Lincoln Speeches (Penguin Civic Classics) - Softcover

9780143121985: Lincoln Speeches (Penguin Civic Classics)
View all copies of this ISBN edition:
 
 
The defining rhetoric of Abraham Lincoln – politician, president, and emancipator

Penguin presents a series of six portable, accessible, and—above all—essential reads from American political history, selected by leading scholars. Series editor Richard Beeman, author of The Penguin Guide to the U.S. Constitution, draws together the great texts of American civic life to create a timely and informative mini-library of perennially vital issues. Whether readers are encountering these classic writings for the first time, or brushing up in anticipation of the 50th anniversary of the Civil Rights Act, these slim volumes will serve as a powerful and illuminating resource for scholars, students, and civic-minded citizens.

As president, Abraham Lincoln endowed the American language with a vigor and moral energy that have all but disappeared from today's public rhetoric. His words are testaments of our history, windows into his enigmatic personality, and resonant examples of the writer's art. Renowned Lincoln and Civil War scholar Allen C. Guelzo brings together this volume of Lincoln Speeches that span the classic and obscure, the lyrical and historical, the inspirational and intellectual. The book contains everything from classic speeches that any citizen would recognize—the first debate with Stephen Douglas, the "House Divided" Speech, the Gettysburg Address, the Second Inaugural Address—to the less known ones that professed Lincoln fans will come to enjoy and intellectuals and critics praise. These orations show the contours of the civic dilemmas Lincoln, and America itself, encountered: the slavery issue, state v. federal power, citizens and their duty, death and destruction, the coming of freedom, the meaning of the Constitution, and what it means to progress.

"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.

About the Author:
Abraham Lincoln was born in a log cabin in Kentucky in 1809 and was largely self-educated. As his family moved to Indiana and then Illinois, he worked as a hired hand, clerk, and surveyor until, in his twenties, he began to study law. He was elected to the Illinois House of Representatives in 1834. After marrying Mary Todd, Lincoln set up his own law practice and was elected to the U.S. Congress in 1846. As a candidate for the U.S. Senate in 1858, he debated Senator Stephen A. Douglas across the state and became a national figure. Nominated for president by the Republican Party, Lincoln was elected in November 1860 and took office in March 1861. Commander in chief of the Union forces during the Civil War, he issued the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863. Reelected in 1864, Abraham Lincoln was shot to death by an embittered Southern actor, John Wilkes Booth, in April 1865, five days after General Lee’s surrender at Appomattox.


Allen C. Guelzo is Henry R. Luce Professor of the Civil War Era and Director of Civil War Era Studies at Gettysburg College. He is the author of A Very Short Introduction: Lincoln, as well as two winners of the Lincoln Prize: Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation: The End of Slavery in America and Abraham Lincoln: Redeemer President.


Richard Beeman
, the John Welsh Centennial Professor of History Emeritus at the University of Pennsylvania, has previously served as the Chair of the Department of History, Associate Dean in Penn's School of Arts and Sciences, and Dean of the College of Arts of Sciences. He serves as a trustee of the National Constitution Center and on the center's executive committee. Author of seven previous books, among them The Penguin Guide to the United States Constitution and Plain Honest Men: The Making of the American Constitution, Professor Beeman has received numerous grants and awards including fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, and the Huntington Library. His biography of Patrick Henry was a finalist for the National Book Award.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

PENGUIN BOOKS

LINCOLN SPEECHES

ABRAHAM LINCOLN was born in a log cabin in Kentucky in 1809 and was largely self-educated. As his family moved to Indiana and then Illinois, he worked as a hired hand, clerk, and surveyor until, in his twenties, he began to study law. He was elected to the Illinois House of Representatives in 1834. After marrying Mary Todd, Lincoln set up his own law practice and was elected to the U.S. Congress in 1846. As a candidate for the U.S. Senate in 1858, he debated Senator Stephen A. Douglas across the state and became a national figure. Nominated for president by the Republican Party, Lincoln was elected in November 1860 and took office in March 1861. Commander in chief of the Union forces during the Civil War, he issued the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863. Reelected in 1864, Abraham Lincoln was shot to death by an embittered Southern actor, John Wilkes Booth, in April 1865, five days after General Lee’s surrender at Appomattox.

