For Those Who Feel Like Giving Up: The Man Who Refused to Look Away

For Those Who Feel Like Giving Up: The Man Who Refused to Look Away

The Jack Hopkins Now Newsletter #728: Sunday, January 11th, 2026.

There are moments in history when a nation resembles a drawing room after a long dinner-voices raised…tempers frayed…alliances half-hidden behind polite smiles.

Nothing has yet shattered. No plates have been thrown. But everyone present senses that something delicate is cracking beneath the surface.

It is in such moments that history does not announce itself with trumpets.

It waits.

And then it chooses an unlikely witness.

In the winter of 1860, Abraham Lincoln was not the inevitable savior of the Union he is now remembered as.

He was, by most measures that mattered at the time…an improbable choice-a self-educated lawyer from Illinois…physically awkward…politically bruised by repeated losses…and deeply underestimated by both allies and enemies.

The United States he inherited was not simply divided. It was unraveling.

Seven states had already seceded. Federal authority was openly mocked. Armed militias drilled in public. Newspapers spoke casually of disunion as if it were an inconvenience…not an existential threat.

Many leaders, exhausted by decades of compromise…believed the nation’s fracture might be inevitable…or even preferable.

Lincoln, meanwhile…was advised to tread lightly. To say less. To reassure everyone. To avoid inflaming passions. To remember that cooling rhetoric was the highest virtue of leadership.

He did not.

What makes Lincoln’s story instructive…uncomfortably so for Americans today…is not that he triumphed easily. It is that he governed in a moment when nearly every institution meant to hold the country together was failing at once.

And…he damn well knew it.

A Country Tired of Itself

By the time Lincoln took office…the American experiment was already suffering from a familiar disease: fatigue.

The public was exhausted by politics. Exhausted by moral arguments. Exhausted by warnings that had been issued so often…they began to feel theatrical…rather than urgent. Many citizens simply wanted the noise to stop.

There were voices-then, as now…insisting that the crisis was being exaggerated. That cooler heads would prevail. That the markets would correct the madness. That the country was too sophisticated…too interconnected…too prosperous to tear itself apart.

Lincoln did not share this optimism.

He read obsessively. He tracked not only speeches and votes…but tone. He understood that when a society loses faith in its own rules…collapse does not arrive all at once. It seeps in through indifference.

His private letters reveal a man deeply troubled not only by secession…but by the normalization of it.

People were becoming accustomed to the idea that the Constitution could be discarded when inconvenient. That law was a matter of interpretation…rather than obligation. That power, not principle…would determine outcomes.

This disturbed him far more than angry rhetoric.

Because Lincoln understood something that remains painfully relevant today:

A democracy does not fall when laws are broken.
It falls…when laws are treated as optional.

The Loneliest Office in the World

Contrary to myth, Lincoln did not step into office with broad public confidence. His election was legal…but not legitimized in the minds of millions of Americans.

He received less than 40 percent of the popular vote. Entire regions of the country rejected him outright. He entered Washington under credible threat of assassination.

And…once in office…he found himself surrounded not by unity, but by rivalry.

His cabinet was famously composed of political enemies…men who believed themselves smarter…better educated…more refined. They questioned his judgment. They mocked his storytelling. They underestimated his resolve.

Lincoln allowed this.

Not because he was weak…but because he believed truth emerged from friction.

What he did not allow was paralysis.

From the very beginning, Lincoln faced pressure to accept the dissolution of the Union as something that had already been done. Influential voices urged him to recognize secession as a political reality rather than a constitutional impossibility.

“Let them go,” some said. “Why fight over principles that no longer command loyalty?”

Lincoln refused.

Not emotionally. Not theatrically.

But with a calm…terrifying clarity.

If the Union could be broken whenever a faction disliked an election outcome…then the Union had never truly existed at all.

The Trap of False Calm

One of the most misunderstood aspects of Lincoln’s leadership is how often he was accused of overreacting.

