Abraham Lincoln

Yes. And no.

In a short, powerful piece in National Review, Rick Brookhiser concludes that "the conservative movement is no more. Its destroyers are Donald Trump and his admirers."

The Issue with Steve Hayes. Want to know what is in this week's magazine? Lucky for you, our editor Steve Hayes is putting together a brief video preview. Check it out here.

Statesmanship, like its popular cousin leadership, is an elusive quality to identify, if only because it varies from the context of one political order to another. In monarchies and dictatorships, the lines of a society are drawn horizontally, with classes of elites, the military, and bureaucrats…

Ever since Theodore H. White’s The Making of the President 1960, book buyers have been treated to the quadrennial offerings of presidential-campaign tell-alls. Many of these offer very little beyond cheap political thrills—White’s 1960 book reads like JFK fan fiction—but the genre is not without…

Last week's release of surviving documents on the assassination of John F. Kennedy was not the first time the federal government has made a clean breast of things on the subject, or attempted to do so. There were plenty of leaks when the Warren Commission was deliberating, back in the Bronze Age…

To many of those commenting on Donald Trump’s maiden address to the United Nations, especially if otherwise disturbed by the president’s character, his emphasis on state sovereignty was a welcome dose of diplomatic normalcy. For example, David Ignatius of the Washington Post found this theme…

To many of those commenting on Donald Trump’s maiden address to the United Nations, especially if otherwise disturbed by the president’s character, his emphasis on state sovereignty was a welcome dose of diplomatic normalcy. For example, David Ignatius of the Washington Post found this theme…

President Trump’s statement on Charlottesville caught my attention roughly halfway through: “We are a nation founded on the truth that all of us are created equal,” he said. Trump was invoking the Declaration of Independence, which indeed set forth that truth, and on which we were founded as a…

If Americans today know John Quincy Adams, whose 250th birthday we celebrate on July 11, it is probably as Congressman Adams—Anthony Hopkins’ character in the film Amistad. Congressman Adams was Adams at his best. But that was a late development.

"Our progress in degeneracy appears to me to be pretty rapid.” So Abraham Lincoln wrote on August 24, 1855, to his friend Joshua Speed. Is it melodramatic to worry that the statement appears apt today?

According to the popular-again Alexander Hamilton, “Energy in the executive is a leading character in the definition of good government." In light of this requirement and the failure of the Articles of Confederation to meet it, the authors of our Constitution took careful measures to create a…

On the day before Lincoln left Springfield on his way to assume the presidency of a nation on the brink of civil war, he walked for the last time down the stairs from his office, paused on the boardwalk, and looked up at the battered shingle that advertised his law firm: LINCOLN & HERNDON. "Let it…

Ralph Lerner is a man of rare learning, biting wit, and deep thought. His virtues are well known to generations of students and colleagues at the University of Chicago, although he is not as prominent in the wider world as he deserves to be. The publication of this book should induce many more…

Ralph Lerner is a man of rare learning, biting wit, and deep thought. His virtues are well known to generations of students and colleagues at the University of Chicago, although he is not as prominent in the wider world as he deserves to be. The publication of this book should induce many more…

Before the days of Schick and Barbasol, a lithograph from the printmaker Currier and Ives depicted President Lincoln's ZZ Top of a cabinet and the chinstrap in chief holding the Emancipation Proclamation. Over his shoulder was graybeard Gideon Welles, secretary of the navy, and to his left were…

Four themes flow together at one of the most remarkable points in American history—the evening when Abraham Lincoln for the last time proclaimed a national day of thanksgiving. It was April 11, 1865: two days after the Civil War ended with Robert E. Lee's surrender at Appomattox; four days before…

In Cleveland Monday morning, Boyd Matheson, the former chief of staff to Utah senator Mike Lee, made an interesting pitch to Republicans on the party's platform committee: a shorter, more meaningful GOP platform. Rather than a party platform that takes up tens of thousands of words and attempts to…

Following the results of Tuesday's Indiana primary, THE WEEKLY STANDARD received a letter from two readers, addressed to the Republican National Committee. With the writers' permission, that letter is reproduced below:

At intervals in his abbreviated life, John Wilkes Booth (1838-1865) apparently pictured himself as a man of destiny—although when, on one occasion, he exclaimed, “I must have fame,” he was presumably thinking of the family craft (acting) and not murder. But like so many of the memories that crowd…

Today we observe the 150th anniversary of Abraham Lincoln’s assassination. We're also at the start of the presidential political season. Over the course of the next year and a half, we will be presented with contrasting visions of America’s future. To help us evaluate these arguments, it is useful…

In the month of February, Americans reflect on the contributions that African Americans have made over the course of our history. Of course, February is also host to President's day -- a joint celebration of the birthdays of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln.