ALLEN C. GUELZO is Henry R. Luce Professor of the Civil War Era and Director of Civil War Era Studies at Gettysburg College. He is the author of Lincoln: A Very Short Introduction, as well as two winners of the Lincoln Prize: Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation: The End of Slavery in America and Abraham Lincoln: Redeemer President.

RICHARD BEEMAN, the John Welsh Centennial Professor of History Emeritus at the University of Pennsylvania, has previously served as the Chair of the Department of History, Associate Dean in Penn’s School of Arts and Sciences, and Dean of the College of Arts of Sciences. He serves as a trustee of the National Constitution Center and on the center’s executive committee. Author of seven previous books, among them The Penguin Guide to the United States Constitution and Plain, Honest Men: The Making of the American Constitution, Professor Beeman has received numerous grants and awards, including fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, and the Huntington Library. His biography of Patrick Henry was a finalist for the National Book Award.

LINCOLN
SPEECHES

ABRAHAM
LINCOLN

EDITED WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY

ALLEN C. GUELZO

SERIES EDITOR

RICHARD BEEMAN

PENGUIN BOOKS

LINCOLN SPEECHES

SERIES
INTRODUCTION

We introduce the Penguin Civic Classics series by presenting our readers with a paradox. On the one hand, there is an abundance of evidence establishing that the vast majority of Americans, whatever their political differences, have an intense love of their country, believing that it has been one of the most successful experiments in human freedom and opportunity that the world has ever seen. And Americans are similarly united in having a deep reverence for their Constitution, for their institutions of government, and for the system of free enterprise that has been such a powerful engine for our economic growth. Americans see all of these as playing a vital role in making the nation as successful as it has been.

But there is an equally large body of evidence suggesting that Americans’ knowledge of their history and of the way in which their institutions have worked over the course of that history is embarrassingly meager. For example, a third of Americans believe that the Declaration of Independence was written after the end of the Civil War, and fewer than half can identify the three branches of our federal government. Nearly 40 percent of the students at fifty-five of America’s elite colleges and universities could not place the Civil War in the correct half century, and fewer than half of them, when presented with the text of the Gettysburg Address, were able to identify it. Nor does it appear that our knowledge improves much as we move closer to the present. Another survey has revealed that more than half of high school seniors thought that Italy, Germany, or Japan was a U.S. ally during the Second World War, and only 14 percent of those seniors could name any relevant fact about U.S. involvement in the Korean War. As the distinguished historian David McCullough has lamented, “While the clamorous popular culture races on, the American past is slipping away, out of sight and out of mind. We are losing our story, forgetting who we are and what it’s taken to come this far.”

With these discouraging results in front of us, it is no wonder that there is a growing clamor for an increased emphasis on “civic education,” defined by one leading authority as “the cultivation of the virtues, knowledge, and skills” necessary for carrying out one’s role as a citizen. That very phrase, “civic education,” sounds to many like a doctor’s prescription: “You need to take your medicine! It may not be very pleasant, but it is something you need to do in order to ensure not only your own health, but also the health of the body politic.” It is our hope that reading these volumes in the Penguin Civic Classics series will be much more pleasant than taking medicine, for although these volumes will indeed help improve the reader’s civic knowledge, we also hope that they will provide some civic inspiration—a genuine appreciation for, even an excitement about, some of the words, ideas, and actions that have shaped American society and government since their founding.

