the room open. After recounting Pierce’s floundering in the “slimy canal,” Lincoln asked whether such a maneuver was “sanctioned by Scott’s Infantry Tactics as adopted in the army.” It was classic Lincoln — a single, straight‑faced question that revealed the entire strategy. By treating the slapstick as if it were a formal battlefield technique, he exposed how ridicule was being used to undermine the very idea of military competence.

But Lincoln didn’t stop with Pierce. He widened the lens. Ridicule, he warned, doesn’t stay in its lane — once unleashed, it corrodes everything it touches. To show the point, he reached back to a Springfield militia parade so chaotic it practically mocked itself. His description was deliberately exaggerated, a frontier caricature meant to show how easily an institution could be laughed out of seriousness.

At its head rode Gordon Abrams, “with a pine‑wood sword about nine feet long” and a pasteboard hat “the length of an ox‑yoke,” followed by men whose “cod‑fish epaulets” and “thirty‑yard sausage sashes” turned the whole affair into unintentional farce. The crowd, Lincoln said, “laughed the whole institution out of countenance.” And that was the danger: not that a single parade became ridiculous, but that an institution — the militia, meant to command respect — could be laughed into irrelevance.

Lincoln’s warning wasn’t confined to 1852. He understood that once ridicule becomes a political habit — mocking nicknames, exaggerated stories, open disdain for institutions — it reshapes the public’s expectations of leadership itself. When political success depends on who can make the other side look most ridiculous, the result is exactly what Lincoln feared: a culture that rewards spectacle over seriousness, performance over responsibility, and derision over duty.

Lincoln wasn’t warning about humor itself; he was warning about the kind of humor that carries contempt — the kind that doesn’t just mock a person, but mocks the very idea that anything in public life deserves respect.

🔥 Conclusion: The Cost of the Disdain

Lincoln understood something in 1852 that today we are still struggling to grasp: a republic doesn’t collapse when citizens argue — it collapses when they stop believing anything is worth arguing about. His 1852 speech wasn’t a plea for politeness or a complaint about rough politics. It was a warning about what happens when ridicule becomes the dominant political currency, when exaggeration becomes strategy, and when public institutions become props in a national comedy routine based on disdain, disrespect, and contempt.

He had watched a militia laughed “out of countenance.” He had watched a decorated general reduced to slapstick. And he feared what would happen if Americans learned to treat every civic responsibility the same way — as something unserious, something beneath respect, something to be mocked rather than maintained.

The danger, Lincoln suggested, is not that politics becomes loud or contentious. The danger is that it becomes performative — that leaders discover they can win by making the public sneer at the very institutions meant to protect them. Once that habit takes hold, the damage is not easily undone. When a people learn to sneer at their own institutions, those institutions cannot stand for long.

Lincoln’s warning wasn’t about 1852. It was about any moment when spectacle threatens to replace substance, and when the laughter aimed at others begins to hollow out the foundations beneath everyone. He wasn’t warning about humor itself; he was warning about the kind of humor that carries contempt — the kind that doesn’t just mock a person or an institution, but mocks the very idea that anything in public life deserves respect, including the people who serve.

Lincoln was reminding us that a republic doesn’t die when people stop taking it seriously, but when they start treating it as something beneath respect.

In the end, contempt — not conflict — is what makes a republic crumble.

Food for thought from the archives of Abraham Lincoln, Storyteller.

Mac

📚 Works Cited

[1[ Lincoln, Abraham. Speech at the Springfield Scott Club, July 1852. In The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, edited by Roy P. Basler, vol. 2, 138–143. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1953.

🛠️ Tough Love: The Day Abe Lincoln Told His Brother to Get a Job

Image generated by Microsoft Copilot (2026).

Before he was president, before he was a national symbol, Abraham Lincoln was a brother trying to keep his family afloat — and sometimes that meant saying the hard thing.

Most of us picture Abraham Lincoln as the patient statesman, the melancholy poet, the man who carried the weight of a nation. But long before the White House, Lincoln was something far more ordinary — a brother trying to keep his family afloat. And sometimes that meant saying "no".

In 1851, his stepbrother John D. Johnston wrote asking for money. It wasn’t the first time. Johnston had a pattern: a crisis, a plea, a promise to reform, and then another crisis. Lincoln had helped before, but this time he answered with one of the bluntest letters he ever wrote.

You are not lazy, and still you are an idler. I doubt whether since I saw you, you have done a good whole day's work in any one day. [1]

He didn’t call Johnston lazy. He called him an idler — someone who didn't hate work, but never quite managed to do a full day of it. Lincoln diagnosed the problem with surgical precision: a habit of wasting time, a habit, Lincoln said, that would shape Johnston’s life and, more importantly, the lives of his children.

It is more important to them, because they have longer to live, and can keep out of an idle habit before they are in it; easier than they can get out after they are in. [1]

Then came the tough love.