When he reinforced federal forts…critics said he was provoking conflict.
When he suspended habeas corpus…they accused him of authoritarianism.
When he delayed emancipation…abolitionists accused him of cowardice.
When he finally issued it…others accused him of recklessness.

There was no move available to him that did not draw outrage.

This is the paradox faced by leaders in moments of institutional collapse: every action feels extreme…because the ground beneath them is already unstable.

Lincoln understood that doing nothing was not neutrality. It was a choice…a catastrophic one.

What he feared most was not criticism.

It was complacency…disguised as restraint.

Governing While the Floor Gives Way

The most astonishing fact about Lincoln’s presidency is not that he led during war.

It is that he led while nearly every stabilizing assumption of American life was failing simultaneously.

Courts were divided.
States openly defied federal authority.
Information ecosystems were polluted with propaganda.
Political violence became normalized.
Trust between citizens collapsed along regional and ideological lines.

Sound familiar?

And…yet…Lincoln persisted in an almost obsessive commitment to legality. Even when stretching the Constitution…he argued relentlessly that he was acting to preserve it…not supersede it.

He agonized over each step. He documented his reasoning. He anticipated future judgment.

He believed…correctly…that if the nation survived…it would need a record showing that power had been exercised reluctantly…not casually.

This is an important detail…often overlooked.

Lincoln did not believe ends justified means.

He believed means determined whether the ends…were worth having.

The Cost of Refusing Illusions

Lincoln paid dearly for his refusal to indulge comforting lies.

He aged visibly. His writings grew darker…more spare. He carried the weight of hundreds of thousands of deaths without ever allowing himself the luxury of abstraction.

Unlike many leaders…he did not outsource moral responsibility to history.

He felt it personally.

And…still…he remained convinced that the alternative was worse.

A nation that preserved peace by abandoning its principles would not…in his view…be at peace at all.

It would simply be waiting for the next fracture.

Why His Story Matters Now

It is tempting to treat Lincoln as an artifact. An icon safely entombed in marble and currency.

That would be a mistake.

Lincoln’s relevance lies not in his sainthood…but in his circumstances.

He governed a nation:

• Furious with itself

• Divided along moral fault lines

• Cynical about institutions

• Exhausted by conflict

• Tempted by the lie that disengagement equals stability

He faced constant pressure to tone it down.
To stop insisting that foundational rules mattered.
To compromise on questions that were, at their core…uncompromisable.

He did not always choose perfectly.

But…he chose deliberately.

And in doing so…he preserved the possibility…of a future in which the United States… could argue fiercely without ceasing to exist.

The Quiet Lesson

The most revealing moments are not the dramatic ones, but the quiet realizations…the instant when a character sees clearly…what has been true all along.

Lincoln’s life offers such a realization for Americans today.

The lesson is not that one heroic figure will save the nation.

It is this:

Democracies survive not because they avoid crises…but because…in crisis…enough people refuse to look away.

Lincoln refused.

Not because he was fearless.
But because he understood the cost of pretending nothing was wrong.

That choice…to see clearly…to act deliberately…to endure unpopularity in defense of principle…is available in every era.

Including ours.

A Final Observation

When Lincoln was assassinated, the nation he preserved did not instantly heal. Reconstruction was flawed. Justice was incomplete. The work remained unfinished.

But…the Union existed.

The constitutional experiment endured.

And…because of that…every generation since…has been given the chance…however imperfect…to argue…reform…and recommit…rather than start again from rubble.

That inheritance is fragile.

It always has been.

History does not ask us to be Lincoln.

It asks something quieter, and harder:

Not to look away when the rules that hold us together are being tested.

That…more than any speech or statue…is the legacy that still matters.

#HoldFast

Back soon,

-Jack
Jack Hopkins

P.S. Stories like Lincoln’s are often taught as inevitabilities. They weren’t. They were decisions made…under pressure…with incomplete information…and no guarantee of success.

Paid subscribers will receive a companion essay examining why societies underestimate these moments while they’re happening…and how to recognize them…before history names them for us.