Biden and Lincoln show us resilience
Historian Sean Wilentz argued that Biden's inaugural address echoed Lincoln's core insight -- that national unity cannot come before accountability -- as the new president confronted the aftermath of the January 6 Capitol attack.
In a January 21, 2021 essay for Rolling Stone, historian Sean Wilentz argued that President Biden's inaugural address the day before drew a meaningful parallel to Abraham Lincoln's approach to national unity -- one built on the premise that reconciliation must follow accountability, not substitute for it. Biden delivered his address at the Capitol just two weeks after a mob of his predecessor's supporters attacked the building on January 6, 2021.
Wilentz wrote that Lincoln understood "there can be no unity without accountability and justice," and argued Biden echoed that logic by declining to call for togetherness while ignoring the threats to democracy the Capitol attack had exposed. In the speech itself, Biden paraphrased Thomas Jefferson on the country's divisions, saying "every disagreement doesn't have to be a cause for total war" -- language Wilentz read as acknowledging deep division without surrendering to it.
What Wilentz says the Lincoln parallel means
The essay's central claim is that Lincoln's model of resilience was conditional: healing the country required confronting those who rejected its democratic norms, not simply appealing to shared identity. Applied to January 2021, Wilentz argued Biden's decency and calm tone -- the outward markers of the speech -- sat alongside an implicit recognition that the threats which produced the Capitol attack had not disappeared with the inauguration.
The warning beneath the tone
Wilentz cautioned that Biden's "unaffected displays of decency" should not be mistaken for the whole picture, writing that the president needed to prepare for "bruising battles ahead" against Republican obstructionism. In Wilentz's reading, the Lincoln-style resilience Biden invoked was less a promise of easy healing than a warning that unity would have to be earned through continued, principled resistance to those still rejecting the 2020 election's legitimacy.
The Jefferson precedent Wilentz also invoked
Wilentz drew a second historical parallel to Thomas Jefferson's 1801 inaugural address, delivered after a bitterly contested election against John Adams. Jefferson had told the country then that "every difference of opinion is not a difference of principle," language Wilentz noted closely prefigures Biden's own formulation about disagreement not requiring "total war." But Wilentz was careful to note the limits of that precedent too: when reconciliation with his Federalist opponents proved impossible, Jefferson ultimately "fought his adversaries tooth and nail" rather than continuing to appease them -- a detail Wilentz used to reinforce his broader argument that unity rhetoric, historically, has always coexisted with a willingness to fight.
On Lincoln specifically, Wilentz's essay went further than a general resilience theme: he wrote that Lincoln's actual practice was to demand that "treason stops" before any binding of the nation's wounds could begin, and that the reconciliation Lincoln is remembered for came only after the Civil War had destroyed slavery, on the premise that "all of the blood drawn with the sword would be equal to all of the blood drawn with the lash." Wilentz's point was that popular memory sands down Lincoln's insistence on justice first into a softer, apolitical story about healing -- the same softening, he argued, that Biden's own critics and allies alike risked applying to his January 2021 remarks.
US In News compiled this archived account from contemporaneous coverage by Rolling Stone. It restores a story originally published on this site in January 2021; figures are as reported at the time.