In the early 1840s, where the steps of the Library of Congress now stand, a group of American abolitionists gathered in a modest boardinghouse to plot the destruction of slavery.

The house belonged to a relatively obscure Washingtonian, a widow named Ann Sprigg. In those days, boardinghouses like Sprigg’s were fixtures of the capital landscape—where congressmen, senators, government officials, and the like tended to live during legislative sessions. Quarters were often cramped. Men rented a room—or just a bed, or even half of a bed—and communed in shared bathrooms and living spaces, with the day’s debates sometimes carrying over to the dinner table. Many houses developed reputations as being favored by certain factions, turning them into political clubs as much as living quarters.

In 1841, Ann Sprigg’s house came to be known as the “abolition house.” Three anti-slavery Whig congressmen—Seth M. Gates, a New Yorker, William Slade, a Vermonter, and Joshua Giddings, an Ohioan—moved in alongside two prominent abolitionists, Theodore Dwight Weld and Joshua Leavitt. Leavitt—a New Yorker from a landowning family who shared a Sprigg House bed with Weld—quickly set about convincing the representatives to work alongside the wider abolition movement as an anti-slavery lobby. The group became the brain trust behind the first significant congressional campaign to combat slavery from the nation’s capital.

The brain trust’s goal was straightforward: to develop a caucus within the legislature, a lobby to influence the legislature, or at the very least an argument that would challenge the power of slavery and slaveholders in the American government. But it was also radical, representing a major sea change in American history, and ultimately a turning point in slavery’s demise. Up until this point, the anti-slavery movement had largely eschewed politics. Led by William Lloyd Garrison and his followers, the early abolitionists focused strictly on changing hearts and minds—what they called “moralsuasion”—not changing votes. Garrison once even burned copies of the U.S. Constitution (which he called “a Covenant with Death and an Agreement with Hell!”) on stage—a flaming, charred reflection of the fact that he preferred challenging slaveholder power from outside the halls of power.

By the time the brain trust moved into the Sprigg House, however, the movement had started to splinter, with more abolitionists taking up the banner of political activism. A year prior, one group of abolitionists broke with Garrison by forming their own political party. Known as the Liberty Party, it was the first ever expressly anti-slavery party in American history, though it never registered more than a blip on the national political radar. As a result, many anti-slavery Whigs like Giddings and Slade opted to remain Whigs, where they could challenge slavery within the existing two-party structure.

This shift within the anti-slavery movement was partly a result of recognizing that as of the late 1830s and early 1840s, slavery’s defenders clearly had the upper hand, especially in the United States Congress. In fact, so great was slaveholder influence in the nation’s capital that in 1836 the U.S. House of Representatives passed a series of resolutions that became known as the “Gag Rule.” At the time, constituents would send petitions to their legislators to read on the house floor; the Gag Rule barred the reading of the many anti-slavery petitions congressmen received, which left slavery virtually unchallenged in Congress.

Carroll Row, which included Ann Spriggs’ boarding house, was located at the site of present-day Library of Congress. Courtesy of Library of Congress.

The first task of the boarders in the Sprigg House was to repeal the Gag Rule. Weld and Leavitt helped prepare anti-slavery speeches and advised the congressmen on strategy, forming what Giddings described as an informal “select committee.” They soon found a key ally in president-turned-congressman John Quincy Adams. Though Adams never lived in the Sprigg House, he spent hours there conferring with the boarders. Finally, on December 3, 1844, thanks in no small part to plans hatched at the Sprigg House, Congress repealed the Gag Rule, galvanizing anti-slavery politicians across the country. Many of them later became “Conscience Whigs,” a faction within the Whig Party that opposed slavery, in opposition to their rivals, the pro-slavery “Cotton Whigs.”

While not as radical as many of his “Conscience Whig” colleagues Abraham Lincoln was himself an anti-slavery Whig, and this is perhaps what drew him to the Sprigg House when he moved to Washington, D.C. in 1847 as a little-known congressman from Illinois. For the next two years, it was where he slept, ate, and debated his fellow boarders on the major political topics of the day, including the Mexican-American War, the annexation of Texas, and the possible expansion of slavery into the West. Though the other members of the brain trust had moved on by then, Lincoln’s fellow Midwesterner in the House, Giddings, still lodged there, and the two most certainly dined together when in session.

Lincoln spent only a single term in Congress, but his time at the Sprigg House was clearly a formative experience, if not also a fond memory for him. When he returned to Washington more than a decade later, this time as president of a fractured nation, he looked in on Ann Sprigg, who had since moved houses and fallen on hard times. When Lincoln learned that she needed help, he got this “most estimable widow lady” a job working as a clerk in the Treasury Department, a position that allowed her to support her family through the war.

Ann Sprigg died in 1870, and her boardinghouse—and the entire block of row houses on which it stood—was demolished in 1887 to build the Library of Congress. Since then, the story of this old D.C. boarding house and the woman who ran it has been largely forgotten. The history of the anti-slavery movement has often focused on bigger, more prominent figures and emphasized the work of activists based in New England or New York and not necessarily a slaveholding city like Washington, D.C.

Yet for the better part of a decade, Ann Sprigg’s abolition house formed the nucleus of a new political attack against slavery. It was there at the dining room table that anti-slavery politicos put together a strategy for combatting slavery within the halls of Congress, a change that thrust anti-slavery activism away from the fringe and placed it right in the heart of American politics.

Editor’s note: This piece has been updated to reflect that while Joshua Leavitt came from a wealthy family, he was not personally wealthy.

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On Wednesday, Elizabeth Mitchell, author of Lincoln’s Lie: A True Civil War Caper Through Fake News, Wall Street and the White House, visited Zócalo live on Twitter with Break It Up author Richard Kreitner to discuss the little-known 1864 episode that illuminates Lincoln’s authoritarian side and his manipulation of the press. Their conversation explored the relationship between politics, media, and national security in today’s America, and the extent to which it should change how our society understands its 16th president.

In Mitchell’s new book, she focuses on a moment during the Civil War when two New York newspapers published a presidential proclamation from Lincoln declaring a draft of 400,000 additional men for active service. In response, Lincoln declared the announcement a forgery—in today’s terms, “fake news”—shut down both outlets and imprisoned telegraph operators, editors, and reporters, in addition to taking military possession of the Independent Telegraph Company’s New York offices to control the transmission of news. But ultimately, Mitchell found, there may have been more truth to the proclamation than Lincoln was willing to admit.

