Saving American Nationalism from the Nationalists

Get thee from your land, from your birthplace, from your father’s house, to the land that I will show thee. And I will make thee into a great nation, and I will bless thee, and make thy name great; and through thee will be blessed all the families of the earth.

I always consider the settlement of America with reverence and wonder, as the opening of a grand scene and design in providence, for the illumination of the ignorant and the emancipation of the slavish part of mankind all over the earth.

In February 1861, Abraham Lincoln left his home in Illinois and embarked on the journey to his inauguration. He faced, Lincoln publicly mused, a challenge greater than the one that had faced George Washington. Several states had already seceded; others, including Virginia, would soon follow. To Lincoln fell the extraordinary task of not only saving the Union, but also of making the case to the country that the Union was worth saving. This he did in a series of extraordinary remarks along the way to Washington. Standing in Trenton, addressing the New Jersey state legislature, Lincoln recalled Washington’s own heroic struggles in that very city and how powerfully his reading about the Revolution had impacted him in his youth: