Editor’s Note: This article is part of “The Unfinished Revolution,” a project exploring 250 years of the American experiment. Abraham Lincoln’s first inaugural address is a dense, technical affair. Delivered in March 1861, before the outbreak of the Civil War but after seven states had left the Union, it could hardly have been the occasion for much else. After a long treatise on the illegality of secession, Lincoln closed with a single flourish. His plea to the “better angels of our nature” is so familiar that we can miss the very particular intercession he imagines. The better angels will touch “the mystic chords of memory” reaching “from every battle-field, and patriot grave” into the hearts of all Americans and “yet swell the chorus of the union.” It is a complex, orchestral vision: angels as musicians, shared past as instrument, the nation itself stirred back into tune.We can still hear in Lincoln’s final, lyrical turn something of what the American Revolution sounded like in his head: transcendent and alive. With good reason, he believed the same to be true for other Americans. They, too, had been reared in a culture of deep veneration for the Revolutionary past; they, too, had heard the stories, memorized the speeches, attended the parades, and worshipped “the fathers.” The problem was that he saw himself as the protector of the Revolution, while those who formed the Confederacy claimed to be its rightful heirs. What he called “the momentous issue of civil war” could not be averted.On the verge of 250 years from 1776, the mystic chords of memory are badly out of tune, the better angels nowhere to be seen. The Revolution does not live for us in the same way it did for Lincoln. Its remains lie dry and brittle, ready fuel for culture-war conflagration. We are caught between caricatured versions of the Revolutionary past. One presents the Founders as hypocrites who could do no right; the other casts them as heroes who could do no wrong. The first forecloses the possibility of a collective and usable past; the second locks us into a limited vision of who we are based on who we were.We would do well to hear something of Lincoln’s Revolution in our own heads. Lincoln rose to prominence at a moment of crisis, when the legacy of the Revolution was at stake. He did not shy away from what he called “the monstrous injustice” of slavery—and he certainly did not seek to purge it from the country’s story. Instead, he confronted it directly. Slavery threatened to invalidate the founding’s most hopeful ideals as lies, and to recast its universal promise as the particular inheritance of white people alone. As the nation fractured, Lincoln summoned the Revolution as neither empty hypocrisy nor mindless triumph, but as an unfinished project whose noblest values could redeem the past and heal the present.Born in 1809, Lincoln was a product of America’s first great age of Founder worship. A generation removed from the Revolution itself, he took in its history as did others of his era—through a growing body of myth and hagiography. This was the world in which George Washington could not tell a lie (in 1806, the biographer known as Parson Weems had added the cherry-tree story to the fifth edition of his Life of Washington); in which children dutifully studied the canon of founding speeches and documents; in which orators offered florid reflections on the Revolution’s heroic deeds each Fourth of July.This mythology spoke to a particular set of anxieties. Keen students of history, Americans knew republics to be fragile things, vulnerable to tyrants, demagogues, conquering generals, ambitious men, and citizens of declining virtue. They worried, too, about growing partisan rancor, ongoing regional differences, and threats of further revolutionary upheaval. Founder worship seemed to settle these fears: Honoring “the fathers” taught necessary virtue, offered subsequent generations a stake in the republic itself, and let them share in the glory of the Revolution without starting one of their own.By the time Lincoln was an adult, he wasn’t just a participant in this culture; he was a practitioner. His 1838 speech on “The Perpetuation of Our Political Institutions,” delivered at the Springfield Young Men’s Lyceum, in Illinois, is best known for its anticipation of civil war: “If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.” For all its grim prescience, though, Lincoln’s speech was a fairly conventional contribution to the genre of Founder worship. Watching as the Revolutionary generation died away, Lincoln asked what would become of the republic in the absence of their living example. Borrowing heavily from Daniel Webster’s famous 1825 speech at the groundbreaking of the Bunker Hill Monument, Lincoln wondered if those who “toiled not” in making the republic could be trusted to maintain it.He wasn’t so sure. A troubling lawlessness—what he called a “mobocratic spirit”—had surged in recent years. In Mississippi in 1835, enslaved men accused of plotting a rebellion had been hanged from trees. In 1836, a mob in St. Louis had lynched a mixed-race man named Francis McIntosh, who’d been accused of killing a police officer. Elijah Lovejoy, an abolitionist-newspaper editor, had the temerity to defend McIntosh and condemn the violence. For his trouble, another mob forced Lovejoy out of town. When he reestablished himself up the Mississippi in Alton, Illinois, mobs there destroyed two of his printing presses. They killed Lovejoy as he tried to defend a third.In the face of such upheaval, Lincoln turned back to the Founders and offered what he called “the political religion” of the Revolutionary past. Echoing Webster—“Let the sacred obligations which have devolved on this generation, and on us, sink deep into our hearts,” he had said—Lincoln asked his contemporaries to “swear by the blood of the Revolution” that they would remain faithful to the noble order that had been bestowed upon them.Lincoln’s argument for Founder worship was reverent, impassioned, and familiar. He also seemed to recognize that it was insufficient. His examples of lawlessness all stemmed from the confounded and violent problems surrounding slavery and race. Could Founder worship—dutiful and rote—confront that? In 1852, Frederick Douglass would excoriate the bland hypocrisy and hollowness of the cult of the Founders in his famous Fourth of July speech, noting that it amounted to blindness and inadequacy in the face of a moral emergency. Lincoln was not there—not in temperament and not yet in politics—but the Lyceum address opened the question of whether mere celebration of the past would be enough. Bigger problems were coming, and something livelier was needed than conjurings of the Founders’ ghosts.When Lincoln gave the Lyceum address, he was an obscure lawyer and state-level politician working on the margins of national politics. He had little reason to expect that his words would outlive the moment. With the exception of a single term in Congress, he remained a minor figure for the next decade and a half. He reemerged only in 1854, to meet a crisis far more serious than he’d anticipated.The litany of events that generations of students have scratched into blue-book essays felt to Lincoln like an open, concerted assault. The Mexican War, the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 and the subsequent violence of Bleeding Kansas, the caning of Charles Sumner in Congress in 1856, the Dred Scott Supreme Court decision in 1857—all confirmed the sense that the so-called slave power was on the march, reversing the broad promise of the Revolution itself. The pronouncements of pro-slavery agitators gave Lincoln and the new Republican Party little reason to think otherwise. Slavery, once handled cautiously as a “necessary evil,” had become in some eyes a positive good, the foundation of all liberty and social harmony for white men. Pro-slavery ideologues complained that Thomas Jefferson had been mistaken to announce the principle of universal equality in the Declaration of Independence, and that the Constitution was deficient in the absence of an explicit guarantee of the right to own slaves. In a speech in early 1861, before the Civil War began, Confederate Vice President Alexander H. Stephens boasted to applause that the Confederacy’s new constitution had fixed all that.Many recognized the drift of events and the arguments beneath them; Lincoln was clear and forceful in drawing out their implications for the Founders’ vision of the nation. Early in the fall of 1854, as he prepared his most detailed statement on the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which turned territory designated as free into contested ground for slavery, Lincoln was seen “nosing around for weeks” in the Illinois state library. He was assembling the response that would carry him to prominence in speeches and debates for the remainder of the decade.Lincoln’s argument began in a version of Revolutionary history—careful, lawyerly, selective—that amounted to a mandate to place slavery on the path to “ultimate extinction.” The Founders had deliberately avoided the words slave and slavery in the Constitution, he said, but they had betrayed their true feelings in a series of measures, including the prohibition of slavery in the Northwest Territory and the Constitution’s ban on the international slave trade, to take effect in 1808. As Lincoln saw it, the Founders had compromised with slavery and left the resolution to future generations. “The thing is hid away,” Lincoln said, “just as an afflicted man hides away a wen or a cancer, which he dares not cut out at once, lest he bleed to death; with the promise nevertheless that the cutting may begin at the end of a given time.” He did not specify when the cutting could or should begin—only that when it did, it would be consistent with the Founders’ wishes.To flout those wishes was to tarnish the Revolution, and deny the promise of the nation itself. Slavery was a blight on America’s claim to be an example of liberty and self-government. Taking on his rival Stephen A. Douglas’s professed indifference to slavery, Lincoln made the stakes clear. “I hate it,” he said, “because of the monstrous injustice of slavery itself. I hate it because it deprives our republican example of its just influence in the world—enables the enemies of free institutions, with plausibility, to taunt us as hypocrites.”For Lincoln, history was not just a record of what the Founders had done, but a living force animated by the ideals they enshrined. The facts of land ordinances and constitutional silences revealed