“We cannot escape history.”
From his earliest days as a State Legislator in Illinois in 1834 through his time serving as president of the United States until 1865, Abraham Lincoln understood the power of words. Whether through naming that America could not perpetually remain "a house divided" to refusing to name Jefferson Davis as anything other than an insurgent leader, Lincoln used his pen as a sword carving his way to a new birth of freedom. While language is a means for communication, it also reflects perspectives by which people view the world. The language used in recording history and writing of its aftermath is not an impartial or objective recounting of facts but rather is shaped by the context and biases of the writer and their audience. For example, the traditional use of terminology in describing the American Civil War often reflects Reconstruction-era efforts by the so-called Confederacy to reclaim the narrative of the Civil War as a glorious lost cause. Words such as compromise, plantation, and fugitive dismiss the experiences of enslaved Black Americans and minimize the harsh truth of their lived realities. These damaging perspectives serve to obscure the magnitude of slavery and have had ripple effects into the modern era influencing everything from popular perceptions of the Civil War to monuments to the so-called Confederacy that dot the American landscape.
At the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum (ALPLM), our institutional commitment as bearers of Lincoln's legacy insists that we consider the terminology used in describing history and challenge ourselves in how that language shapes the present and impacts the future. While we cannot change the wrongs of what happened in the past, we can work in the present to ensure that our language evolves to acknowledge historical injustices and center the people who were most harmed both in their own time and in the retelling of their past. The intentional use of language in this book is one way in which we at the ALPLM are challenging ourselves to confront our institutional biases in how we have implicitly and explicitly shaped the collective memory of the past. By being more precise and conscious in our use of language, it is our hope to not only correct the historical record but also to honor the lives of those who suffered and resisted.