Springfield Did Not Disappoint
A report on the ALA's 217th Birthday Celebration
Dear ALA Members and Friends,
February in Springfield has a way of focusing the mind. Walk the streets of Lincoln’s old hometown in the cold and gray of midwinter, and you feel his presence in ways that are hard to explain and easy to remember. This year, on the 217th anniversary of his birth, we gathered once again at the President Abraham Lincoln Hotel for two days of celebration, scholarship, and the kind of conversation that only happens when serious people share a serious subject. It was a remarkable two days. Here is what you missed, or what you’ll want to revisit.
Thursday Evening: The Birthday Banquet
The ALA’s annual Birthday Banquet is one of Springfield’s most cherished traditions, and this year’s gathering lived up to every expectation.
Our keynote speaker was Allen C. Guelzo, Professor of Humanities at the Hamilton School of Classical and Civic Education at the University of Florida. If you know Lincoln scholarship, you know Guelzo — the only person to have won the Lincoln Prize three times, and the author of a shelf of essential books on Lincoln and the Civil War era. His address, “Walking in the Old Paths: Abraham Lincoln and the Inheritance of the Revolution,” was everything you’d want from a Guelzo lecture: deeply researched, gracefully argued, and alive with ideas.
His central argument cut to the heart of why Lincoln still matters. Lincoln did not invent America’s founding principles; he inherited them, studied them, and staked everything on their truth.
The evening was warm, the company was excellent, and the room was full of people who love Lincoln for the right reasons.
Friday: The Benjamin P. Thomas Memorial Symposium
The symposium is the ALA’s signature scholarly event, and this year’s program was as strong as any we can remember. Three distinguished scholar-writers took the podium, each bringing a fresh angle on Lincoln’s life and legacy.
Lucas E. Morel — “Lincoln, the Founding, and an America Worth Saving”
Washington and Lee’s Lucas E. Morel — a former president of the Abraham Lincoln Institute and a member of the U.S. Semiquincentennial Commission — brought his trademark precision and passion to a question that feels newly urgent: What did Lincoln believe about the American Founding, and why did he think the nation was worth saving at such an extraordinary cost? Morel’s answer was careful and compelling, rooted in Lincoln’s own words and the intellectual tradition he drew from. With the Declaration’s 250th anniversary just months away, this was exactly the right lecture at exactly the right moment.
John Bicknell — “Lincoln, Fremont, and the Battle for Emancipation”
Bicknell, a journalist of thirty years and the author of the just-published The Pathfinder and the President: John C. Frémont, Abraham Lincoln, and the Battle for Emancipation (2025), opened the day with a story most of us think we know, and don’t. When Frémont issued his unauthorized emancipation proclamation in Missouri in 1861, he handed Lincoln a crisis that was also an opportunity. Bicknell unpacked the clash between these two complicated men with a journalist’s eye for drama and a historian’s command of evidence. The audience left with a much richer sense of how emancipation was won: through conflict, negotiation, and hard political calculation.
The Thomas F. Schwartz Luncheon
At midday, we paused for the Thomas F. Schwartz Luncheon Buffet, named in honor of the longtime Illinois State Historian whose career embodied the best of this field. The luncheon featured a conversation between Michael Burlingame — holder of the Naomi B. Lynn Distinguished Chair in Lincoln Studies at the University of Illinois Springfield and the author of the definitive two-volume Abraham Lincoln: A Life — and Allen Guelzo, back for a second act.
Their topic was “Encouraging Trends in Recent Lincoln Scholarship,” and the conversation was everything the title promised and more. Burlingame and Guelzo ranged across new discoveries, contested interpretations, and the state of the field with candor and humor. Members told us afterward it was one of their favorite moments of the two days, a reminder that great scholarship is also great conversation.
Michael Vorenberg — “Lincoln the Peacemaker: How Our Greatest President Thought the Civil War Should End”
Brown University historian Michael Vorenberg gave us a Lincoln we don’t always see. Drawing on his acclaimed book Lincoln’s Peace: The Struggle to End the American Civil War (Knopf, 2025) — named by the Los Angeles Times one of the ten most anticipated books of the year — Vorenberg showed how Lincoln thought about the end of the war from nearly its beginning. He was not simply fighting to win. He was thinking about what winning should look like, and what kind of peace a broken nation could bear. It was a nuanced, moving presentation, and it opened up new ways of seeing a president we thought we understood.
The Closing Roundtable
The day ended with all four scholars gathering together for a discussion moderated by Michael Burlingame. The roundtable pulled together the threads of the day’s presentations and pushed into territory none of the individual talks had reached.
Until Next February
Lincoln described the Declaration of Independence as something more than a founding document. It was, he said, “a standard maxim for free society,” meant to be “constantly looked to, constantly labored for, and even though never perfectly attained, constantly approximated.” Days like February 12 and 13 are part of that approximation. They are how we keep faith with Lincoln’s memory and with the ideals he gave his life to defend.
The Abraham Lincoln Association is grateful to its members, supporters, and distinguished guests who made these two days possible. We hope to see you next February in Springfield. Mark your calendars now.
With warm regards,
Joshua Claybourn
President, Abraham Lincoln Association
The Abraham Lincoln Association has honored Lincoln’s memory and promoted the study of his life since 1908. If you are not yet a member, we invite you to join us at AbrahamLincolnAssociation.org. If a friend or colleague forwarded this newsletter to you and you’d like to subscribe, you can do so here.
I have attended ALA's Birthday Celebrations for the last three years, and found them most gratifying, inspirational, and congenial. It's also a pleasure to walk about Springfield and experience some of the sights Lincoln did.