“Abraham Lincoln’s Words for Our Times” is a version of a course I taught to undergraduates at the University of Massachusetts at Boston for many years. It was then called “The Political Thought of Abraham Lincoln.” One of our first readings, “The Perpetuation Speech,” should make it abundantly clear how Lincoln speaks to us today. There will be other examples.
Lincoln proclaimed that he never had a political thought that did not come from the Declaration of Independence. Well into the Civil War, he professed that the Constitution barred him from touching the institution of slavery where it existed. By the time of the Emancipation Proclamation Lincoln came to believe that saving the Union required the end of slavery. The two became a single goal.
In closing his Gettysburg Address, Lincoln wrote that the nation “shall have a new birth of freedom — and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.” Questions about whether that nation can be preserved persist to this day.
Lincoln wrote beautifully, often in the language of the Bible. Frederick Douglass referred to Lincoln’s Second Inaugural as “a sacred effort.”
I use Roy Basler, ed., Abraham Lincoln: His Speeches and Writings. Most any collection of Lincoln’s speeches and writings will do, and I will provide links to all readings in the syllabus.
Instructor Maurice T. Cunningham retired in 2021 as associate professor of political science at the University of Massachusetts at Boston where he taught The Political Thought of Abraham Lincoln for more than twenty years. He is the author most recently of Dark Money and the Politics of School Privatization, and he continues research and writing on the effects of secret wealth on American politics. But his favorite topic is Lincoln and he is overjoyed to return to reading Lincoln with others.