The history represented in these volumes, from the founding of the American colonies in the seventeenth century to the adoption of America’s Declaration of Independence to Abraham Lincoln’s inspiring Gettysburg Address to Barack Obama’s inaugural address as the first African American president in American history, is not merely a collection of names and dates to be memorized but, rather, a set of stories to be absorbed and enjoyed. And they are stories that have a real relevance and meaning to our lives today, whether we are debating the nature of America’s immigration laws, the extent to which the federal government should be involved in decisions relating to our health care, or, getting even closer to home, whether local schools and school districts have the constitutional right to search a student’s school locker.

In these volumes, the reader will encounter nearly all of the central themes in American history, as well as the dilemmas and conflicts that have provided much of the dynamism and excitement of that history. The central themes and ideas of American public life—democracy, equality, economic opportunity, the role of government in maintaining that delicate balance between public order and personal freedom, and the government’s responsibility to protect certain individual rights—have never remained static, nor have they ever elicited uniform agreement among American citizens.

The very first item in Terry Golway’s collection of important American speeches is a sermon given by Massachusetts governor John Winthrop, aboard the ship Arbella, as it transported the first Puritan settlers to the new colony. In that sermon, Winthrop described the Puritans’ mission in Massachusetts Bay as one of creating a “city upon a hill,” a model of virtue and purity for all others in the world to follow. But his vision of that society was in some important respects very much at odds with the values that guide America today. In the opening words of his sermon, Winthrop reminded his fellow colonists that “GOD ALMIGHTY in His most holy and wise providence, hath so disposed of the condition of mankind, as in all times some must be rich, some poor, some high and eminent in power and dignity; others mean and in submission.” Hardly a prescription for the democratic society that we claim to be today.

Fast-forward 136 years to the promise contained in Thomas Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence that “all men are created equal”—a view of society very different from that articulated by Winthrop. Jefferson’s city upon a hill was to be a nation dedicated to equality and the pursuit of happiness, not to a divinely ordained, inegalitarian social hierarchy. But, of course, in a world in which Africans were enslaved, women were considered legally subordinate to men and, indeed, in which many free white males were denied the right to vote because they did not own the requisite amount of property, Jefferson’s promise of equality fell far short of an accurate description of the reality of American society in 1776. Still, words have power, and Abraham Lincoln, for one, knew the power of those words. As is amply displayed in Allen Guelzo’s volume containing many of Lincoln’s principal speeches, time and time again Lincoln invoked Jefferson’s preamble as a pledge that Americans of his age were honor-bound to fulfill, describing the preamble as “the electric cord in that Declaration that links the hearts of patriotic and liberty-loving men together, that will link those patriotic hearts as long as the love of freedom exists in the minds of men throughout the world.”

Alas, Americans would fight a horrific, bloody civil war in which more than 600,000 people, slave and free, lost their lives before the nation was able to take the steps necessary to forge the link to which Lincoln had referred. Beginning in December of 1865, with the adoption of the Thirteenth Amendment, eliminating the institution of slavery; continuing with the adoption of the Fourteenth Amendment (July 1868), with its guarantee of “equal protection under the laws”; and culminating with the adoption of the Fifteenth Amendment (February 1870), asserting that the right to vote could not “be abridged...on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude,” those ideas of democracy and equality began to be incorporated into our constitutional system. But although those three amendments represented an important step forward, America’s struggle to live up to the promise of the preamble was far from over. It took until 1920 for the nation to adopt the Nineteenth Amendment, giving to women the right to vote, and in spite of the guarantees of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, the civil rights of African Americans, including the right to vote, continued to be undermined by the actions of individual state governments well into the twentieth century. When Lyndon Johnson, only the second (after Woodrow Wilson) Southern-born president since the Civil War, signed into law the Voting Rights Act of 1965, he too quoted the preamble to the Declaration and ended his speech with a phrase from the anthem of the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s: “We Shall Overcome.” And when the first African American president, Barack Obama, delivered his inauguration speech on a cold day in January 2009, he began his speech by paraphrasing the words of Thomas Jefferson’s preamble, urging Americans “to carry forward that precious gift, that noble idea, passed on from generation to generation: the God-given promise that all are equal, all are free, and all deserve a chance to pursue their full measure of happiness.” Even in 2009 those words were, like Jefferson’s, expressions of hope, not descriptions of reality. But they have proved powerful indeed, and they continue to be a dynamic force in shaping the American future just as they have the American past.

