LincolnEverything you need to know about Abraham Lincoln.

Glossary

The vocabulary of Lincoln's world — plain definitions, no jargon left unexplained.

Abolitionist

One who demanded the immediate end of slavery. Lincoln was not an abolitionist in the 1850s sense — he favored stopping slavery’s expansion and gradual, compensated emancipation — though abolitionists like Frederick Douglass became his wartime allies and critics.

Anaconda Plan

General Winfield Scott’s 1861 strategy for strangling the Confederacy: blockade its ports and seize the Mississippi, squeezing it like the snake. Lincoln adopted its outlines; Grant and Sherman executed them.

Border States

The slave states that did not secede: Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri (plus, after 1863, West Virginia). Lincoln called keeping them in the Union the war’s central political problem; the Emancipation Proclamation deliberately exempted them.

Carpetbagger

A Northerner who moved South during Reconstruction — originally a slur. Lincoln died before the term’s heyday, but his Reconstruction plans were aimed at avoiding the conflicts the term describes.

Compensated emancipation

Paying slaveholders for freed slaves — Lincoln’s preferred early solution (he proposed it for Delaware in 1861 and for the border states in 1862). Congress never funded it at scale; the war settled the question differently.

Confederacy

The Confederate States of America (1861–1865) — eleven seceded slave states under President Jefferson Davis. Lincoln’s legal position was that secession was void and the Confederacy did not exist as a nation.

Contraband

The Union Army’s early legal fiction for escaped slaves: as enemy property used against the Union, they could be seized as “contraband of war.” General Benjamin Butler coined the usage at Fort Monroe in 1861; Congress’s Confiscation Acts formalized it.

Copperhead

A Northern Democrat who opposed the war and sympathized with the South — from the venomous snake. Lincoln’s administration arrested the most prominent, Clement Vallandigham, and exiled him in 1863.

Dred Scott decision

Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857): the Supreme Court ruled that Black people could not be U.S. citizens and that Congress could not ban slavery in the territories. Lincoln denounced it as a political decision and made opposition to it central to the 1858 debates.

Emancipation Proclamation

Lincoln’s January 1, 1863, executive order freeing slaves in rebellious areas — a war measure, not a universal abolition. See the deep dive.

Executive Mansion

The 19th-century name for the White House. Lincoln’s Gettysburg drafts were written on Executive Mansion stationery.

Free Soil

The principle — and the 1848–1854 political movement — that western territories should be reserved for free labor, excluding slavery. Lincoln’s Republican Party absorbed the Free Soilers.

Freedmen’s Bureau

The federal agency for formerly enslaved people, created March 1865 — after Lincoln’s death, though he signed the bill. Part of the Reconstruction he planned but did not live to direct.

Habeas corpus

The legal right against detention without charge. Lincoln suspended it along rail corridors and later more broadly (1861–1863); Chief Justice Taney ruled the suspension unconstitutional in Ex parte Merryman (1861), which Lincoln ignored — one of the most debated civil-liberties episodes of his presidency.

House Divided

From Lincoln’s June 16, 1858, speech: “A house divided against itself cannot stand.” See Sayings and the debates deep dive.

Know-Nothing

Member of the nativist American Party of the 1850s, hostile to immigrants and Catholics. Lincoln privately despised the movement (see his 1855 letter to Joshua Speed, quoted in Sayings) while courting its voters.

Lame duck

An officeholder serving out a term after a successor is chosen. Lincoln’s four-month lame-duck session after the 1864 election — when he pushed the Thirteenth Amendment through — was among the most productive in history.

Martial law

Military rule replacing civil authority. Lincoln declared it in limited areas; its extent remains one of the standard criticisms of his presidency.

Missouri Compromise

The 1820 bargain admitting Missouri as a slave state and Maine as free, banning slavery north of 36°30′ in the Louisiana Territory. The Kansas-Nebraska Act’s repeal of it in 1854 is what brought Lincoln back into politics.

Peace Democrats

See Copperhead — the faction label; “Copperhead” was the Republican slur for them.

Pocket veto

Killing a bill by not signing it after Congress adjourns. Lincoln pocket-vetoed the Wade-Davis Reconstruction bill in July 1864. See Reconstruction.

Stephen A. Douglas’s doctrine that each territory’s settlers should decide slavery’s fate by vote. Lincoln argued it was morally empty — a way of not deciding whether slavery was right or wrong.

Radical Republicans

The congressional faction (Thaddeus Stevens, Charles Sumner) demanding aggressive emancipation, Black rights, and a punitive Reconstruction. Lincoln’s allies against slavery and his antagonists on method and pace.

Reconstruction

The postwar rebuilding of the South and redefinition of the Union — the plan Lincoln began and did not finish. See the deep dive.

Secession

The claimed right of states to leave the Union. Lincoln’s First Inaugural argued the Union was perpetual and secession legally void — “no State upon its own mere motion can lawfully get out of the Union.”

Spoils system

Awarding government jobs for political support. Lincoln practiced it extensively (it helped win him the 1860 nomination) while complaining about the office-seekers it brought to his door.

State suicide theory

The Radical Republican legal theory that seceded states had “committed suicide” and reverted to territories — rejected by Lincoln, who insisted the states had never legally left.

Ten Percent Plan

Lincoln’s December 1863 Proclamation of Amnesty and Reconstruction: a seceded state could form a loyal government when 10% of its 1860 voters swore allegiance. Radicals called it absurdly lenient. See Reconstruction.

Thirteenth Amendment

The constitutional amendment abolishing slavery, passed by Congress January 31, 1865 (Lincoln lobbied hard for the votes) and ratified December 6, 1865.

Union

In Lincoln’s usage: both the United States as an unbroken whole and the Northern cause in the war. Preserving it was, by his own repeated statement, his paramount object.

War Democrats

Northern Democrats who supported the war — Lincoln’s 1864 running mate Andrew Johnson was one, which is why the ticket was renamed the “Union Party.”

West Virginia

Admitted to the Union in June 1863 after western Virginia counties rejected secession — the one case where Lincoln accepted the creation of a new state from a seceded one, on contested constitutional grounds.

Wigwam

The Chicago convention hall where Lincoln was nominated in May 1860 — literally a two-story wooden “wigwam” built for the convention.

Writ of habeas corpus

See habeas corpus.

Source notes