intentions, but the ideals reached further, imposing obligations on the present.Nowhere were those obligations clearer or more urgent than in the Declaration of Independence. Scorned by pro-slavery ideologues and mocked as a pathway to racial equality by Douglas, the Declaration’s universal principles were, Lincoln said, “a standard maxim for free society which should be familiar to all, and revered by all; constantly looked to, constantly labored for, and even though never perfectly attained, constantly approximated, and thereby constantly spreading and deepening its influence, and augmenting the happiness and value of life to all people of all colors everywhere.”Lincoln’s defense of the Declaration worked a certain alchemy over the impurities of the past and the present. He cast its promise as something to be “constantly approximated” over generations, a vision that allowed him both to affirm universal equality in principle and to reassure white audiences wary of its implications. Pressed by Douglas, he carefully parsed the Declaration to mean equality in natural rights, not necessarily in “all respects.” He insisted that he did not favor political or social equality for Black Americans, and he gave support to colonization schemes that imagined freedom only by removal from the United States. In this way, Lincoln’s notion of equality unfolding through time was both a genuine belief and a shrewd dodge: It kept faith with the Declaration’s ideals without forcing him to confront racism directly, not to mention his own doubts about whether Black and white Americans could share full social equality.Cautions aside, Lincoln’s claim that the Declaration carried across generations set him squarely against those who sought to narrow its promise. In its Dred Scott decision, the Supreme Court declared that Black Americans “had no rights which the white man was bound to respect” and sought to anchor that exclusion in the very history of the founding. To Lincoln, that teaching did not merely misread the past—it rewrote it, extinguishing the Revolution’s promise in the present. He claimed that whoever “teaches that the negro has no share, humble though it may be, in the Declaration of Independence” was “muzzling the cannon that thunders” the Revolution’s “annual joyous return.”The conditions of the Civil War put to rest any lingering idea that it was enough merely to venerate the Revolution. After Fort Sumter, it became necessary to live it. Throughout the war, Lincoln put into practice what had mostly been a theory of Revolutionary history. Some bemoaned his excesses while others lamented his limits, but he demonstrated what it meant to live in dynamic relation to the past.Amid brutal setbacks on the battlefield and at the polls in late 1862, Lincoln offered his Annual Message to Congress, another bland text with an abrupt shift from the dry and detailed to the poetic. Without dwelling on the Revolution itself, he defined the moment as revolutionary, akin to 1776, when every action would reverberate through the ages, down to the last generation. The “stormy present,” he said, demanded forgetting the “dogmas of the quiet past” and embracing revolutionary action—“as our case is new, so we must think anew, and act anew.”Lincoln and his party were doing just that. Legislation passed by Congress that summer had already turned Union armies into instruments of emancipation. That fall, Lincoln’s administration had effectively reversed the Dred Scott ruling and begun recognizing the citizenship of freeborn Black Americans. And although the Emancipation Proclamation had, as the historian Richard Hofstadter said, “all the moral grandeur of a bill of lading,” it marked a revolutionary action in its own right. Anticipating its arrival, Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote in The Atlantic, “In so many arid forms which States incrust themselves with, once in a century, if so often, a poetic act and record occur.”At Gettysburg, in November 1863, Lincoln made it plain that this revolutionary present was grounded in the Revolutionary past. There among the patriot graves, he distilled the argument he’d been making for the past decade into scarcely more than two minutes. Beginning with his old, biblical math, he drew a direct line between 1863 and 1776. If 1863 had taken a revolutionary turn—vaguely referenced in the speech as “a new birth of freedom”—it had done so only in service to 1776; if it marked a second founding, it was only to improve the first. To think anew and act anew was not to reject the Revolution, but to fully realize it.Like the Revolutionaries he tried to redeem, Lincoln was never free of contradiction or compromise. His new birth of freedom was fragile and incomplete, barely surviving more than a decade after his death. In the country’s 250th year, though, we might well look back at 1776 by way of 1863. In a year when some will use the Revolution as a bludgeon of a retrograde politics of restoration, Lincoln offers another way. He invites us to carry its living ideals forward without denying its contradictions. The glory of the Revolution, he knew, belonged to those who’d made it. The test of whether it still lives falls to us.This article appears in the November 2025 print edition with the headline “Lincoln’s Revolution.”