Another important theme that emerges from these volumes of Civic Classics involves the age-old debate on how and where to strike the best balance between public order and personal liberty. For most of human history, those who held government power—kings or emperors or czars—usually dealt with that issue by ruthlessly imposing their own definition of what was good for the masses of people whom they governed. When Thomas Paine published his earth-shaking pamphlet Common Sense in January of 1776, his primary purpose was to persuade the American colonists to throw off British rule, but one of the key elements in his argument was the notion that while every society needs some form of government in order to provide security and protect the freedom of its citizens, the best and freest societies are those in which government is least intrusive. In Paine’s words: “Society in every state is a blessing, but government even in its best state is but a necessary evil; in its worst state an intolerable one.” Paine’s words struck a chord with his American readers, who were already suspicious of the overly powerful, distant government of Great Britain, and the Declaration of Independence, approved seven months later, reinforced that same theme. The distrust of concentrations of government power—the notion that government, while necessary, must be restrained—is deeply rooted in America’s revolutionary past, and, of course, is very much alive today, as we can observe by the vitality of political movements such as the Tea Party.

As powerful as Paine’s and Jefferson’s indictments of excessive British power may have been, they did not provide the answer to the question of how the independent American nation could create a government that would strike an ideal balance between order and liberty. The men who gathered in Philadelphia in the summer of 1787 to frame a new constitution for their still-fragile independent nation took a giant step forward in providing an answer when they created a governmental system based on the division of power between the individual states and the central government—the system that we now call federalism—and by further dividing power among the three branches of the federal government—in a system that we characterize as one of “checks and balances.”

But, as in so many other important ideas in American history, those involving federalism and checks and balances were subject to many different interpretations. Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay, in the eighty-five essays comprising The Federalist Papers, attempted to address some of the concerns that Americans had about the excessive power of the proposed new federal government and, in the process, provided Americans with enduring insights about government and politics—insights that are still cited by Supreme Court justices in their judicial opinions even today. But Hamilton and Madison, the two principal authors of The Federalist Papers, began to disagree about the relationship of the new federal government to the individual states and to the people at large almost from the moment the new government commenced operation. The debate over the way the words of the Constitution should be interpreted, with Madison and Jefferson taking a “strict construction” position, and Hamilton, George Washington, and others arguing for a broader interpretation of the Constitution, has stayed with us until the present day. As readers of Jay Feinman’s collection of landmark Supreme Court cases will discover, the Court has spent a significant portion of its time over the years, beginning with Chief Justice John Marshall’s majority opinion in McCulloch v. Maryland (1819), wrestling with the extent of and limits on federal government power. Nor has that conflict been confined to judicial or intellectual arguments. In the years leading up to the Civil War, Northern and Southern politicians fought ferocious battles over the question of what authority the federal government had to legislate with respect to the expansion of slavery into ne...

"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.

Top Search Results from the AbeBooks Marketplace

Seller Image

Lincoln, Abraham; Guelzo, Allen C. (EDT); Beeman, Richard (EDT)
Published by Penguin Books (2012)
ISBN 10: 0143121987 ISBN 13: 9780143121985
New Softcover Quantity: 1
Seller:
GreatBookPrices
(Columbia, MD, U.S.A.)

Book Description Condition: New. Seller Inventory # 16676342-n

More information about this seller | Contact seller

Buy New
US$ 11.14
Convert currency

Add to Basket

Shipping: US$ 2.64
Within U.S.A.
Destination, rates & speeds
Stock Image

Lincoln, Abraham
Published by Penguin Books (2012)
ISBN 10: 0143121987 ISBN 13: 9780143121985
New Paperback Quantity: 1
Seller:
upickbook
(Daly City, CA, U.S.A.)

