"To Obey the Law While Respecting Themselves"

"In that sense, Lincoln was the embodiment of America's long struggle to remake itself as a morally coherent nation. Under his leadership, the Civil War finally resolved the problem of fugitive slaves by destroying the institution from which they had fled. By the time of his death, some 4 million black Americans were no longer at risk of forcible return to their erstwhile masters. They had entered the limbo between the privations of their past and the future promise of American life—a state of suspension in which millions of black Americans still live."

Andrew Delbanco at The Atlantic connects the 1850s to today.

"Of No Party or Clique"

"On May 5, 1857, a group of Boston Brahmins gathered for dinner at the Parker House Hotel and decided to create a new magazine, one that would make politics, literature, and the arts its chief concerns. These men, united in their opposition to slavery, their love of American writing, and their tripartite names, included such eminences as Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and James Russell Lowell. They did not set out to exclude women from the gathering; Harriet Beecher Stowe, the author of Uncle Tom's Cabin, was invited, but she boycotted the dinner when she learned that alcohol would be served."

Jeffrey Goldberg at The Atlantic marks the 160th anniversary of The Atlantic.

What Hath God Wrought

"Thus, President James Monroe observed that a growing network of canals and turnpikes and the development of the steamboat were helping stitch a disparate country together, even as other Americans, like DeWitt Clinton, foresaw a calamitous 'dismemberment of the Union,' East to West, unless it were bound to­gether by a common thread like the Erie Canal. Thus, average Americans worshiped Andrew Jackson as 'Everyman writ large,' even as the new Whig party saw him as an unbridled despot. Thus, countless utopian movements blossomed across the country—'We are all a little wild here with numberless projects of social reform,' Ralph Waldo Emerson breathlessly wrote—along with movements to help the poor, heal the sick and assist the deaf, even as Native Americans were brutally marched to their deaths along the Trail of Tears and plans were being made to ship free blacks off to Africa, or elsewhere."

Jay Winik in The New York Times reviews David S. Reynolds's Waking Giant: America in the Age of Jackson.

Democracy's Discontent

"A century ago, a generation of progressive men and women balked at the narrow self-interest and rapacious greed that had characterized the Gilded Age. Disgusted by the outright corruption that pervaded late-nineteenth-century politics, progressives organized to miminize the pernicious influence of money in politics and to wrest control of the government from the powerful corporate 'Trusts.' They set up new political systems and institutions to regulate Big Capital and to make government more responsive to the will of the people. Recognizing for the first time the importance of the social environment in individual development, they struggled to improve living and working conditions for all Americans, and began to reemphasize the civic fabric that binds us--farmer and worker, rich and poor, laborer and capitalist, black and white, native and immigrant--all together."

Kevin C. Murphy of Ghost in the Machine has created a new site as a clearinghouse for civic progressivism: Small-R Republic.