Abraham Lincoln Archives - Richard M. Langworth

Churchill and Lincoln: Scholars Consider the Cooper Union Speech

31 October 2023

In June 1860, Lincoln wrote that “when I came of age I did not know much.... The little advance I now have upon this store of education, I have picked up from time to time under the pressure of necessity.” Churchill in March 1949 would echo these remarks: “I frankly confess that I feel somewhat overawed in addressing this vast scientific and learned audience.… I have no technical and no university education, and have just had to pick up a few things as I went along.” Their observations undervalued the immense effort both had put into self-improvement.

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Guelzo on Robert E. Lee: “To Err on the Side of Absorbing Society’s Defaulters”

15 November 2021

Allen C. Guelzo, Robert E. Lee: A Life (New York: Knopf, 2021), 608 pages, illus., $35, Kindle $15.99. First published in The American Spectator, 9 November 2021.

“Who’s that man on the horse?”…

…I asked my father at a young age. “That’s Lee—he led a Southern army in the Civil War.” He gave me a book I still have, Illustrated Minute Biographies, by William DeWitt. Published 1953, it is utterly non-judgmental. Opposite the page on Lee (“Leader of a Lost Cause”) is a page on Lenin (“Father of the Russian Revolution.”)

Among DeWitt’s 150 personalities, Lee fascinated. I’ve always had a soft spot for underdogs.…

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Defcon 1: The Urgent Defense of Churchill’s Name and Legacy

16 June 2020

Case for the defense: “If we allow our monuments and statues and place-names to be torn down because of our present-day views, and claims of people being offended by our built environment that has been around for decades and sometimes centuries, it speaks to a pathetic lack of confidence in ourselves as a nation. We are on the way to a society of competing victimhoods, atomized and balkanized into smaller and smaller communities, which ironically enough is something racists want too.” —Andrew Roberts

Defense of the good

The Hillsdale College Churchill Project has joined many other groups and individuals in defense of the good.…

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Lee surrenders, 9 April 1865. “He was a foe without hate, a friend without treachery, a soldier without cruelty, and a victim without murmuring.” (Painting by Thomas Nast, 1895, Wikimedia Commons)

Robert E. Lee and the Fashionable Urge to Hide from History

7 July 2019

On the tearing down of statues and symbols, Shelby Foote cited a state senator, who got her fellow senators to disallow the use of a Confederate symbol—not the Battle Flag—by the Daughters of the Confederacy. "I don't understand that," he said. "It's a violation of the Greaat Compromise. It's an arousal of bitterness. Now she, along with a great many others, do not want to be reminded. She has every right to want to hide from history if she wants to. But it seems to me that she's trying to hide history from us—and that's a mistake."

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“The Pool of England”: How Henry V Inspired Churchill’s Words

8 April 2019

Excerpted from “Churchill, Shakespeare and Henry V.” Lecture at “Churchill and the Movies,” a seminar sponsored by the Center for Constructive Alternatives, Hillsdale College, 25 March 2019. For the complete video, click here.

Shakespeare’s Henry: Parallels and Inspirations

Above all and first, the importance of Henry V is what it teaches about leadership. “True leadership,” writes Andrew Roberts, “stirs us in a way that is deeply embedded in our genes and psyche.…If the underlying factors of leadership have remained the same for centuries, cannot these lessons be learned and applied in situations far removed from ancient times?”…

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chicken — Addressing the Canadian Parliament, 30 December 1941. (Wikimedia Commons)

Churchill, Canada and the Perspective of History (Part 3)

9 December 2018

Perspective of History: Address to the Churchill Society of Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, on Sir Winston’s 144th birthday, 30 November 2018 (Part 3). We were kindly hosted at Earnscliffe by the British High Commissioner, Susan le Jeune d’Allegeershecque.

Perspective, 144 Years On

Concluded from Part 2…. “The great movements that underlie history—the development of science, industry, culture, social and political structures—are powerful, almost determinant,” wrote Charles Krauthammer.

Yet every once in a while, a single person arises without whom everything would be different. In recent times, only Churchill carries that absolutely required criterion: indispensability… Take away Churchill in 1940 [and] Hitler would have achieved what no other tyrant, not even Napoleon, had ever achieved: mastery of Europe.…

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Before the microphones, 1940. (Library of Congress)

AZ Quotes: A Cornucopia of Things Churchill Never Said

6 September 2018

Much of my labor in the Churchill Vineyard involves researching quotations “AZ.” My 650-page books and ebooks, Churchill by Himself and Churchill in His Own Words, are the largest sources of Churchill’s philosophy, maxims, reflections and ripostes accompanied by a valid source for each entry. There are 4,150 entries, but a new, expanded and revised edition is coming. It will include a much larger appendix of “Red Herrings”—oft-repeated passages he never said but constantly ascribed to him.

“Red Herrings” are part of what quotemaster Nigel Rees calls “Churchillian Drift.” (Click here for the full description.)…

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Churchill’s Ersatz Meeting with Lincoln’s Ghost

31 January 2018

Unless the ghost of Abraham Lincoln was in the habit of switching rooms, he is unlikely to have appeared in Churchill's bedroom (which was not the famous Lincoln Bedroom). Even less likely did the apparition appear as Churchill was emerging from his bath.

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Mr. Stern, Mr. Trump, Churchill Quotes and Misquotes

28 November 2017

November 27th— Writing in the Daily Beast, Mr. Marlow Stern praises Kristin Scott Thomas (“Clementine Churchill” in the new movie Darkest Hour) and announces: “Donald Trump is No Winston Churchill.” (Past doubt, but who is?)

Mr. Stern himself offers only one Churchill quote and gets it right: “A free press is the unsleeping guardian of every other right that free men prize; it is the most dangerous foe of tyranny.” (Colliers, 28 December 1935.)

Bingo! That’s an obscure one. Forgive him for vastly exaggerating Churchill’s alcohol intake. (WSC’s “six whisky sodas” were described by his private secretary as “scotch-flavored mouthwash.”…

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lecture — What an honor: Nashville portraitist Shane Neal set to work. Thanks, Shane!

Nashville (1). Winston Churchill: Current Contentions and Things That Go Bump in the Night

18 October 2017

NASHVILLE, OCTOBER 14TH— The Churchill Society of Tennessee kindly invited me to talk about Winston Churchill: Myth and Reality and the Hillsdale College Churchill Project. Our hosts, John and Karen Mather and Dick and Linda Knight, could not have been more thoughtful, kinder and more generous to Barbara and me. If I performed anything for them or Mr. Churchill, that’s only a poor contribution in an attempt at requital. *** As a bonus, I was honored by a portrait by Shane Neal, a brilliant Nashville artist and a gent, as their way of saying thanks. In discussing Churchill’s art, Shane was joined by fellow artist Joseph Daily, who painted some forty portraits of the Churchill family and their friends in England. …

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