Today, Lincoln’s shutdowns of telegraph offices would be comparable to shutting down the internet, Mitchell told Kreitner, but pointed out that journalistic standards and readers’ expectations of a free, independent press, were different at the time. Anonymous reporting was a common and accepted practice, she said, describing a separate incident where Lincoln secretly purchased a newspaper in order to influence key voters shortly before an election.

The late 19th-century incident foreshadows contemporary reckonings with executive power and privilege. Mitchell and Kreitner considered the episode’s similarity to Trumpian attempts to undermine trust in the press in recent years. Kreitner also drew a comparison to the January 6 insurrection and the challenge of prosecuting crimes that involve a U.S. president.

“On a certain level,” Mitchell said, “[Lincoln] had an interpretive approach to the executive branch, and I think that the way it’s structured at this point, the executive branch gets that advantage—maybe to a dangerous degree.”

Quoted with Elizabeth Mitchell:

“A president has a lot of power, and they can easily strain past the powers that they are even granted … For democracy to work very well, all the other players in this democracy, which is everyone else, need to be on alert to be pushing for all of the laws that are on the books to be enacted and the protections to be executed.”

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Nicolay, who eventually became Lincoln’s private secretary, may not be well-known today, but he was one of the most significant people working behind the scenes in the Lincoln administration and his efforts on behalf of the 16th president changed the course of American history. Possessed of organizational skills that Lincoln lacked, Nicolay managed White House operations and protected Lincoln’s time, allowing the president to become perhaps the nation’s most active and involved wartime commander-in-chief. Nicolay was devoted to Lincoln and his friendship eased the president’s burdens during the terrible ordeal of civil war. Following Lincoln’s assassination, Nicolay and his friend John Hay worked for years on a massive biography of Lincoln that shaped the president’s image as the good and wise Father Abraham who saved the Union, ended slavery, and gave America renewed freedom. Nicolay helped Lincoln achieve greatness in both life and legend.

Born Johann Georg Nicolai in 1832 in the village of Essingen in what is now Germany, Nicolay was five when his family arrived in the United States, anglicized its last name, and settled in a German immigrant community in Cincinnati, Ohio. When Nicolay’s mother died soon thereafter the family left for a series of western locations, eventually settling in Pike County, Illinois, where they operated a grist mill. While physically frail, the academically inclined George, as he was called, learned English quickly. By the age of 14 he had lost his father and been dismissed from the family mill by his eldest brother. But he soon landed a job at the Pike County Free Press in Pittsfield, the county seat of Pike County, Illinois.

Lincoln at the time was a circuit-riding attorney who often argued cases in the Pike County courthouse, across the street from the newspaper’s offices. Nicolay followed Lincoln’s court appearances and budding political career with growing interest and enthusiasm. Like Lincoln, Nicolay was drawn to the new Republican Party, which opposed slavery’s expansion. And like Lincoln, he was vehemently opposed to Senator. Stephen A. Douglas’s 1854 Kansas-Nebraska Act, which negated the Missouri Compromise of 1820 and permitted slavery anew in territory that had been closed to it.

At the Free Press, Nicolay worked his way up from printer’s apprentice to reporter to sole proprietor. The paper supported Republican candidates in Illinois, including Ozias M. Hatch, who after his election as Secretary of State in 1856 invited Nicolay to become his chief clerk. After selling the newspaper, Nicolay moved to Springfield to join Hatch’s staff in 1857. While executing his duties at the state library and election archives, located directly across the street from Lincoln’s law office, Nicolay finally got to meet Lincoln in person. Although Lincoln was 23 years older than Nicolay they became fast friends, often conversing and playing chess in the State Library.

In 1858, Lincoln ran for Douglas’s senate seat, engaging in the famous Lincoln-Douglas debates that cemented his reputation as a moderate and reasoned anti-slavery voice within the Republican Party. He lost the race, but Republican leaders decided that transcripts of the debates should be published and distributed nationally to promote the party’s cause. Lincoln called on Nicolay to hand deliver the copies to a publishing company in Ohio, writing in his letter of introduction, “Mr. Nicolay is a good Republican … a good man and worthy of any confidence that may be bestowed upon him.” Given these sentiments, it didn’t take long for Lincoln and Nicolay to forge a partnership in politics.

Lincoln’s star was on the rise. Many Republicans thought he’d make a great vice presidential candidate in the 1860 election, but he and Nicolay envisioned something more. In February, 1860, Nicolay began pushing Lincoln’s prospects for a presidential run, writing an editorial endorsing Lincoln for president in the Pike County Free Press. Nicolay was present at the Chicago convention when Lincoln won the nomination. Soon thereafter, Lincoln offered him the position of campaign secretary.  

Lincoln liked Nicolay and admired his abilities, but there was also a political calculation in choosing a widely respected German immigrant to play a key role in his administration. German American voters had been alienated by the Democratic Party’s defense of slavery, as well as by the American (or “Know Nothing”) Party and its anti-immigrant positions. When the “Know Nothings” merged into the coalition forming the new Republican Party, German American voters were unsure where they belonged. By appointing Nicolay his private secretary, Lincoln assured German Americans that he was not a nativist.

As the Private Secretary to the president, Nicolay became the de facto first White House chief of staff. He brought his friend Hay on board as an assistant. Nicolay served as a gatekeeper of access to Lincoln, coordinating daily White House routines that included managing the president’s schedule, handling correspondence, and even ordering filing cabinets for proper storage of the administration’s paperwork (no longer was Lincoln allowed to carry around important documents in his hat). Nicolay served as the principal liaison between the White House and Congress. He sat in on Cabinet meetings and presidential interviews and took careful notes. He drafted important documents and letters. He assisted First Lady Mary Lincoln with state dinners and other matters of protocol, experiencing tense relations with her when she overspent and fudged the accounts. Nicolay and Hay were Lincoln’s sounding boards as the president conducted business in D.C. and went on missions to various parts of the country beyond as the president’s trusted eyes and ears. Nicolay conducted multiple treaty negotiations with Native American tribes. His organization of the president’s schedule freed Lincoln to spend critical hours each day in the War Department’s telegraph office monitoring developments in the field. Without Nicolay’s focus, Lincoln could have been lost in a sea of detail.

