In a November 1884 issue of The Christian Recorder, one of the leading nineteenth-century African-American periodicals, the Reverend R. G. Mortimer recounted an anecdote about a visit from Abraham Lincoln to a prominent Sunday school. With all the excitement that might be expected from such a visit, the students anticipated a long and profound speech. Instead, Lincoln offered only a simple statement: “My dear young friends, do not chew, do not smoke, do not swear.” Mortimer, a former professor of Latin, Greek, and exegesis at Wilberforce University, used the moment less as an illustration of the children's disappointment than as a didactic tool of instruction. He implored his readers to heed Lincoln's example, noting that “the address deserves to be held up as worthy the imitations of public speakers generally.” Underlining the address's “brief, plain, sensible, timely” delivery, Mortimer accentuated the succinct economy of Lincoln's mode of rhetoric as ideal.

Mortimer's assessment of Lincoln's address is a reminder of Lincoln's significance as a rhetorician and orator. Remembered now for political phrases like “A house divided against itself cannot stand” and a “government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth,” Lincoln is also identified with popular adages such as “Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak and remove all doubt.” Lincoln’s “House Divided” speech is one of his most identifiable and iconographic, but like most speeches it has been rendered recognizable primarily through one or two encapsulated key phrases. Beginning with George Washington , Americans have been especially enamored of presidential speeches and, even more so, with their figures of speech. From Thomas Jefferson ’s “That government is best which governs least, because its people discipline themselves” in the nineteenth century to John F. Kennedy ’s “And so my fellow Americans, ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country” in the twentieth century, Americans have remained fond of presidential maxims.