“Abraham Lincoln and the First-Person Plural: A Study in Language and Leadership”, 2011-04-21 ():
The 2009 bicentennial of Abraham Lincoln’s birth brought forth an outpouring of fresh studies of the man and his times. The new scholarship largely affirmed the long-standing consensus about the 16th president and his greatness. His was an almost superhuman achievement in holding the Union together, emancipating the slaves, and ultimately leading the North to victory.
This study offers a novel evaluation of one key element of Lincoln’s leadership. It details how Lincoln frequently and surprisingly substituted “we” for “I” in his famous addresses, as no political leader had done before him, and explores how his preference for the plural over singular first-person pronoun enabled his political ascendancy in the 1850s and sustained his presidency during the war.
His syntax offers a linguistic window into understanding his timely, unique, and uniquely self-conscious, style of leadership. Although not exactly a man of letters, Lincoln proved to be a great leader in large measure because of his steadfast beliefs about a union and an inclusive vision of American nationhood so powerfully expressed in his exceptional use of the first-person plural.
[Keywords: Lincoln, leadership, rhetoric, U.S. citizenship, nationalism]
…Lincoln seldom speaks of himself in the singular “I”, often resorting to tortured syntax and impersonal constructions to obviate the need for the first-person singular. Perhaps no American leader used the first-person plural more and more astutely than Abraham Lincoln. Certainly, none used the first-person singular more sparingly.9 In The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln “we” appears 12,000×. In his two greatest speeches, “I” is conspicuous by its absence. Only once in the 701-word Second Inaugural does Lincoln use it and only to conjugate the modest verb to trust; in the 272 words of the exceedingly economical Gettysburg Address he employs “we” 10× and “I” not at all.