President Abraham Lincoln sits between John George Nicolay (left) and John Hay (right) in Washington, D.C., in November 1963. Hay wrote in his diary, “We had a great many pictures taken … Nico & I immortalized ourselves by having ourselves done in a group with the Prest.” Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

Nicolay continued working for Lincoln through the president’s 1864 election to a second term, but decided he wanted to depart the White House shortly thereafter. Living in Washington had meant enduring long periods of separation from the love of his life, Therena Bates, who remained in Pittsfield, and Nicolay was growing weary of confrontations with Mrs. Lincoln. He accepted Lincoln’s offer of an appointment as American consul at Paris, but was still in his White House job—returning from a mission to Cuba—when he learned that the president had been assassinated. Devastated, he remained in his secretary post until he and Hay had organized Lincoln’s presidential papers and made the presidential office ready for Lincoln’s successor, Andrew Johnson.

Nicolay and Bates got married and headed off for a new life in Paris in June of 1865. Their daughter, Helen, was born there the following year. Nicolay served as consul at Paris until he was replaced by an appointee of President Grant in 1869. He returned to the U.S. and became a naturalized American citizen on October 12, 1870. (Apparently no one, including President Lincoln, had known that Nicolay wasn’t a citizen.) In 1872 he was selected to be Marshal of the U.S. Supreme Court. This enabled Nicolay and his family to live in Washington, D.C., and allowed him to begin the legacy-cementing literary work he really wanted to do: prepare a history and biography of Abraham Lincoln and his era.

Nicolay and Hay worked with Robert Todd Lincoln, the president’s son, who gave them access to Lincoln’s presidential papers. Doing painstaking research, Nicolay and Hay shunned hearsay and undocumented tales about Lincoln and relied on credible documentation for every aspect of their 10-volume, 4,800-page work, Abraham Lincoln – A History, which was published by the Century Company in 1890. The work was more than a mere biography of Lincoln. It assembled a detailed military history of the Civil War and reported on the machinations of the cabinet, Congress, and the military. It portrayed Lincoln as a witty and wise man who loved to tell stories. It detailed how Lincoln bore the suffering of war on his shoulders while his faith in God grew deeper, and the ways he saw beyond the immediate ups and downs of war, keeping the ultimate goal of preserving the Union ever in his mind. It was the first scholarly validation of the president’s greatness and became the foundational work for all the scholarly writing on Lincoln to follow.

This massive effort was not viewed as flawless, but it was widely praised when it was published, and it shaped a heroic image of Lincoln that persists to this day. In Nicolay and Hay’s telling, Abraham Lincoln could do no wrong. His motives were always pure, his fairness, kindness, and wisdom were without parallel, and only he possessed the qualities of mind and character needed by the nation in its moment of gravest crisis. The book was a work of filial love, scholarly yet biased, by two men who, in their early manhood, had viewed Lincoln as an all-wise father figure who could do no wrong, the man who had saved the nation and ended slavery.

The self-effacing Nicolay—the Father of Lincoln Scholars—is practically invisible in the volumes. He always chose to work behind the scenes for his hero, mentor, and friend.

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Yet, there has always been a small cloud of doubt about just how great an emancipator he really was. Why (for instance) did he wait for two years into his presidency to issue his Emancipation Proclamation? And why didn’t that Proclamation free all the 3.9 million African-Americans then held in bondage? And once free, was Lincoln really committed to justice and equality for black Americans?

In a nation that needs to revere its presidents as a reflection of itself, these are not easy questions. If Lincoln the Great Emancipator turns out to be fraudulent, maybe a good deal more about Lincoln—and us—might turn out to be a fraud, too.

Still, there is no reason to doubt that Lincoln hated slavery. “I have always hated slavery,” he said in 1854, and kept on saying it until his death 11 years later.

Bear in mind, however, that Lincoln thought of slavery primarily as an economic injustice rather than a racial one. It forced people into labor they had not chosen, and took from them what that labor produced. He could remember his own resentment at the easy way his father had rented him out to neighboring farmers and pocketed all his earnings. Lincoln would say later that the turning point of his life came when he was able to keep two silver half-dollars he had earned on the Ohio River for ferrying two strangers out to a passing steamboat. “You may think it was a very little thing, but it was a most important incident in my life. I could scarcely credit that I, a poor boy, had earned a dollar in less than a day … The world seemed wider and fairer before me.”

Slavery, in Lincoln’s mind, was any economic relationship based on force and confiscation, and in his experience, it was an offense that rose above questions of race. “I used to be a slave,” he said in 1858, “and now I am so free that they let me practice law.” He candidly admitted that he had “no purpose to introduce political and social equality between the white and the black races.” But “in the right to eat the bread, without leave of anybody else, which his own hand earns,” every African-American “is my equal and the equal of … every living man.”

The great question before the Civil War, however, was what to do about slavery, since it was protected by state law in 15 states. No federal law could reach across the constitutional wall that separated federal and state governments to lay a finger on it. The northern states had long since put an end to slavery there, but not to the racial hatred of whites for blacks, so there was not much hope that the northern states would do anything to intervene.

The wisest path to ending slavery, argued Lincoln, was to hem it into the states where it was then legal and admit no further slave states to the Union. But slaveholders had no intention of allowing themselves to be hemmed-in. When Lincoln was elected president in 1860, 11 of the slave-holding states organized themselves as the Confederate States of America, and civil war broke out between North and South. But even as president of the United States, Lincoln lacked any clear constitutional authority to undo state laws about slavery.

That left Lincoln only one other option, and it was the most risky of all—a proclamation of emancipation, freeing the slaves, issued not in his civilian authority as president but as a military necessity decreed in his capacity as commander-in-chief, relying on his presidential “war powers.” No president had ever actually attempted to use these “war powers.” But time and the opportunity to act against slavery was slipping away, and Lincoln “had about come to the conclusion that … we must free the slaves or be ourselves subdued.” On July 22, 1862, he submitted a draft emancipation proclamation to his cabinet, then issued it in preliminary form on September 22, and finally signed it into law on January 1, 1863.

The Proclamation did not free slaves in the four slave states that had refused to join the rebels. But a “war powers” proclamation could only operate on those who were at war with the government; those four states were not, and any effort to reach into them would be met with disastrous legal challenges, and Lincoln was afraid of driving these “border” states away from the Union. Not until the 1864 congressional elections gave Lincoln an irrefutable mandate was he able to press onward to a constitutional amendment that ended slavery everywhere in the nation.

We love the drama of the “gotcha” moment in politics, even though we know that the drama frequently tramples all over complexity. It’s no different in history. Understanding our history can’t be done by cherry-picking “gotcha” phrases from Lincoln or smirking over the blemishes of the Founders. The study of history is like the rebuilding of disappeared cathedrals—it can’t be done by hurriedly putting up a tin shack and then complaining about how cheap the cathedral looks. It requires the patient reconstruction of the full world someone like Lincoln lived in, with all the options and all the obstructions as clearly in view to our eyes as they were to his.

