Historians and the general public regularly rank Abraham Lincoln as America’s greatest president. There is little doubt that he is widely admired for the work he did to end slavery and preserve the Union.
But beyond these two important points, most Americans know little else about Lincoln’s life. A 2013 poll by Participant found that two-thirds of Americans admitted to knowing “little to nothing” about him. Eighty-three percent of respondents thought that the Emancipation Proclamation freed all the slaves in the United States. (It only freed the slaves in areas under Confederate control.) Another 40 percent believed that Lincoln was a Democrat. (Google only confuses matters when it lists his party affiliation as “National Union Party,” which was a temporary rebranding of the Republican Party during the 1864 presidential election.) In fact, Lincoln was the first Republican to be elected president.
As a professor of American Studies at Christopher Newport University, I spend a great deal of time teaching my students about Abraham Lincoln. I require them to read Lincoln’s speeches and letters in the hope that they will come to appreciate the greatness of his mind, the political constraints in which he operated, and the moral compass that led him to fight for the principles of the Declaration of Independence. Each summer I also teach these sorts of lessons to groups of high school teachers around the country. I find that teachers are eager to better understand Lincoln’s life and legacy and to find new ways to convey that
