Abraham Lincoln was not a historian. But he never stopped seeing himself as part of a history, stretching back to American Revolution, and particularly to the band of revolutionaries whom he liked to call the fathers or the founders, or the framers, and even the patriarchs of the American republican democracy. In February of 1860, in his east-coast debut as a potential candidate for the Republican Party’s presidential nomination at the Cooper Institute, he identified these figures with the “thirty-nine” men who signed their names to the Federal Constitution. That included, pre-eminently George Washington. But that category had special room for James Madison and Alexander Hamilton, since there are at least seven moments in the Federalist Papers (in Federalist nos. 1, 22, 29, 43, 49 and 50) to which Lincoln may be alluding in his writings and remarks. And in some senses, he saw himself as bridging a gap between the political and economic crises of his time and the entire revolutionary generation. “Theirs was the task (and nobly they performed it) to possess …this goodly land,” Lincoln said in his first major public address in 1838, “and to uprear upon its hills and its valleys, a political edifice of liberty and equal rights.” The task of his generation was “to transmit these…unprofaned by the foot of an invader” and “undecayed by the lapse of time…to the latest generation that fate shall permit the world to know.” Like so much of the Enlightenment historical theory, Lincoln shared the general fear that even the highest achievements of statecraft were prey to declension and decay, and only by an effort to “recur to first principles” could Americans hope to maintain the original shape of the American experiment. If Lincoln could explain himself in only one sentence, it would be his determination to “turn this government back into the channel in which the framers of the Constitution originally placed it.”