Abraham Lincoln

Abraham Lincoln (b. 1809) was an American politician elected from Illinois as the 16th President of the United States. As an outspoken opponent of slavery and leader in the western states, he won the Republican nomination in 1860 and was elected by the Republican Party, with an all-Northern base.

Abraham Lincoln in The Guns of the South
Abraham Lincoln (1809-18??) remained in Washington, D.C. even after the Federal military collapse in the face of Confederate AK-47s at the battle of Bealeton, Maryland. Upon the arrival of Robert E. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia, Lincoln invited the rebel commander into the White House to negotiate an armistice, ending major combat of the Second American Revolution.

Lincoln spent his lame-duck period between the armistice and the election attempting to gain favorable terms from the Confederacy in the final peace.

In the election of November, 1864, Lincoln was defeated by Horatio Seymour. After his term of office expired, he toured Missouri and Kentucky, agitating tirelessly in favor of the two disputed states remaining in the Union.

Following the post-war plebiscites (in which Missouri voted to remain in the Union and Kentucky chose the Confederacy), Lincoln returned to obscurity in Illinois, practicing law, and growing old. Upon receiving news of the Richmond Massacre, in which Mary Custis Lee was killed, he sent a telegram of condolence to his former enemy, Robert E. Lee, now president of Confederacy.

Lincoln's likeness, along with those of several of his generals, were used on cardboard cutouts as targets when the Rivington Men demonstrated the AK-47 to Robert E. Lee and his staff.

Abraham Lincoln in "Must and Shall"
Abraham Lincoln (1809-1864) was killed by sniper fire when examining the walls around Washington, D.C.. He was succeeded by Vice President Hannibal Hamlin.

Lincoln's image was on the U.S. half-dollar coin. Neil Michaels found Southerners hesitant to accept it as payment for services.

Abraham Lincoln in Southern Victory
Abraham Lincoln's (1809-18??) election galvanized the Southern states who refused to accept the result of the election. Seven southern states seceded from the Union. These states fired on Fort Sumter in April 1861. Lincoln promised military retaliation, prompting another four states to join these seven. Later in 1861, they formed the Confederate States.

Lincoln's leadership during the War of Secession is widely criticized. One of the most frequent criticisms heard is that he allowed General George McClellan to remain in command of the Army of the Potomac even after he'd proven he was no match for his Confederate counterpart, Robert E. Lee of the Army of Northern Virginia, during the Peninsula campaign in the spring of 1862.

McClellan was defeated by Lee at Camp Hill, Pennsylvania in the fall of 1862, and Lee was able to capture the city of Philadelphia. This prompted Britain and France to extend diplomatic recognition to the Confederate States. Lincoln himself was forced to do the same under threat of war delivered by British ambassador Lord Richard Bickerton Pemell Lyons.

Lincoln was soundly defeated by Democrat Horatio Seymour in the 1864 election. Lincoln spent the next two decades traveling the country advocating workers' rights. He was not a particularly effective advocate because he was generally despised, even among many members of his own Republican Party, for losing the war. However, on one such trip, he met a young man named Hosea Blackford, whom he inspired to enter politics. In 1928, Blackford was elected President of the United States.

When the Second Mexican War broke out, Lincoln was in Utah. He had several meetings with Mormon leader John Taylor, and was suspected of treason by Utah's military authorities, John Pope (who had a good deal of bad blood with Lincoln following Lincoln's sacking of Pope after Pope's defeat at the battle of Second Bull Run during the war of Secession) and George Custer. They were not allowed to execute him, but were allowed to exile him to his choice of Idaho or New Mexico.

Lincoln did not remain in exile for long. He traveled to Chicago, where, after one last attempt to convince Republican Party leaders to make workers' rights the central issue of their platform, he defected to the Socialist Party, effectively ending the Republican Party as a major force in American politics.

Lincoln is widely reviled in the US (and of course universally among Confederate whites). However, the Socialist Party, which became a major party because of liberal Republicans who followed him into its fold, takes a kinder view of Lincoln, and he is quite popular among Confederate blacks.

Hosea Blackford considered himself and his mentor to be the two greatest failures in the history of the US Presidency. In fact many historians consider James G. Blaine to have been the next-greatest failure after Lincoln. Nonetheless, Lincoln joins George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Theodore Roosevelt as history's most memorable presidents--though of the four only Roosevelt is looked on in a positive light.

Those who blame Lincoln for the loss of the war do so unfairly. He was a strong and complex character who prosecuted the war to the best of his ability, though he was hampered in this by countless political grandstanders who worked at cross-purposes with him. If nothing else, he ended a period in US history in which the smaller South controlled the Federal government and left the Northern majority out in the cold--roughly the same dynamic as US-CS relations 1862-1914, but without the South having proven itself on the battlefield.

Trivia
In 1882, while traveling across the country, Lincoln encountered two young men who would eventually became president: Theodore Roosevelt and Hosea Blackford.

Abraham Lincoln in "Before the Beginning"
Recordings of the assassination of Abraham Lincoln were quite popular after the time-viewer was invented.