# Abraham Lincoln — "We can not have free government without elections" > [!quote] "We can not have free government without elections; and if the rebellion could force us to forego, or postpone a national election, it might fairly claim to have already conquered and ruined us. … But the election, along with its incidental, and undesirable strife, has done good too. It has demonstrated that a people's government can sustain a national election, in the midst of a great civil war." > — Abraham Lincoln, Response to a Serenade, Washington, D.C., November 10, 1864 ## Context Spoken two days after the 1864 election, to celebrants at the White House. Lincoln had insisted on holding the election on schedule even as the [[American Civil War]] raged and his own defeat had, for a time, looked likely — he had privately pledged to cooperate with a successor if he lost. Holding the vote was itself the argument: a republic that suspends elections in a crisis has already surrendered. ## Why this matters The starkest statement of why elections are non-negotiable: to cancel or overturn one, even under the gravest provocation, is to concede that self-government has failed. Lincoln treats the election as the thing the rebellion most needed to destroy and most conspicuously could not. The principle cuts directly against any later effort to set aside a result by claiming emergency, fraud, or existential threat — the very rationales the modern election-denial movement deploys. ## Verification - **Primary source:** [The American Presidency Project, Lincoln Response to a Serenade, November 10, 1864](https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/remarks-response-serenade-2); [House Divided (Dickinson College)](https://housedivided.dickinson.edu/sites/lincoln/response-to-serenade-november-10-1864/). Authoritative text in Basler, ed., *Collected Works*. - **Status:** Verbatim from the official text. Undisputed. ## Related quotes - [[Richard Nixon - announced the victory of his opponent]] — accepting a contested result rather than "ruining" the system to keep power. - [[Jimmy Carter - the title of citizen]] — the losing incumbent yielding so the election can mean something. - Featured in [[Presidents on the Peaceful Transfer of Power]].