Several years ago, speaking at a college in upstate New York, I laid out the legal niceties of Lincoln’s strategy for emancipation. But the niceties didn’t satisfy one questioner in the audience, who complained that it just ”didn’t feel right” to say that “Lincoln freed the slaves.” He was afraid that Lincoln was being given credit he didn’t really deserve, while the role of everyone else—including the slaves—was neglected. It’s true that many hands pulled down the edifice of slavery. But Lincoln’s hands remain the most important, even if to some of us they seemed puzzlingly slow in doing their work. Without Lincoln’s attention to the legalities of emancipation, fugitive slaves would never be anything more than fugitives, and a civil war might have ended with federal courts still protecting slaveholding. Frederick Douglass, the African-American abolitionist, understood this when he said that, “viewed from the genuine abolition ground, Mr. Lincoln seemed tardy, cold, dull, and indifferent; but measuring him by the sentiment of his country, a sentiment he was bound as a statesman to consult, he was swift, zealous, radical, and determined.” Our understanding of our history, and of Abraham Lincoln, needs to be reminded of that.

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Early on the morning of April 15, 1865, Garrison, best known as the controversial editor of The Liberator, had traveled across the city with a handful of other fellow abolitionists to visit the gravesite of the original philosopher of secession. Sometime shortly after Lincoln had choked out his last breath at 7:22 a.m., Garrison reportedly said to his friends standing inside the cemetery, “Down into a deeper grave than this, slavery has gone, and for it there is no resurrection.”

The trouble was that not everybody agreed with Garrison’s optimistic prediction. The end of the war and the pending destruction of slavery was generating a deep sense of foreboding among many Americans, only magnified that Saturday afternoon as word of Lincoln’s assassination spread across the nation’s telegraph lines.

On April 14, 1865, the U.S. flag was raised again over Fort Sumter

Frederick Douglass, the most famous black abolitionist in the country, certainly lacked Garrison’s confidence about the future. Douglass had not gone with the others to Charleston to commemorate victory, but had instead been out lecturing northern audiences on the remaining work to be done to secure real freedom for the former slaves. He was at home in Rochester, New York, when word of the president’s murder reached him, and that evening he delivered some impromptu remarks at a hasty memorial held at city hall. Much later, he claimed that this moment was the first time he had ever felt such “close accord” with his white neighbors. It was the shocking nature of that “terrible calamity,” he recalled, which made them all—white and black—feel more like “kin” than “countrymen.”

This was an especially important sensation for Douglass, because he was already deeply concerned that emancipation would mean little without immediate and full equality. He had been arguing for months that friends like Garrison, his one-time mentor and patron, might ultimately fail the former slaves if they did not push harder for black rights while black men and women were still making important contributions to the Union war effort.

Garrison and his clique of mostly white supporters were not opposed to black voting rights or other civil rights, but they had different priorities by April 1865. They were busy that spring organizing emergency charitable support, what they called freedmen’s relief, spurred on by the pending creation of the new federal Freedmen’s Bureau. The idea was to provide a safety net and universal education for the former slaves, propelling them toward integration into American society and the labor force. Yet in the weeks after Lincoln’s assassination, Douglass became openly scornful of such efforts, which he considered patronizing and a dangerous distraction. “The negro needs justice more than pity,” he growled on May 2, 1865, “liberty more than old clothes; [and] rights more than training to enjoy them.”

A week later, he went even further and backed a kind of coup within the American Anti-Slavery Society, the great abolitionist organization that Garrison had launched some three decades before. Proud but tired, Garrison had proposed disbanding the movement in its moment of triumph, anticipating ratification of the proposed 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which had passed Congress at the end of January. On May 9, 1865, the resolution to disband was voted down, 118-48, and orator Wendell Phillips replaced the now-outcast Garrison as head of the organization. Douglass supported Phillips and blasted anyone who claimed that slavery was already in its grave. “Slavery is not abolished until the black man has the ballot,” he said at the annual meeting in New York, with Garrison glaring down at him, and then adding with a defiant flourish, “or [while] any discrimination exists between white and black at the South.”

Abolitionists had always been prone to feuding, especially over movement tactics, but there was still something maddening about this last epic fight. During a period that should have been marked by a spirit of solemn awe over what they had helped to accomplish, the anti-slavery activists found themselves at worse odds than ever during the final months of the Civil War.

Douglass was in a fighting mood, but he was also a practical man. He soon developed a plan for achieving his most sweeping aspirations. The public’s reaction to Lincoln’s assassination had captivated him, as it did so many others. The electric bond, which he had first felt with his white neighbors on that Saturday evening of April 15, convinced him that the best way forward was to fight this new political war in Lincoln’s name, to keep reminding white audiences that embracing black equality was the best way to honor the martyred president’s memory.

Douglass began this campaign in earnest on June 1, 1865, which had been set aside by new President Andrew Johnson as a national day of mourning for Lincoln. Johnson did not share Douglass’ civil rights fervor, however, and had just issued a controversial proclamation of amnesty, which offered pardons to most of the participants in the Confederate rebellion. This was the kind of backsliding that infuriated Douglass and that he would spend the rest of his life fighting against. So, Douglass eulogized Lincoln that morning in New York emphatically as the “black man’s president,” calling him “the first to show any respect to their rights as men.” He pushed hard to define the war as a struggle not just for emancipation, but also for equality—and did so explicitly in Lincoln’s name.

Over the next several years, Douglass pursued this strategy with a single-minded devotion that yielded some impressive results. He made an alliance with Radical Republicans who had come to despise President Johnson and together they fought successfully for the 14th (1868) and 15th (1870) Amendments, which guaranteed equality and due process for all Americans, and suffrage for black men.

But this early civil rights movement also encountered major setbacks. They failed to end discrimination in the South (or North, for that matter), and in their zeal to insist it was “the negro’s hour” and to abolish all the vestiges of slavery, Douglass and Phillips antagonized feminists and old friends like Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, who wanted a broader expansion of voting rights. By the middle of the 1870s, it was clear that civil rights for blacks had come at a high political cost and that the future of freedom was still as uncertain as ever.