George Washington, 1796:

On July 4, 1863, as he stared across the fields near Gettysburg at Robert E. Lee’s battered army, George Meade issued a general order expressing his thanks for the “glorious result” of the previous three days’ fighting.  The victory already won would be “matters of history ever to be remembered,”…

In his celebrated Thanksgiving proclamation, Abraham Lincoln struck his customary note of hope tinged with a kind of fatalistic melancholy.  

Over at Powerline, Scott Johnson reminds us of perhaps the greatest speech about July 4th—Lincoln's remarks on July 10, 1858, in response to Stephen Douglass. Here's the key passage:

Valerie Jarrett, a close advisor to President Barack Obama, said yesterday on CNN that the president is not going to debate the role of government. Instead, she said, "progress is compelled by action right now."

Bill Kristol gives some advice to President Barack Obama and his Inaugural Address speech writers:

President Barack Obama will deliver this year's State of the Union Address on February 12, which is the same day as Abraham Lincoln's birthday.

Leon Kass, on Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address:

The year that is drawing toward its close has been filled with the blessings of fruitful fields and healthful skies. To these bounties, which are so constantly enjoyed that we are prone to forget the source from which they come, others have been added, which are of so extraordinary a nature that…

My advice, for what it's worth, to conservatives and Republicans desperate to see Todd Akin off the ballot in Missouri: You've made your point. You've bewailed and denounced and threatened. Now it's time to hearken to the words of Lincoln, in his great Temperance Address, delivered on Washington's…

If you're in the mood for reading a bit this July 4th, there are many fine Independence Day speeches and orations to choose from. Here are three that I find particularly moving:

Geoffrey Norman’s lovely piece on the Seven Days Battles of June 1862 in this week’s edition of the magazine needs no glossing, but the fights that brought Confederate General Robert E. Lee to the fore also marked the beginning of a period where the future of the United States was increasingly in…

In the midst of the current controversies over the Martin Luther King and Dwight Eisenhower memorials in Washington, it’s worth examining the human impulse toward memorialization, so that we can appreciate what is at stake in the inevitable battles—aesthetic and moral—over the shapes our collective…

Given the everlasting cascade of books about Abraham Lincoln, is anything at all left to be said? Perhaps. We sometimes overlook Lincoln’s pivotal role as a cause—or at least a provocation—of the war. Without his election, would hostilities have broken out? A hypothetical question, of course, but…

Since embarking on a taxpayer-funded campaign tour of the Midwest, Obama has already compared his plight to Lincoln and Martin Luther King Jr. and blamed his troubles on "bad luck," as if the president's policies had nothing to do with the current predicament. 

One gets the sense that some in the media are doing their best to help Michele Bachmann win the Republican nomination by attacking her over ridiculous kerfuffles. The latest example involves her claim that the Founding Fathers "worked tirelessly" to end slavery. On Good Morning America, host George…

Check out Jonathan D. Horn's review of Lincoln on War, Harold Holzer's latest addition to the more than 16,000 books about our sixteenth president. The book focuses on Lincoln's thoughts and speeches about war, and Holzer has pieced together a narrative that allows the reader to follow the…

Lincoln on War edited by Harold Holzer Algonquin, 336 pp., $24.95

Claiming Lincoln

The first men to die in the American Civil War fell on this day, 150 years ago, on Pratt Street in Baltimore. Troops en route to Washington were confronted downtown by rioters, and the fighting cost four federal soldiers and 12 civilians their lives.

In honor of the 150th anniversary of the inauguration of Abraham Lincoln, stop whatever irrelevant busywork you're engaged in and take a moment -- well, half an hour -- to read one of the greatest of presidential utterances. If your busywork won't wait half an hour, skip to the last paragraph. It's…