Letters from an American – February 11, 2026 – Heather Cox Richardson
https://substack.com/session-attribution-frame
Letters from an American, February 11, 2026
By Heather Cox Richardson, Feb 11, 2026
On February 12, 1809, Nancy Hanks Lincoln gave birth to her second child, a son: Abraham.
Abraham Lincoln grew up to become the nation’s sixteenth president, leading the country from March 1861 until his assassination in April 1865, a little over a month into his second term. He piloted the country through the Civil War, preserving the concept of American democracy. It was a system that had never been fully realized but that he still saw as “the last, best hope of earth” to prove that people could govern themselves.
“Four score and seven years ago,” he told an audience at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, in November 1863, “our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.”
Lincoln dated the founding of the nation from the Declaration of Independence rather than the Constitution, the document enslavers preferred because of that document’s protection of property. In the Declaration, the Founders wrote that they held certain “truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.—That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed….”
Continue/Read Original Article Here: February 11, 2026 – by Heather Cox Richardson
Tags:
Abraham Lincoln,
All men are created equal,
Declaration of Independence,
Four Score,
Gettysburg,
Heather Cox Richardson,
Letters from an American,
Substack,
U.S. Constitution,
United States
#AbrahamLincoln #AllMenAreCreatedEqual #DeclarationOfIndependence #FourScore #Gettysburg #HeatherCoxRichardson #LettersFromAnAmerican #Substack #USConstitution #UnitedStates