I. Divided

Springfield, June 1858. Accepting the Illinois Republicans' nomination for the Senate, Lincoln borrowed a sentence from the Bible: “A house divided against itself cannot stand.”

The house was a country that spoke the language of liberty while allowing some people to own others. He was not offering a lesson in architecture. He was asking how long a nation could live with that contradiction.

Slavery existed in the northern as well as the southern colonies in 1776. Northern abolition came gradually; the plantation South grew more dependent on enslaved labor. In 1787, the Constitution carried the conflict into its machinery. For representation and direct taxation, three-fifths of an enslaved population would count toward a state's total.

The clause did not declare someone three-fifths human. Its operation was colder than that: people without votes increased the political weight of the states that enslaved them. Counted in the arithmetic, excluded from speaking for themselves.

The Missouri Compromise, the Compromise of 1850, the Kansas–Nebraska Act: each rearranged where slavery might be permitted. Drawing another line did not settle the quarrel. The Dred Scott decision in 1857 made opponents of slavery's expansion feel that even the ground beneath those lines could give way.

Lincoln argued that permanent division into slave and free states was unsustainable. He opposed slavery's expansion; he was not yet proposing immediate federal abolition in every state. And he said he did not expect the Union to dissolve. Warning that a house was divided was not a wish to see it fall.

Two years later he was elected president. The house in the speech became the place he had to wake up in every morning.

II. An Inheritance

Washington helped build the house. He did not build it alone. He presided over the Constitutional Convention, became the first president, and left after two terms. This series has lingered over that departure: a person could hold power and then let it go.

Slavery remained when he left. Jefferson had written the language of equality while enslaving more than six hundred people over his lifetime. Franklin joined the abolitionist cause in his later years. These were different choices, not a single unanimous act of postponement. Their successors nevertheless inherited an unresolved contradiction.

By the time Lincoln took office in March 1861, seven slave states had declared themselves outside the Union. Secession was not simply a group of housemates moving out. The enslaved people remaining under their control had not been asked whether they wished to leave with them.

Lincoln rejected unilateral secession. His predecessor, Buchanan, also considered it unconstitutional but denied that the federal government could wage war to compel a state to stay. There was no manual everyone agreed to follow.

Confederate forces fired on Fort Sumter in April. Lincoln called for militia, and more states joined the Confederacy. He accepted the responsibility of using force to preserve the Union. But saying he alone chose a war erases other decisions, the interests defended by slavery, and the guns that had already opened fire.

Here was the difficulty: an inherited institution protected some people and injured others. What should be preserved? What could no longer be allowed to continue?

III. The War Changes Its Purpose

Four years of war. The traditional estimate is about 620,000 military deaths; later demographic studies have put the toll higher. Historians still work on the numbers. A parent missing a son does not suffer less because the counting is unfinished.

Initially, preserving the Union stood at the center of Lincoln's public policy. In his August 1862 letter to the editor Horace Greeley, he said he would save it either without freeing anyone or by freeing everyone, if either course would work. The sentence leaves an uncomfortable question: was another person's freedom merely a means?

It was not the whole of his position. He ended the letter with his wish that everyone could be free. Before writing it, he had already presented an emancipation draft to his cabinet. Constitutional authority, military necessity, conviction, and the search for public support occupied the same mind. They did not line up neatly.

The Emancipation Proclamation, effective January 1, 1863, declared freedom for enslaved people in designated areas in rebellion. Loyal slaveholding border states were excluded, as were specified areas already under Union control. Turning its words into lived freedom depended on the progress of the war.

It was a war measure, but not merely a tactic. Emancipation became an explicit Union commitment. The proclamation also authorized Black enlistment. People treated as a labor resource to be fought over could now serve as soldiers helping decide the outcome.

They had been acting long before the proclamation. Enslaved people escaped plantations, entered Union lines, and supplied intelligence, forcing officers and politicians to answer a concrete question: will you send us back? Abolitionists had spent years organizing. Freedom did not descend as a gift from a single presidential pen.