Book Description Paperback. Condition: New. Seller Inventory # mon0000233586

More information about this seller | Contact seller

Buy New
US$ 9.51
Convert currency

Add to Basket

Shipping: US$ 4.49
Within U.S.A.
Destination, rates & speeds
Stock Image

Lincoln, Abraham (Author); Beeman, Richard (Editor); Guelzo, Allen C. (Introduction by)
Published by Penguin Random House (2012)
ISBN 10: 0143121987 ISBN 13: 9780143121985
New Softcover Quantity: > 20
Seller:
INDOO
(Avenel, NJ, U.S.A.)

Book Description Condition: New. Brand New. Seller Inventory # 0143121987

More information about this seller | Contact seller

Buy New
US$ 10.12
Convert currency

Add to Basket

Shipping: US$ 3.99
Within U.S.A.
Destination, rates & speeds
Stock Image

Lincoln, Abraham; Guelzo, Allen C. [Editor]; Beeman, Richard [Editor]; Guelzo, Allen C. [Introduction];
Published by Penguin Books (2012)
ISBN 10: 0143121987 ISBN 13: 9780143121985
New Paperback Quantity: 1
Seller:
Ergodebooks
(Houston, TX, U.S.A.)

Book Description Paperback. Condition: New. Seller Inventory # DADAX0143121987

More information about this seller | Contact seller

Buy New
US$ 17.55
Convert currency

Add to Basket

Shipping: FREE
Within U.S.A.
Destination, rates & speeds
Seller Image

Abraham Lincoln
ISBN 10: 0143121987 ISBN 13: 9780143121985
New Paperback Quantity: 1
Seller:
Grand Eagle Retail
(Wilmington, DE, U.S.A.)

Book Description Paperback. Condition: new. Paperback. The defining rhetoric of Abraham Lincoln - politician, president, and emancipatorPenguin presents a series of six portable, accessible, and-above all-essential reads from American political history, selected by leading scholars. Series editor Richard Beeman, author ofThe Penguin Guide to the U.S. Constitution, draws together the great texts of American civic life to create a timely and informative mini-library of perennially vital issues. Whether readers are encountering these classic writings for the first time, or brushing up in anticipation of the 50th anniversary of the Civil Rights Act, these slim volumes will serve as a powerful and illuminating resource for scholars, students, and civic-minded citizens.As president, Abraham Lincoln endowed the American language with a vigor and moral energy that have all but disappeared from today's public rhetoric. His words are testaments of our history, windows into his enigmatic personality, and resonant examples of the writer's art. Renowned Lincoln and Civil War scholar Allen C. Guelzo brings together this volume of Lincoln Speeches that span the classic and obscure, the lyrical and historical, the inspirational and intellectual. The book contains everything from classic speeches that any citizen would recognize-the first debate with Stephen Douglas, the "House Divided" Speech, the Gettysburg Address, the Second Inaugural Address-to the less known ones that professed Lincoln fans will come to enjoy and intellectuals and critics praise. These orations show the contours of the civic dilemmas Lincoln, and America itself, encountered- the slavery issue, state v. federal power, citizens and their duty, death and destruction, the coming of freedom, the meaning of the Constitution, and what it means to progress.The defining rhetoric of Abraham Lincoln - politician, president, and emancipatorPenguin presents a series of six portable, accessible, and-above all-essential reads from American political history, selected by leading scholars. Series editor Richard Beeman, author ofThe Penguin Guide to the U.S. Constitution, draws together the great texts of American civic life to create a timely and informative mini-library of perennially vital issues. Whether readers are encountering these classic writings for the first time, or brushing up in anticipation of the 50th anniversary of the Civil Rights Act, these slim volumes will serve as a powerful and illuminating resource for scholars, students, and civic-minded citizens.As president, Abraham Lincoln endowed the American language with a vigor and moral energy that have all but disappeared from today's public rhetoric. His words are testaments of our history, windows into his enigmatic personality, and resonant examples of the writer's art. Renowned Lincoln and Civil War scholar Allen C. Guelzo brings together this volume of Lincoln Speeches that span the classic and obscure, the lyrical and historical, the inspirational and intellectual. The book contains everything from classic speeches that any citizen would recognize-the first debate with Stephen Douglas, the "House Divided" Speech, the Gettysburg Address, the Second Inaugural Address-to the less known ones that professed Lincoln fans will come to enjoy and intellectuals and critics praise. These orations show the contours of the civic dilemmas Lincoln, and America itself, encountered- the slavery issue, state v. federal power, citizens and their duty, death and destruction, the coming of freedom, the meaning of the Constitution, and what it means to progress. Shipping may be from multiple locations in the US or from the UK, depending on stock availability. Seller Inventory # 9780143121985

