April 8, 2026
Jacob K. Friefeld
Next week marks the 161st anniversary of the day the most famous midwesterner, Abraham Lincoln, died. Four days before his death, Lincoln stood on the White House’s north portico ready to address a celebratory crowd excited about the surrender of Robert E. Lee’s rebel army. Lincoln didn’t know this would be his last speech.
The speech isn’t impressive, but it displays important Lincoln hallmarks that held true to the end: his ability to shape public opinion and his fidelity to the founding principles of the American republic.
Most of the speech deals with reconstruction in Louisiana. As historian Louis Masur reminds us in his excellent book Lincoln’s Last Speech, for Lincoln, Reconstruction wasn’t just a question of what to do with the seceded states after the war. Lincoln viewed Reconstruction as a wartime strategy. He thought if he could gather the loyal union men of each seceded state to create a new constitution and restore the state to the union, it would gradually undermine the rebellion state by state.
By late 1864, Louisiana had created a new state constitution and was ready to rejoin the union, just as Lincoln had hoped. But Republicans in Congress fought him, questioning his authority to set reconstruction policy and the limits to Black American’s civil equality in the new constitution. Lincoln used the opportunity to take his case to the people as he had done so often before. In 1862, when newspaper editor Horace Greeley criticized Lincoln for not moving more swiftly against slavery, Lincoln wrote a public reply famously saying that his main goal was to save the Union and he would be in favor of freeing no slaves, all the slaves, or some of the slaves only in so far as it helped him save the Union. When he wrote this, he had already drafted the Emancipation Proclamation (which would free some enslaved people). He had used his reply to Greeley to prepare the public for the Proclamation. Now, in 1865, he used a moment of public focus in the wake of victory to argue for accepting Louisiana back into the Union. He argued that the point of the conflict was to bring the seceded states back into their proper relationship with the Federal government, and the shortest path to doing this was by accepting the new Louisiana Constitution.
Lincoln’s ability to marshal public opinion made him a good politician, but his ability to do so in service of higher ideals made him a great leader. In this final speech, when discussing a provision that would allow the government of Louisiana to extend suffrage to Black Americans, Lincoln became the first sitting president to endorse suffrage for Black men. As Lincoln said in 1861, “I never had a feeling politically that did not spring from the sentiments embodied in the Declaration of Independence.” In 1863, in his Gettysburg Address he used the Declaration to reframe the war not as one just for union, but for a “new birth of freedom” in the country. He pushed for that new birth of freedom until his death, advocating for Black voting rights.
We remember Lincoln as we approach the anniversary of his death. We should also remember him throughout 2026 when we think about the 250th anniversary of America’s founding. Lincoln believed the Declaration of Independence was a beacon the founders erected “to guide their children and their children’s children, and the countless myriads who should inhabit the earth in other ages.” We cannot possibly reflect upon the meaning of the Declaration in 2026 without reflecting on what it meant to Lincoln during the years when the nation was reforged without slavery. A partnership between the Abraham Lincoln Association and the Abraham Lincoln Group of the District of Columbia seeks to help us keep Lincoln in mind during our celebration of America 250. Visit Lincoln250 for reflections from Lincoln scholars and enthusiasts and keep Lincoln on your mind this year.
Jacob K. Friefeld is the editor of Middle West US, the Director of the University of Illinois Springfield Center for Lincoln Studies, sits on the board of directors of both the Abraham Lincoln Association and the Lincoln Forum, and is the governor appointed chair of the Illinois State Historic Preservation Board and member of the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum Board of Trustees. He is coauthor of two books on the history of the Homestead Act of 1862 on the Great Plains.