Lincoln then supported securing abolition through a constitutional amendment. The Senate passed it in 1864; on January 31, 1865, the House reached the required two-thirds majority after a struggle in which he invested substantial political effort. Ratification by three-quarters of the states was still necessary. That threshold was reached on December 6.

He lived to see congressional passage, not completed ratification. Between the vote in Congress and enough states agreeing, other people had to keep working and gathering support.

IV. What the Law Achieved

The Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery and involuntary servitude, with an exception for punishment following conviction of a crime. That exception later worked with Black Codes and convict leasing to leave an opening for coercive labor. The change was real. So was its incompleteness.

The Fourteenth Amendment established citizenship and equal protection in 1868. The Fifteenth, in 1870, prohibited denying the vote on grounds of race, color, or previous enslavement. These later achievements came after Lincoln's death. They cannot all be booked under his name.

Congress, abolitionists, Black communities, and people whose names we will never know made this transformation. They organized schools, searched for separated relatives, and went to polling places. A right on paper became something with which to begin arranging a life.

It is easy to say that law cannot do everything. Harder to see its failures without dismissing its protections. Not being legally available for sale and still being vulnerable to racist violence were realities the same person could face.

An open door does not guarantee that no one will come to block it.

V. Blocking the Door

During Reconstruction, Black men voted and entered state legislatures and Congress. Schools, churches, and political organizations grew. These years were not an interval between presidents. For many people they were a first chance to put freedom to use.

The counterattack did not wait until 1877. Black Codes, white supremacist terror, and threats against voters and officeholders had already narrowed those opportunities. Violence drove someone away from the polling place; a law could then lock the door.

In 1877, political arrangements following a disputed election, together with the Hayes administration's removal of troops protecting the remaining Republican state governments in the South, marked a further federal retreat. This did not mean that every federal soldier suddenly vanished from the region. The commitment to protecting rights was giving way.

Over subsequent decades, poll taxes, literacy tests, grandfather clauses, and segregation stripped Black citizens of rights. In 1896, Plessy v. Ferguson upheld “separate but equal.” Separation was enforced with considerable seriousness. Equality was not.

Qin Shi Huang and Marx, encountered earlier in this series, bring a recurring temptation into view: imagining that unification, revolution, or a law can settle every difficulty yet to come. Their histories do not form a single formula. Stalin is not the sole inevitable outcome of everything Marx wrote.

Nor was Jim Crow simply slavery under a new name. People who gained freedom had not stood still. Because something had changed, we can ask more precisely who subsequently reclaimed power over them, and how.

Oppression is not a natural quantity that must be conserved. Decisions, interests, and institutions sustain it; people can resist it. The lesson is not that effort is pointless. It is that even after a victory, someone must keep the door open.

VI. Washington and Lincoln

Washington and Lincoln faced different demands. One had to show that a new political order could survive without its founding leader in office. The other had to decide which commitments could not be abandoned when that order split apart.

Washington's retirement meant relinquishing a public office. The secession of slaveholding states concerned territory, public power, and the fate of enslaved people. Calling both acts “leaving” makes a neat contrast, but folds unlike responsibilities into one word.

The comparison remains useful as a question: when should you release your hold, and when should you accept the work of continuing? Persistence is not a virtue on its own. Whose life does your persistence serve?

Lincoln was not waiting at an enlightened endpoint for everyone else to catch up. He had supported schemes for colonizing freed Black people overseas and publicly opposed full social and political equality in 1858. In his last public speech in 1865 he supported voting rights for some Black men, still within limits. Both the movement and the limits matter.

Acknowledging them does not diminish the importance of abolition. It lets us see a person who made consequential changes and also needed to be pushed, including by people whose equality he had not fully accepted.

A house deserves to be kept standing for its inhabitants, not because its name is sacred. Those inhabitants are not construction materials. Every person who died had a name, people they loved, and days they would never get to live.

