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Abraham Lincoln is clearly one of the most frequently cited figures in American political rhetoric, especially with regard to issues of equality. But given the ubiquity of Lincoln's legacy, many references to him, even on the presidential level, are often of questionable accuracy. In Claiming Lincoln, Jividen posits that in much twentieth-century presidential rhetoric, especially from progressive leaders, Lincoln's understanding of equality is slowly divorced from its grounding in the natural rights thinking of the American Founding and reinterpreted in light of progressive history. Claiming Lincoln examines the manner in which rhetoricians have appealed to Lincoln's legacy, only to distort that legacy in the process. Focusing on Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, and Lyndon Johnson and touching on Barack Obama, Jividen argues that presidential rhetorical use and abuse of Lincoln has profound consequences not only for how we understand Lincoln but also for how we understand American democracy. Jividen's original take on Lincoln and the Progressives will be of interest to scholars of American politics and all those invested in Lincoln's legacy.

In the aftermath of the Civil War, Republicans and Democrats who advocated conflicting visions of American citizenship could agree on one thing: the rhetorical power of Abraham Lincoln's life. This volume examines the debates over his legacy and their impact on America's future. In the thirty-five years following Lincoln's assassination, acquaintances of Lincoln published their memories of him in newspapers, biographies, and edited collections in order to gain fame, promote partisan aims, champion his hardscrabble past and exalted rise, and define his legacy. Shawn Parry-Giles and David Kaufer explore how style, class, and character affected these reminiscences. They also analyze the ways people used these writings to reinforce their beliefs about citizenship and presidential leadership in the United States, with specific attention to the fissure between republicanism and democracy that still exists today. Their study employs rhetorical and corpus research methods to assess more than five hundred reminiscences. A novel look at how memories of Lincoln became an important form of political rhetoric, this book sheds light on how divergent schools of U.S. political thought came to recruit Lincoln as their standard-bearer.

[...]since overseers \"over eighteen and under thirty-five\" were now liable to be drafted into the army, it meant that \"the peace and safety of helpless women and children must be imperiled for want of protection against bands of idle slaves, who must be left to roam over the country without restraint.\" The increasing power of the central government and of individual Confederate states, as well as the burdens of service and sacrifice these governments required from civilians, led to an unprecedented increase in letters to government officials and leaders seeking \"protection\" from the demands of war.7 Reflecting this desire for protection, ordinary white men and women in Georgia flooded Governor Brown with correspondence. The array of complaints was vast and included everything from the high price of food to Confederate taxes and neighbors using grain for distilling whiskey instead of making flour.8 An examination of all these letters, however, indicates that, despite some initial concerns, real servile insurrection fears were rare. (The volume of overall incoming correspondence to the governor was about the same for each of these years.) Like the \"ripe\" insurrection climate stemming from the 1860 election and secession crises, the governor's incoming correspondence indicates something similar arising after the outbreak of war.

A paradox of U.S. history has been Americans' commitment to limiting the power of their national government—often articulated as a defense of states' rights—amid that same government's rise to a continental and then world power. Connecting nineteenth-century debates over federalism with the intertwined discourses of nation and empire, this essay explores that contradiction by examining how states' rights advocates used the term \"consolidation\" to critique the emerging concept of the nation-state. The essay argues that critics of consolidation offered a vision of American expansion organized around the principle of divided sovereignty as the best means for governing a heterogeneous collection of territories and peoples. In this respect, states' rights provided Americans committed to a self-image as the world's leading democratic republic with a roadmap for joining the fraternity of empires via a rhetoric ostensibly aimed at preventing tyranny by the center.

Frederick Douglass's Freedmen's Monument speech of 1876 is notable for its complexity, and commentators have offered widely varying readings. Critics have judged it an abdication of racial responsibility, indicative of an unwarranted optimism characteristic of Douglass's larger argument on racial reform. In this article, I explicate this speech, highlighting the complex rhetorical design in which Douglass forges a memory of Lincoln as a medium for issuing carefully targeted appeals to the interests and virtues of black and white Americans. In its hitherto underappreciated theoretical dimension, the speech epitomizes a theory of racial progress that challenges recent, pessimistic readings of America's racial history and prospects.

In this essay I analyze the debate over Abraham Lincoln's role in the emancipation of African American slaves. Speaking both to contemporary public memory and the evidence of history, I contend that when Lincoln discussed or wrote about emancipation between 1860 and 1863, his rhetoric exhibited a dialogic form that shifted responsibility from the president to congressional leaders and common citizens. I conclude that Lincoln's dialogic rhetoric does not signal his opposition to emancipation but rather his deep belief that emancipation would become meaningful only after the considered deliberation and action of the American people.

This essay examines reminiscences of Abraham Lincoln that were published in the aftermath of his death by those who had interacted with Lincoln personally. An understudied genre y Lincoln reminiscences offered judgments of Lincolns character through a portraiture style designed to make salient private as well as public dimensions of his character. We historicize the rhetoric of portraiture and trace the rise of reminiscence out of biography as a stand-alone genre, which reached unprecedented popularity in the competitive subgenre of the Lincoln reminiscence. We argue that Lincoln reminiscences featured a balance of common and uncommon virtues thought essential for a president, a balance that helped democratize and humanize presidential character.

Challenging traditional readings of Abraham Lincoln, this article investigates his public use of the Bible before he became President of the United States. The rhetorical tropes of covenant, purification, sacrifice and rebirth illuminate a previously under-appreciated dimension of Lincoln's Biblical oratory. A close study of those themes reveals a consistently radical and polarizing Lincoln from his early speeches (Lyceum and Temperance) to his late pre-Presidential ones (Peoria and House Divided). At the heart of this unity was an uncompromisingly moral vision of the Union. The article concludes with some reflections on the enduring importance of > the Bible in the American tradition, and the place of redemptive violence in political life.

This essay evaluates the significance of voice and \"natural language\" in James Fenimore Cooper's first three maritime novels, The Pilot (1824), The Red Rover (1827), and The Water-Witch (1830). In each of those works Cooper imagines ships with absolute command hierarchies structured according to vocal power, a trait that provides evidence of a \"natural aristocracy\" and proves to be the sine qua non of maritime authority. Drawing on eighteenth-and nineteenth-century theories of voice and elocution, I show how Cooper used the ideals of \"natural language\" to structure the command hierarchies on board his fictional ships. I argue that his use of such hierarchies allowed Cooper to unite two competing elements of his political imagination: on the one hand, his patriotism and reverence for the common citizenry and, on the other hand, his appreciation for a strong, legally constituted authority that would guide that citizenry. Sailors and junior officers on board Cooper's fictional ships understand and accept that vocal ability precedes and confirms a commander's authority, and their mute obedience to strong-voiced leaders reflects the existence of a dictatorial shipboard government that is anything but tyrannical. By positioning voice as the foundation of power on board ship, Cooper transforms, as if by magic, nondemocratic shipboard command into an authoritarian liberalism that might also obtain on land.