Let us have faith that right makes might, and in that faith, let us, to the end, dare to do our duty as we understand it.
What it means
Lincoln asks his listeners to trust that doing right will prove the stronger force in the end, and on that trust to do their duty, as they see it, all the way through. The sentence before it names the two things that push people off their duty: false accusations, and threats.
“As we understand it” is a modest phrase. He doesn’t claim certainty; he asks them to act on their honest best judgement and not be argued or frightened out of it.
The context
Lincoln gave the speech at Cooper Union in New York on 27 February 1860, before the Republican convention that May, when he was not yet his party’s candidate for president. At more than 7,000 words it was one of his longest speeches. It is considered one of his most important, and some historians argue it won him the presidency later that year.
He spent most of it arguing that slavery should not spread into the western territories, and that the nation’s founders would have agreed. Near the end he says the whole dispute comes down to one thing: “Their thinking it right, and our thinking it wrong.” He warns against “groping for some middle ground between the right and the wrong, vain as the search for a man who should be neither a living man nor a dead man,” and then closes with these two sentences.
Why it matters
Integrity is easy when no one objects. Lincoln names the two pressures that actually make people give way: being accused of things that aren’t true, and being threatened. Both work by making the cost of holding your position feel larger than the position itself.
His answer isn’t to be certain you’re right. It’s to decide what your duty is, as honestly as you can, and to keep doing it “to the end” when the pressure comes.
About Abraham Lincoln
16th president of the United States, 1809–1865
Abraham Lincoln was born on 12 February 1809 in a one-room log cabin in Kentucky and raised on the frontier. He was self-educated and became a lawyer, an Illinois state legislator and a member of the U.S. House of Representatives. Angered by the Kansas–Nebraska Act of 1854, which opened the territories to slavery, he became a leader of the new Republican Party.
He won the presidential election of 1860, became the first Republican president, and led the United States through the Civil War, playing a major role in the abolition of slavery. On 14 April 1865, five days after the Confederate surrender at Appomattox, he was shot by John Wilkes Booth at Ford’s Theatre in Washington, and he died the next day.
The source, and how we checked it
It comes from Address at Cooper Union, New York, 27 February 1860.
The full passage:
Neither let us be slandered from our duty by false accusations against us, nor frightened from it by menaces of destruction to the Government nor of dungeons to ourselves. Let us have faith that right makes might, and in that faith, let us, to the end, dare to do our duty as we understand it.
We matched both closing sentences word for word against Abraham Lincoln Online's text, which comes from the Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, edited by Roy P. Basler. That text prints the final sentence in capital letters; we give it in ordinary type. We last checked this on 5 November 2026.