It has become commonplace to say that Americans are more divided now than at any time since Abraham Lincoln’s presidency. The country is “confronting the greatest strain to its fundamental cohesion since the Civil War,” Ronald Brownstein argued in January 2021. Americans are “more divided than at any time since the Civil War,” Robert Reich opined in January 2024.
Such comparisons make for lurid copy but bad history. When Lincoln was elected president in 1860, Americans were divided not over the republic’s founding culture itself, but its scope. Were the rights and liberties in the Declaration of Independence of universal application (as Lincoln believed)? Or did they (as Jefferson Davis thought) attach only to those with the right racial credentials?
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