On April 14, 1876, the 11th anniversary of Lincoln’s assassination, Douglass spoke at the dedication of an emancipation memorial in Washington, D.C. The statue, funded with the contributions from tens of thousands of freed people who organized the effort in the immediate aftermath of the assassination, showed a standing Lincoln unshackling the chains of a kneeling slave. Yet the memory of that magical period when white and black had felt an electric kinship over their martyred president now seemed far removed. Douglass no longer tried to invoke Lincoln as the “black man’s president.” Instead, he now called him “preeminently the white man’s President,” and concluded, with President Ulysses S. Grant and members of the Supreme Court seated behind him, that Lincoln had been “entirely devoted to the welfare of white men.”

The speech was not a total surrender of faith—Douglass still praised Lincoln’s emancipation policy—but it was an admission that his earlier strategy had fallen short. Rallying around Lincoln’s memory had helped to alter the words of the Constitution, but it was not enough to revolutionize American race relations.

Douglass had come to the hard realization that slavery and its vestiges were not fully abolished, even after the black man had the ballot. Not everybody saw it that way, but clearly the fight over what it meant to be an American—a free American citizen—was far more complicated than anyone had anticipated.

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Lincoln simply strode up the hills of Richmond, the enemy capital, passing the pearly state capitol building designed by Thomas Jefferson. He sauntered into the antebellum mansion on East Clay Street that had served as the “White House of the Confederacy,” headquarters to his nemesis, Jefferson Davis.

The Civil War was all but over, but Lincoln had only 10 more days to live, as he would be among the conflict’s final casualties.

That early spring day was the grandest day of Lincoln’s presidency, as measured by the Declaration’s pursuit of happiness. (We know he was fond of quoting Jefferson’s document.) It’s easy to forget he barely glimpsed the fruits of winning the war that took a toll of 620,000 lives and tore the nation asunder. The Civil War president had overseen it all. From the initial secession crisis to the North’s massive mobilization; from the initial hesitation of his generals in Virginia and the derring-do of his generals in the West to the crescendo of scorched-earth warfare; from delicate talk about war not being about slavery to emancipation; and now, from incessant war to thoughts of reconstruction and reconciliation, Lincoln was a president for all seasons.

As cruel events played out, here was Lincoln’s one chance to actually see and savor his success as commander-in-chief. Richmond was full of burnt wreckages, buildings smoldering from fires set by the evacuating Confederate army. There was not a battle, but a grim message from General Robert E. Lee that it was all over; the city could not be defended. He gave stern instructions to headstrong Jefferson Davis, president of the rebel states, to leave town. Richmond, though it was only 114 miles from Washington, felt more like the Deep South. The city overlooks the James River, where the slave trade had prospered.

The man who freed 4 four million of them was stepping foot right into the inner sanctum of slavery. How sweet the justice.

As a Lincoln scholar, I consider his visit to Richmond worthy as a story for the ages, one to pass on to our children. But I never heard a word about it in Civil War sesquicentennial events. The scene was missing in the movie Lincoln directed by Steven Spielberg, which was filmed in Richmond. So I felt compelled to take the trip, a two-hour train ride from my home in Washington.

With his top hat, 6-foot-4-inch stature, and curious countenance, there was no mistaking the president in person. Word flew around the town to produce an overjoyed reception by Richmond’s black community. Out on the streets, a throng of formerly enslaved men, women, and children sang, danced, and wept in exclaiming hosannas, glory to God, and thanksgiving to the man they called their Moses. It was even the season of Passover, the celebration of the Israelites’ escape from slavery to freedom. Some got down on their knees to thank “Father Abraham.” The man who set a people free had never seen such a profusion of gratitude. In fact, it remains an utterly singular scene in the annals of American history. Overcome, Lincoln mustered a few words for the multitude. He urged them to get up on their feet. And then he said, as Richmond lore has it: “Enjoy your liberty.”

The white people of Richmond naturally did the opposite, giving Lincoln sullen glares—“stony silence,” as a sign at the city’s American Civil War Center says. His security detail must have been relieved that the vanquished chose to express their feelings by merely locking their doors shut behind them and pulling their curtains.

For all the nights at the telegraph office he spent angsting over each update from the various fronts, the casualty counts he endured, all the generals he fired, he finally got to witness what it was all for. It wasn’t until three winters after signing the Emancipation Proclamation that he got to see the sun of emancipation with his own eyes, in exquisite black and white. He at last found a little sweetness, after so much salt. Lincoln wept more than once on the job.

As Harold Holzer, a leading Lincoln author, observes, the moving Richmond visit was also fraught with peril:

Never in world history had a conqueror entered a vanquished city so humbly and so openly. It really is one of the most extraordinary moments in the American experience. A man who had conducted the biggest and bloodiest and bitterest war ever fought up to that time exposing himself to his enemies, oblivious to the danger, surprised by the emotional greeting.

For Lincoln, the shambles of the Confederate capital were the stage to voice his vision for the future. Peace was coming to the land. The squall of cannonballs had passed. According to the American Civil War Center’s sign, “Let ’em up easy,” was how the author of the Gettysburg Address put his strategy going forward on that day.

On East Clay Street, the president’s destination was the Southern White House, which Davis had abandoned two days before. Lincoln asked for a glass of water and then held a meeting with his military officers in the parlor. He also spent time sitting in the library. The act of occupying this White House, if only for a few hours, carried devastating significance for Confederates out in the field still in denial that their cause’s fate was all but sealed.

And yet, when looking back on the Civil War, we don’t sufficiently appreciate the drama and importance of Lincoln’s day in Richmond, overshadowed as it is in memory by the encounter five days later between Lee and Grant at Appomattox Court House and Lincoln’s assassination at Ford’s Theater five days after that.

Truth be told, the genteel Virginia capital still feels like it’s waking up from a nightmare and is stuck recounting stories about when “Richmond fell.” The town’s main narrative lines Monument Avenue: statues of Lee and Stonewall Jackson, even J. E. B. Stuart, the “eyes and ears” who let Lee down at the fateful showdown at Gettysburg.

But back down by the riverside, there is a bronze statue of Lincoln and Tad. On National Park Service land, you can see the only statue of the 16th president in the former Confederacy, a relatively recent installation. “During his long walk into Richmond, Lincoln received a boisterous and prolonged welcome from the large population of African Americans,” the sign says. “Lincoln’s visit produced, in the words of a prominent modern historian, ‘the most unforgettable scenes of this unforgettable war.’”

This sign is a serious undersell. The word “boisterous” misses the majesty of this incredible turnaround in the fate of African-Americans in the heart of the Confederacy. No mention of slavery, no name with the quote. Clearly, the sign is trying to avoid giving offense in enemy terrain. The museum is, in fact, sited on the old Tredegar Iron Works, a major munitions maker for the Confederacy.

But it is a fine statue capturing the president’s pathos and the humanity of that landing in Richmond, especially knowing his days are numbered. The president is sitting without his hat, with his arm around his son. In his private life, Lincoln had a lenient philosophy of parenting—roughhousing with his younger sons on the floor of his office, letting them keep a goat for fun. The statue reminds us how Lincoln became, in four years, also a father figure to the nation, and would remain so, for generations to come.

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The months leading to the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation in January 1863 formed a crucial chapter in this clash. President Abraham Lincoln had spent the first two years of the war claiming that the goal of the fight was to restore the Union and nothing more. Indeed, as late as August of 1862, he asserted that “[i]f I could save the Union without freeing any slave, I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves, I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone, I would also do that. What I do about Slavery and the colored race, I do because I believe it helps to save this Union, and what I forbear, I forbear because I do not believe it would help to save the Union.”

At the time, many considered this statement disingenuous, given that Lincoln had long been a vocal opponent of slavery. Did he really expect mothers to continue to watch their boys die for something so abstract, cerebral, and unstable as the American idea of a continental union resting on first principles?

The inkstand Lincoln used in signing the Emancipation Proclamation

“The Union is unnatural,” wrote the novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne at the outset of the war, “a scheme of man, not an ordinance of God. … How can you feel a heart’s love for a mere political arrangement?” Hawthorne certainly didn’t, nor did his emotions run strong for abolition. He considered the whole enterprise to end slavery to be foolhardy and meaningless, the ideal of emancipation one of “misty” philanthropy, the war itself a venture where young men (the term infantry comes from infant, French for “youth”) were dying for old men’s stale ideals. As the killing continued, many Northerners seemed to look at the war in the same way.

Then, only a month after his bold assertion about the preeminence of “union,” Lincoln made a move that appeared to contradict his expressed flexibility on the fate of slavery. On September 22, 1862, he issued the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, challenging the belligerent states of the South to put down their arms, rejoin the Union, and accept a gradual, compensated end to slavery. He gave them 100 days to comply or face the immediate emancipation of their slave populations on January 1. It was an extraordinary gamble. With one bold gesture, Lincoln had changed the calculus of the war, making its mission much more explicitly about the future of slavery, and he had done so even though there were no polls to tell him that the people of the North would back him. Nor was he certain that the army he led would accept it either. In an audacious challenge to accepted military practice, Lincoln was targeting not only the rebel army of the South, but the civil society, its institutions, and its private property as well.

Interestingly, Lincoln himself stewed over what action could be considered more “American.” A man of the law, he understood that the Constitution protected slavery. He justified his action by asserting that the freeing of the slaves was a tactic of war, and that he, as commander in chief, could thus wield such authority without Congressional sanction. For that reason, the proclamation would not apply to the border slave states that had stayed in the Union; there, ironically, slavery could continue in force. But even if Lincoln could justify his move as an extraordinary wartime measure, the constitutional protection of slavery would outlast any conflict—even a victorious one. No matter what the Declaration of Independence had to say about equality, Lincoln knew full well that it was merely a revolutionary manifesto. The Constitution, with its endorsement of slavery, was the law of the land.

Throughout his life, Lincoln had grappled with this dissonance between the Declaration and the Constitution. He had asserted that equality was the “sheet anchor of American republicanism” and, in another brilliant image, borrowed from the book of Proverbs, that the Declaration was the “apple of gold” framed by the Constitution’s “picture of silver.” The picture (think frame here) was made for the apple, “not the apple for the picture.” To Lincoln, then, the nation had begun not in 1789, with the ratification of the Constitution, but in 1776 with the move to cut ties with England and begin the world anew. This was a radical idea—the “nation” being formed in spirit before it was formed in law—but Lincoln needed to convince the people of it to make the case for equality. Indeed, it was this that he referred to when, in November 1863, he famously spoke of “four score and seven years ago” at the Union cemetery at Gettysburg, and when he subsequently urged the Congress to pass the 13th Amendment ending slavery.

In the days after the issuance of the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, Lincoln appeared to have doubts about the wisdom of his act. The midterm elections were a setback for his party; after a qualified victory at Antietam, the Union army resumed what seemed to be a trajectory of defeat, a dire situation compounded by a lack of reliable military leaders. When Lincoln delivered his annual address to Congress in December, he barely mentioned the proclamation, prompting the abolitionist leader Frederick Douglass and others to worry that he had lost the courage to go through with it, to flatly confront the South and claim for this war the mantle of equality.

They were wrong. On the morning of January 1, 1863, after three hours of greeting guests, Lincoln retreated to the second floor of the White House, where the final version of the proclamation awaited him. Lincoln dipped his pen in the ink and then hesitated. Looking around at the others gathered in the room, he said that he had never felt “more certain that I was doing right,” yet he was worried that his fatigue might lend a fragility to his signature that later generations would see as doubt. Then, emboldened by this reflection, he put the finishing touch on the document that freed 4 million.

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The difference that December 1864? William Tecumseh Sherman’s Union Army had just marched across Georgia through the rice plantations of the low-country and reached the seaport of Savannah, offering it to President Abraham Lincoln as a Christmas present.

New Year’s Day 1865—and those in the two years previous—were among the most poignant and pregnant with new beginnings in American history. Ever since Lincoln had signaled his intent in September 1862 to declare slaves in rebel states emancipated as of New Year’s 1863, the possibility of freedom for African-Americans in the South had been hanging in the air, depending on the war’s progression.

I’ve long been fascinated by this transitory period of anticipation, in part because some of my ancestors were living under slavery and grappled with what it meant to be emancipated either by their own actions, or by decree. It’s also always struck me as tone deaf to argue that the Emancipation Proclamation or the Army’s earlier “contraband” policy that freed the slaves it came into contact with were merely symbolic or cynical acts. (Lincoln didn’t seek to free slaves in border states that stayed in the Union, critics are quick to point out.) As Frederick Douglass and other abolitionists contended in a rebuttal to those who posited the perfect as the enemy of the good (and a rebuttal worth repeating in the context of gradual progress on a host of landmark issues ranging from segregated schools to wartime human rights abuses): It matters where the nation officially comes down on moral issues, even if it is not ready or able to completely live up to its professed ideals.