VII. At Gettysburg

November 19, 1863. The battle at Gettysburg, a little over four months earlier, had produced roughly fifty thousand casualties, including the wounded, missing, and captured as well as the dead. Now a soldiers' cemetery was being dedicated.

Edward Everett spoke for about two hours. Lincoln followed for a few minutes. The familiar printed version is 272 words; the surviving manuscripts differ slightly. Brevity did not mean the subject was simple.

He began eighty-seven years earlier, taking his listeners to the Declaration of Independence in 1776 rather than the Constitution of 1787. Equality stood at the opening of his account of the nation.

The Declaration had not abolished slavery, and its authors practiced exclusions of their own. Lincoln was not retrieving an immaculate document. He was seizing an unfulfilled promise and asking the living to answer for it.

The test was larger than whether a map could remain intact. Could a political community professing freedom and equality make those words into a way of living? He spoke of freedom being born anew and of a government belonging to its people.

No speech single-handedly changed the war in a few minutes. The proclamation, people escaping bondage, and Black military service were already changing it. Lincoln gave that change language others could remember, contest, and use.

Du Fu's poetry makes suffering difficult to pass by. Lincoln's few minutes in a cemetery addressed a question to the survivors: if the dead can no longer speak, how shall the living carry on?

VIII. Lincoln and Marx

In the same era, Marx studied labor and capital in London while Lincoln made decisions about war and emancipation in Washington. Placing them side by side need not become a contest between a thinker and a man of action.

Marx organized as well as wrote. Lincoln thought about free labor, self-government, and constitutional authority as well as signing orders. One was not all brain; the other was not all hands.

In 1864 Marx drafted the International Working Men's Association's address congratulating Lincoln on his reelection and supporting the struggle against slavery. These were not two men speaking across an ocean without any connection.

The useful contrast lies in two pressures. Marx makes us ask whether a smoothly functioning institution itself depends on deprivation. Lincoln's experience poses another question: if you are responsible today, how do you change it without abandoning those who need protection amid the wreckage?

Not every institution deserves to survive, and reform from within is not always preferable to replacement. In this case, preserving the Union gradually became inseparable from changing its fundamental rules. Keeping the old arrangement intact was no longer enough.

Neither man's work closes the question for his successors. Criticism must reach actual lives; laws must be put into practice. After the book is finished and the decree signed, the person still standing outside the door remains there.

IX. Ford's Theatre

On the evening of April 14, 1865, Lincoln was watching a play at Ford's Theatre in Washington. John Wilkes Booth entered his box and shot him. Lincoln died the next morning, aged fifty-six.

Lee had surrendered at Appomattox five days earlier, but other Confederate armies had yet to surrender. The Thirteenth Amendment still needed enough states to ratify it. This was not a hero leaving the stage after everything was finished. A person doing unfinished work was suddenly gone.

Reconstruction had already begun during the war. What he did not see was its later, bitter course—or Martin Luther King Jr., a century on, standing at his memorial and calling the country back to a promise it had not fulfilled.

We cannot decide for him that missing the failures was a kind of good fortune. People who had to live through them had no such choice. Nor does saying that the house survived answer who could feel safe inside it.

At this series' imagined bridgehead, another tall man arrives: a gaunt face, a high hat. Beside Washington, he seems still to be bracing a wall, unable yet to lower his hands. This is not a historical scene. It is a way of leaving a question visible.

Keep some light beyond him. Beside the wall are people who walked out of slavery, Black soldiers, abolitionists, and generations who would organize for their rights. Without them, equality written on that wall would remain lettering.

Lincoln was not the first to see the fracture or the last to take responsibility for repairing it. He accomplished things that cannot be erased. He left things unfinished.

The person is gone. The question passes to the living: what, exactly, are we keeping this house standing for?

Han Qin (秦汉) · @hqinjarsy · Great Lives