Lincoln defined liberty as an empty signifier contested between slaveholders and abolitionists.

Evidence

Lincoln used an analogy for clarification. “The shepherd drives the wolf from the sheep’s throat, for which the sheep thanks the shepherd as a liberator, while the wolf denounces him for the same act as the destroyer of liberty, especially as the sheep was a black one,” he said. “Hence we behold the processes by which thousands are daily passing from under the yoke of bondage, hailed by some as the advance of liberty, and bewailed by others as the destruction of all liberty.” — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 606

Categorization

• DEFINE: Lincoln’s shepherd-wolf analogy is a precise, memorable encapsulation of how the same word ‘liberty’ means opposite things to oppressor and oppressed — a live, usable definitional case for Kendi’s framework.
• QUESTION: Kendi reads Lincoln’s analogy as ‘rewriting current events’ by casting enslaved people as passive sheep. Worth holding this against the book’s claim that policy precedes ideas — is Lincoln’s self-serving framing a racist idea justifying policy, or a half-converted president’s genuine view?