African-American communities already held traditional church services on New Year’s Eves, but they took on a special meaning as the country welcomed in the watershed year of 1863, becoming the predecessors of today’s Watch Night services. In Baltimore, Washington, D.C., and the many free black communities in other cities and towns, African-Americans gathered to anticipate the moment the United States finally would declare itself at war with slavery and not simply disunion. Overton Bernard, a white, pro-slavery minister, described with dismay the Watch Night he witnessed in Union-held Portsmouth, Virginia, in response to what he described as Lincoln’s “unwise and unconstitutional” proclamation: Black families packed the A.M.E. church until well past midnight to pray, to sing, and to hope. In his diary, Bernard hoped that somehow emancipation would be averted as even the promise of freedom had caused the town’s blacks to become “idle and impudent” and ready to challenge their place in society.

The next day some 5,000 men, women, and children marched and rode horses, hoisting banners and flags in celebration of freedom. They celebrated despite the fact that troops from New York jeered them and disrupted their march at rifle and bayonet point and also despite the fact that Portsmouth was not covered by the proclamation, given that it was under Union control before Lincoln made his announcement. The condition of the enslaved in Union-held areas would be “left precisely as if this proclamation were not issued” because Lincoln wanted to make it clear that his emancipation order was meant to injure secessionists more than the institution of slavery.

But the significance of this decidedly imperfect decree was still electric. It is often said that the Emancipation Proclamation only freed slaves where the Union lacked authority to do so (and where the commander-in-chief could get away with it on his own as a wartime exigency), but to blacks in Portsmouth, the mere promise of freedom was so tantalizing that it was cause for celebration.

At the same time, abolitionists in the North were also throwing parties laden with expectation. In Medford, Massachusetts, businessman and activist George Stearns opened his vast estate for an affair he called “the John Brown party.” Unveiling a marble bust of the radical antislavery revolutionary whom he had helped to fund and arm, Stearns played host to a storied assortment of public intellectuals, including trailblazing abolitionists William Lloyd Garrison and Wendell Phillips; Julia Ward Howe, whose “Battle Hymn of the Republic” had inspired northern soldier and civilian alike; and the transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson and his friend Amos Alcott, who brought his daughter Louisa May (later known as the author of Little Women). Like the free blacks at their Watch Nights, the partygoers spent New Year’s Day waiting for word that Lincoln had actually signed the document and had begun, in their minds, to redeem himself for his previous inaction and timidity on the central moral issue of the day.

But back in Georgia, on the plantation in Oconee County that held Ed McCree and his family captive, the Emancipation Proclamation was still nothing more than a theoretical abstraction that New Year’s Day of 1863. While it effectively meant the United States government no longer considered Ed the property of his owner John McCree, the proclamation was not known to any slave on the plantation. As 1863 dawned, the Union Army was too far away—two years away, to be precise—to be in a position to deliver on the proclamation’s promise to Ed, and it is one of the horrific cruelties of history to think of all the hardship slaves still endured while awaiting their promised deliverance.

When it did come, the deliverance from slavery would be experienced by most African-Americans in the South very suddenly. Sometimes men and women forced the issue by escaping slavery whenever federal armies got close enough to afford them the opportunity. Other times it came with a group of soldiers showing up at the plantation out of the blue and passing out hams and shoulders from the smokehouse as they took some for themselves.

Sherman’s March to the Sea from Atlanta in late 1864 took the Federals right through the McCree plantation before Christmas. After the troops had passed, Ed remembered his owner gathering his former property before him and beginning to state what they had longed to hear their whole lives: that they were free. The young boy didn’t actually hear what was said as he remembered bolting at the first words and running “around that place, a-shouting at the top of my voice.”

Something draws me to that moment of emancipation Ed McCree experienced 150 years ago, two years after it was initially proclaimed. Emancipation was the beginning of a host of decisions and challenges for Ed and his family. The entire world the former slaves knew and had learned to survive, especially Georgia and South Carolina’s “Kingdom of Rice,” was gone. Should the family stay where they were and try to make a new life there, or should they follow Sherman’s Army and see where it led? Even if they were slaves no more, the Emancipation Proclamation did not make African-Americans citizens, or endow them with many of the core rights enjoyed by other Americans. Even many who’d hoped for slavery’s abolition also hoped people like Ed would, once free, leave the country in which they were born, and which their sweat had helped build and make wealthy, in order to “go back to Africa.” For some members of my extended family back then, uncertainty about their situation and what their future in the United States might hold was enough for them to go to Canada.

Still, in honor of all the folks for whom emancipation suddenly marched their way as 1864 came to an end, we are putting a decidedly Savannah flavor into the traditional dish of cowpeas and rice in our household’s New Year’s celebration this year. Rather than black-eyed peas, my New Year’s hoppin’ John will go by its Gullah name, “reezy peezy,” and will feature Carolina Gold Rice and low-country red peas, a staple for slaves in the region. We will enjoy the dish as a tribute to the resilient spirit of the thousands who found themselves traveling a new road to find their way in a new, unknown America.

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The signing of the Yosemite Grant Act on June 30, 1864, set aside the dreamy waterfalls and majestic granite outcroppings in Yosemite Valley and the massive sequoias of Mariposa Grove for “public use, resort, and recreation.” It was the first time the federal government protected scenic land for such purposes. The act also set the stage for the creation of the National Park System.

President Lincoln and members of Congress were inspired to make this move, in part, by a portfolio of photographs taken by Carleton Watkins, a San Francisco-based master of landscape photography. It was not easy to be a landscape photographer in the 19th century—Watkins had to mix chemicals in the field, set up portable dark rooms, and deal with dust that could ruin his glass plates. But Watkins had a taste for adventure.

In 1861, the photographer trekked into Yosemite over dirt trails with a team of mules hauling nearly a ton of photographic equipment. One of the items in his cart was a custom-built camera that produced enormous 18-by-22-inch negatives. While Watkins was not the first to photograph Yosemite, the size of his camera produced images that were awe-inspiring and incredibly crisp. These were the most striking images of this place taken by early photographers, explained Elizabeth Kathleen Mitchell, co-curator of an exhibition of Watkins photographs currently on view at Stanford University’s Cantor Art Museum.

Among the images: the sheer face of El Capitan towering over its surroundings, the weathered Cathedral Rocks holding court over a lush and glassy Merced River, and a misty Vernal Falls skipping over boulders.

Watkins sold prints out of his studio, exhibited them in New York City, and gave them away to friends. And while there isn’t a clear trail of handoffs between Watkins and the decision-makers in D.C., his photographs became a national and international sensation, said Mitchell.