Lincoln refused to send the $80. Instead, he offered a deal: for every dollar Johnston earned between now and May, Lincoln would match it. Ten dollars a month in wages would become twenty. It was generous, but conditional — help tied to effort, not escape.

Now if you will do this, you will soon be out of debt, and what is better, you will have a habit that will keep you from getting in debt again. [1]

And he wasn’t shy about the stakes. When Johnston said he’d “almost give his place in Heaven” for the money, Lincoln shot back that Johnston valued Heaven very cheaply. It’s frontier sarcasm at its finest, delivered with affection and exasperation in equal measure.

Then Lincoln turned to the promise Johnston was dangling — the offer to deed him the land if he couldn’t repay the loan. To Lincoln, it wasn’t just a bad idea; it was illogical on its face.

You say if I furnish you the money you will deed me the land . . . Nonsense! If you cant now live with the land, how will you then live without it?

What makes the letter remarkable isn’t the scolding. It’s the clarity. Lincoln believed that habits become destiny. He believed that work was dignity, not punishment. And he believed that enabling someone’s worst patterns was a form of unkindness.

Then, just as the letter reaches its sternest point, he softens the ground beneath it.

You have always been kind to me, and I do not now mean to be unkind to you… if you will but follow my advice, you will find it worth more than eight times eighty dollars to you. [1]

It’s a striking pivot — the moral firmness giving way to reassurance. Lincoln wanted Johnston to hear the truth without mistaking it for contempt. He wasn’t punishing him; he was trying to preserve him.

And then comes the signature that tells the whole story.

Affectionately

Your brother

A. Lincoln

Johnston wasn’t his blood brother. He was the son of the man who married Lincoln’s widowed mother. Yet Lincoln signs with warmth, loyalty, and a kind of chosen kinship. Even after the lecture, even after the exasperation, he wants Johnston to know the relationship is intact — that respect and affection remain.

This wasn’t the president speaking. It was the brother who had watched Johnston drift for years and finally drew a line — not out of anger, but out of hope that Johnston might still change course.

It’s a rare glimpse of Lincoln without the marble pedestal: practical, unsentimental, loyal, and deeply responsible. A man who understood that sometimes the most loving thing you can do is help someone break the habits that are holding them back.

Profound advice from the archives of Abraham Lincoln, Storyteller.

Mac

🎩 If you’d like to explore more of Lincoln’s family story, here are three more posts — his little brother Tommy, his sister, Sarah, and his little boy Eddy.(Better have a kleenex.)

[FYI: A transcript of the letter in its entirety is posted below the Works Cited section.]

📚 Works Cited

[1] Lincoln, Abraham. “To Thomas Lincoln and John D. Johnston.” 24 December 1848. In The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, ed. Roy P. Basler, vol. 2, pp. 81–82. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1953.

Here's a transcript of the entire 1848 letter.

Dear Johnston: Your request for eighty dollars, I do not think it best, to comply with now. At the various times when I have helped you a little, you have said to me "We can get along very well now" but in a very short time I find you in the same difficulty again. Now this can only happen by some defect in your conduct. What that defect is I think I know. You are not lazy, and still you are an idler. I doubt whether since I saw you, you have done a good whole day's work in any one day.

You do not very much dislike to work; and still you do not work much, merely because it does not seem to you that you could get much for it.

This habit of uselessly wasting time, is the whole difficulty; and it is vastly important to you, and still more so to your children that you should break this habit. It is more important to them, because they have longer to live, and can keep out of an idle habit before they are in it; easier than they can get out after they are in. You are now in need of some ready money; and what I propose is, that you shall go to work, "tooth and nails" for some body who will give you money [for] it. Let father and your boys take charge of things at home---prepare for a crop, and make the crop; and you go to work for the best money wages, or in discharge of any debt you owe, that you can get. And to secure you a fair reward for your labor, I now promise you, that for every dollar you will, between this and the first of next May, get for your own labor, either in money, or in your own indebtedness, I will then give you one other dollar. By this, if you hire yourself at ten dolla[rs] a month, from me you will get ten more, making twenty dollars a month for your work. In this, I do not mean you shall go off to St. Louis, or the lead mines, or the gold mines, in Calif[ornia,] but I [mean for you to go at it for the best wages you] can get close to home [in] Coles county. Now if you will do this, you will soon be out of debt, and what is better, you will have a habit that will keep you from getting in debt again. But if I should now clear you out, next year you will be just as deep in as ever. You say you would almost give your place in Heaven for $70 or $80. Then you value your place in Heaven very cheaply for I am sure you can with the offer I make you get the seventy or eighty dollars for four or five months work. You say if I furnish you the money you will deed me the land, and, if you dont pay the money back, you will deliver possession. Nonsense! If you cant now live with the land, how will you then live without it? You have always been [kind] to me, and I do not now mean to be unkind to you. On the contrary, if you will but follow my advice, you will find it worth more than eight times eighty dollars to you. Affectionately Your brother A. LINCOLN