More information about this seller | Contact seller

Buy New
US$ 17.99
Convert currency

Add to Basket

Shipping: FREE
Within U.S.A.
Destination, rates & speeds
Stock Image

Abraham Lincoln
Published by Penguin Books (2012)
ISBN 10: 0143121987 ISBN 13: 9780143121985
New Softcover Quantity: 1
Seller:
Books Puddle
(New York, NY, U.S.A.)

Book Description Condition: New. pp. 176 1st Edition. Seller Inventory # 2645364792

More information about this seller | Contact seller

Buy New
US$ 14.01
Convert currency

Add to Basket

Shipping: US$ 3.99
Within U.S.A.
Destination, rates & speeds
Stock Image

Lincoln Abraham
Published by Penguin Books (2012)
ISBN 10: 0143121987 ISBN 13: 9780143121985
New Softcover Quantity: 1
Seller:
Majestic Books
(Hounslow, United Kingdom)

Book Description Condition: New. pp. 176. Seller Inventory # 46369255

More information about this seller | Contact seller

Buy New
US$ 12.51
Convert currency

Add to Basket

Shipping: US$ 8.20
From United Kingdom to U.S.A.
Destination, rates & speeds
Stock Image

Lincoln, Abraham
Published by Penguin Books (2012)
ISBN 10: 0143121987 ISBN 13: 9780143121985
New Paperback Quantity: 1
Seller:
GoldenWavesOfBooks
(Fayetteville, TX, U.S.A.)

Book Description Paperback. Condition: new. New. Fast Shipping and good customer service. Seller Inventory # Holz_New_0143121987

More information about this seller | Contact seller

Buy New
US$ 23.41
Convert currency

Add to Basket

Shipping: US$ 4.00
Within U.S.A.
Destination, rates & speeds
Stock Image

Lincoln, Abraham
Published by Penguin Books (2012)
ISBN 10: 0143121987 ISBN 13: 9780143121985
New Paperback Quantity: 1
Seller:
GoldBooks
(Austin, TX, U.S.A.)

Book Description Paperback. Condition: new. New Copy. Customer Service Guaranteed. Seller Inventory # think0143121987

More information about this seller | Contact seller

Buy New
US$ 26.33
Convert currency

Add to Basket

Shipping: US$ 4.25
Within U.S.A.
Destination, rates & speeds
Stock Image

Lincoln, Abraham
Published by Penguin Books (2012)
ISBN 10: 0143121987 ISBN 13: 9780143121985
New Softcover Quantity: 1
Seller:
Front Cover Books
(Denver, CO, U.S.A.)

Book Description Condition: new. Seller Inventory # FrontCover0143121987

More information about this seller | Contact seller

Buy New
US$ 30.35
Convert currency

Add to Basket

Shipping: US$ 4.30
Within U.S.A.
Destination, rates & speeds

There are more copies of this book

View all search results for this book