🇺🇸 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.