LINCOLN ROOM 
 
 UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS 
 LIBRARY 
 
otlhomsjdkmti 
 
 By 
 ABRAHAM LINCOLN 
 
 J OF ILU IB. 
 
Digitized by the Internet Archive 
 
 in 2012 with funding from 
 
 University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign 
 
 http://archive.org/details/letterinreplytoiOOIinc 
 
By ABRAHAM LINCOLN 
 
 IN REPLY TO AN INVITATION TO ADDRESS A 
 MEETING IN HONOR OF THE BIRTHDAY 
 
 OF Thomas Jefferson 
 
 APRIL 28,1859 
 
 ¥ 
 
 WALLACE KIBBEE & SON 
 
 SAN FRANCISCO 
 
 1937 
 
To H. L. Pierce and others: 
 
 Gentlemen: Springfield, 111., April 6, 1859. 
 
 Your kind note inviting me to attend a festival 
 in Boston, on the 28th instant, in honor of the 
 birthday of Thomas Jefferson, was duly received. 
 My engagements are such that I cannot attend. 
 
 Bearing in mind that about seventy years ago 
 two great political parties were first formed in this 
 country, that Thomas Jefferson was the head of 
 one of them and Boston the headquarters of the 
 other, it is both curious and interesting that those 
 supposed to descend politically from the party op- 
 posed to Jefferson should now be celebrating his 
 birthday in their own original seat of empire, 
 while those claiming political descent from him 
 have nearly ceased to breathe his name everywhere. 
 
 Remembering too, that the Jefferson party was 
 formed upon its supposed superior devotion to 
 the personal rights of men, holding the rights of 
 property to be secondary only, and greatly inferior, 
 and assuming that the so-called Democracy of to- 
 day are the Jefferson, and their opponents the anti- 
 Jefferson, party, it will be equally interesting to 
 note how completely the two have changed hands 
 as to the principle upon which they were origi- 
 
nally supposed to be divided. The Democraqr of 
 today hold the liberty of one man to be absolutely 
 nothing, when in conflict with another man's 
 right of property; Republicans, on the contrary, 
 are for both the man and the dollar, but in case of 
 conflict the man before the dollar. 
 
 I remember being once much amused at seeing 
 two partially intoxicated men engaged in a fight 
 with their great-coats on,which fight, after a long 
 and rather harmless contest, ended in each having 
 fought himself out of his own coat and into that 
 of the other. If the two leading parties of this day 
 are really identical with the two in the days of 
 Jefferson and Adams, they have performed the 
 same feat as the two drunken men. 
 
 But soberly, it is now no child's play to save 
 the principles of Jefferson from total overthrow 
 in this nation. One would state with great confi- 
 dence that he could convince any sane child that 
 the simpler propositions of Euclid are true; but 
 nevertheless he would fail, utterly, with one who 
 should deny the definitions and axioms. The prin- 
 ciples of Jefferson are the definitions and axioms 
 of free society. And yet they are denied and evaded, 
 ^ with no small show of success. One dashingly calls 
 them "glittering generalities." Another bluntly 
 
 v:' 
 
 ^n 
 
 
 
calls them"self-evident lies." And others insidi- 
 ously argue that they apply to "superior races'' 
 These expressions, differing in form, are identical 
 in object and effect - the supplanting of the prin- 
 ciples of free government, and restoring those of 
 classification, caste and legitimacy. They would 
 delight a convocation of crowned heads plotting 
 against the people. They are the vanguard, the 
 miners and sappers, of returning despotism. We 
 must repulse them, or they will subjugate us.This 
 is a world of compensation; and he who would 
 be no slave must consent to have no slave. Those 
 who deny freedom to others deserve it not for 
 themselves and, under a just God, cannot long 
 retain it. 
 
 All honor to Jefferson -to the man who, in 
 the concrete pressure of a struggle for national 
 independence by a single people, had the cool- 
 ness, forecast, and capacity to introduce into a 
 mere revolutionary document an abstract truth, 
 applicable to all men and all times, and so to em- 
 balm it there that today and in all coming days it 
 shall be a rebuke and a stumbling block to the very 
 harbingersofreappearingtyrannyand oppression. 
 
 Your obedient servant, 
 
 A. Lincoln. 
 
IN THE DOMAIN OF LITERATURE the dead leaves of pol- 
 itics are carried swiftly by the tide of times to a merciful 
 and merited oblivion. But the evergreens - the utterances 
 of true men - remain, and their leaves are kept, as the old 
 saying has it, for the healing of the nations.These men,we 
 say,knewand therefore spoke; their message is for all men 
 and for all times and places; and among the greatest of 
 these were Abraham Lincoln and Thomas Jefferson. Lin- 
 coln, in this letter to Pierce and others, describes in his 
 charaaeristic way a phenomenon associated with party 
 politics that is almost as old as sin itself: the turning of 
 the coat. It is the whirligig of time bringing in its re- 
 venges: Gladstone the Conservative becoming the grand 
 old man of Liberalism; Disraeli the Radical becoming the 
 idol of Conservatism; the anarchist of yesterday becom- 
 ing the ruthless diaator of today; and armies of lesser 
 men, for a handful of silver, a riband, or the privilege of 
 wearing a top hat, turning their political coats as grace- 
 fully and with as little reason as did the drunken men that 
 amused Lincoln.Wise men know that at bottom a party 
 name is an empty shibboleth^ for the hair that divides 
 the false and the true in the realm of opinion is not al- 
 ways perceptible to free minds. As Lincoln honored 
 Jefferson so would we of today honor them by our 
 loyalty to the ideal for which they fought: a free soci- 
 ety of autonomous minds, safeguarded from despotism 
 and oppression by its sense of justice and its recog- 
 nition of the nobility of the individual. And men of 
 honor, with such a heritage, will not be satisfied with less. 
 
 " To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield. '' 
 
THIS EDITION 
 
 is published in commemoration of the one 
 
 hundred and twenty-eighth anniversary 
 
 of the birth of Abraham Lincoln by 
 
 WALLACE KIBBEE & SON 
 
 at ^00 Sansome Street 
 
 in San Francisco 
 
 Original pen and ink drawing of Lincoln 
 
 by John StoU of San Francisco through 
 
 courtesy of Bank of America 
 
 Comment by Bill Smith of Inver 
 
UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS-URBANA 
 
 973.7L63PJ1937 C001 
 
 A LETTER IN REPLY TO AN INVITATION TO AD