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Yet were these two things entirely missing from the earlier document? By July 4, 1861, Lincoln, along with millions of other Americans, had already caught a glimpse of emancipation: those bold contrabands escaping slavery, hailing Lincoln and his armies as liberators. He had also felt the terrible stab of loss with Ellsworth’s sacrificial death. And in fact, his message to Congress carries in itself hints of the inevitable sacrifices ahead—both the price to be paid by ordinary Americans and what they would gain by paying it:

This is essentially a People’s contest. On the side of the Union, it is a struggle for maintaining in the world, that form, and substance of government, whose leading object is, to elevate the condition of men—to lift artificial weights from all shoulders—to clear the paths of laudable pursuit for all—to afford all, an unfettered start, and a fair chance, in the race of life. Yielding to partial, and temporary departures, from necessity, this is the leading object of the government for whose existence we contend.

After publication, Lincoln’s message would be roundly criticized by abolitionists, who accused him of skirting—in fact, entirely omitting—the very issue that had sparked the war. “Any one reading that document, with no previous knowledge of the United States, would never dream from any thing there written that we have a slaveholders war waged upon the Government,” Frederick Douglass lamented.20

But it may have been the proslavery forces, this time, who inferred a subtler understanding of Lincoln’s words. The editors of the Baltimore Sun, unbending in its defense of slaveholders’ rights, described the document as “strikingly at variance with all our preconceived ideas of the principles of [American] government.” They pointed specifically to the “People’s contest” passage:

This paragraph has been understood to signify, in somewhat ambiguous terms, the amplest doctrines of the abolitionists. “To elevate the condition of men, to lift artificial weights from all shoulders,” &c., is scarcely susceptible of any other practical application than to the colored race, slave and free. It seems to mean the abolition of slavery, and the social, civil, and political equality of the Ethiopian, Mongolian, Caucasian, and all other races.

Lincoln, the newspaper complained, was claiming to find ideas and intentions embodied in the Constitution that its framers had never intended to put there: “The President might [as well] assert that it is one particular design of the Union to regulate the tail of the comet, the cut of a coat, or the size of a lady’s hoops.”21

The Sun was right: when Lincoln wrote of “an unfettered start,” he chose his words deliberately. An earlier draft had used the phrase “an even start,” an image that fit much more neatly with the “race of life” metaphor.22 But when the president crossed out the word even and wrote unfettered above it, he sacrificed metaphorical coherence for an unmistakable evocation of the plight of the slaves. The Sun was also correct in discerning another new idea: the government as guarantor of “a fair chance, in the race of life,” something that might well have left the nation’s founders scratching their heads. Lincoln was speaking not in the voice of the eighteenth century but that of the nineteenth, a voice informed by new ideas in science—the race of Life—as well as in politics.

This came as no small shock to some of Lincoln’s longtime doubters: those members of the nation’s intellectual establishment who had seen him as a half-educated Midwestern rube, a man unequal to the times. George W. Curtis, the journalist and Republican activist, had originally dismissed him as a cipher, believing that William Seward was the man who must save the Union. But now, still reeling from the death of his friend Winthrop at Big Bethel, Curtis wrote privately:

I envy no other age. I believe with all my heart in the cause, and in Abe Lincoln. His message is the most truly American message ever delivered. Think upon what a