“In Washington, D.C., people had read about Yosemite or heard about it in newspapers, but very few people had ever visited it,” she said. “The same people who were looking at images of bloody Civil War battlefields could also see there was this untouched Eden on the Pacific Coast. It must have been incredibly appealing.”

After the land had been set aside, Watkins returned to Yosemite in 1865 and worked into the following year as an ad hoc member of the California State Geological Survey team, producing more stunning views. He hand-assembled an album from both trips into a collection he called Photographs of the Yosemite Valley, which he sold to wealthy patrons.

Mitchell’s favorite image comes from this second trip where Galen Clark, the first Anglo-American to enter the Mariposa Grove and the first guardian of the Yosemite Grant, stands in the crook of a massive sequoia known as “Grizzly Giant.”

“All in one picture, you see the tree and the man who would become a legend,” Mitchell said. “There’s something about the way Watkins captures him standing against that tree, where you can only see the base of it, but it seems to go on forever.”

Watkins’ images of Yosemite and others he took of the Pacific Coast are on view at the Cantor Art Museum through August 17.

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Americans routinely invoke the “separation of powers” when describing constitutional authority, but that phrase has been misunderstood, particularly in the context of national security. The phrase “separation of powers” itself never appears in the Constitution. Instead, over the years, we have translated Montesquieu’s great enlightenment principle in ways that political scientist Richard Neustadt famously summarized as “separated institutions sharing powers.”

As commander-in-chief, Lincoln went even further in parsing the great constitutional principle. He followed what might be termed a “chronology of powers.”

In April 1861, Lincoln expressed no doubt that secession was rebellion and that ordinary criminal proceedings were inadequate to stop the Confederates. Since Congress was out of session, he took action, authorizing the use of military force and suspending habeas corpus, as the Constitution provides, “when in cases of rebellion or invasion the public safety may require it.” Not everyone agreed. The president’s toughest critic was Chief Justice Roger B. Taney, who warned publicly that Lincoln had usurped what should have been congressional war powers on a mere “pretext” that left the American people “no longer living under a Government of laws.” Unbowed, the president took this argument to Congress. In a message from July 4, 1861, Lincoln recounted his decision-making process in painstaking narrative detail, concluding that he had “so far, done what he has deemed his duty.” “You will now,” he added, “according to your own judgment, perform yours.”

Congress did perform its duty, in fits and starts, and sometimes in ways that hampered the president. Yet throughout the war, Lincoln accepted congressional oversight. Whatever secrets he kept from them—such as his plans for emancipation—he kept quiet only for a matter of weeks or months, not years, and never through an election cycle. Nor was this a battle played out only behind closed doors. Lincoln went public frequently with plain-spoken arguments on behalf of his administration’s most controversial policies. He engaged his critics. When questioned over the source of authority for his most sweeping executive actions, Lincoln responded, “I think the constitution invests its commander-in-chief, with the law of war, in time of war.” When opponents charged that such reasoning represented a first step towards tyranny, Lincoln fought back with metaphors, claiming that just because “a particular drug” was “not good food” for a healthy man, it did not mean that it was “not good medicine for a sick man.”

He also accepted judicial review of his initial war-making efforts in the only notable Supreme Court case of the conflict, The Prize Cases (1863), which ended up approving his actions, over Chief Justice Taney’s bitter objections. The majority decided the president was “bound to meet” the grave national security threat “without waiting for Congress to baptize it with a name.” Finally, Lincoln never canceled a single election, even in the summer of 1864, when nearly everyone believed his reelection effort was doomed. “We cannot have free government without elections,” he stated simply.

This is the chronology of powers. Lincoln understood that presidents must sometimes assert practically unlimited initiative in the name of public safety. Yet he conceded what advocates for a strong presidency often do not—that with such great initiative comes the need for even greater accountability. Only with true oversight can Congress react in ways that limit executive actions during periods of crisis. This is essentially a political process—a series of arguments about policy—but after this political contest has been fully joined, then the federal courts must also apply legal standards in order to review legitimate claims of individual harm. Most important, however, the people themselves must eventually decide what rights they are willing to sacrifice in the name of national security—and to whom. Regular elections are the ultimate American bulwark against tyranny.

Such a model offers much-needed perspective but no easy answers. Nobody knows what Lincoln would do today. In the midst of the Civil War, he could appear unyielding. During one of his more plain-spoken moments, he asserted that the government should have “seized and held” Robert E. Lee and other high-ranking secessionists even before they had committed any crimes, because they “were nearly as well known to be traitors then as now.”

Would he have tossed them into Gitmo or authorized drone strikes against them if he had those capabilities? Maybe. But maybe not. Despite all of his tough talk, Lincoln was also committed to upholding international law, or what he called the “law of war.” Surprisingly, perhaps, Americans in those days seemed to take international law more seriously than we do. The Supreme Court cited international legal theory in The Prize Cases, and the Lincoln Administration issued its own handbook on international laws of war, known as the Lieber Code, which later became a significant precedent for The Hague and Geneva conventions of war.

In other words, like everybody else, Lincoln found it challenging to navigate a proper balance between liberty and security. That did not stop him, however, from making tough decisions on his own initiative and, more important, from then making his case directly to the American people.

Certainly no president since Lincoln has been as well situated to offer a thoughtful rationale for executive initiative as Barack Obama, a former editor of the Harvard Law Review and constitutional law professor at the University of Chicago. Yet he now authorizes targeted killings as a commander-in-chief while remaining unaccountably mute about his weighty constitutional responsibilities. In his most recent State of the Union address, delivered on Lincoln’s birthday in February, the president promised that “in the months ahead” his administration would be “even more transparent” about how “our targeting, detention, and prosecution of terrorists remains consistent with our laws and system of checks and balances.” Yet he has not kept that promise.

During the short-lived Senate filibuster in March over the drone program’s secrecy, the administration essentially lawyered up by sending out the attorney general to dismiss Senator Rand Paul’s various concerns regarding weaponized drones as “entirely hypothetical.” Last month, the administration went even further, declining to send anyone to testify before the Senate’s first official hearing on the “drone wars.” Senator Richard Durbin, the chair and a leading Democrat (who once represented Abraham Lincoln’s old congressional district), felt compelled to express his “disappointment” at the administration’s refusal to cooperate.

If Lincoln taught us anything, it is that words matter, especially in times of crisis. Presidents need to make arguments as well as decisions. They cannot delegate profound questions about war powers to the lawyers but must provide a clear rationale for their actions. President Lincoln certainly performed his duty in this regard. The question is, when will President Obama perform his?

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