Abraham Lincoln

Abraham Lincoln (February 12, 1809 - April 15, 1865) 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 with an all-Northern base.

Lincoln's 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, and the American Civil War was underway.

From 1861 through 1865, Lincoln steered the country through the war, facing initial Southern military victories, threat of intervention from abroad, and criticism at home. Originally, Lincoln did not intend to free all slaves in the nation; his plan was to forbid the spread of slavery into any new regions, and let the institution die a gradual, natural death where it already existed. The abolitionist Republicans considered Lincoln weak because of this, and intended to replace him with John C. Frémont in the next election. However, after punitive measures emancipated the slaves of captured regions, the furor of the freedmen for their new status changed his mind. As the North gained victories, Lincoln was able to lay the foundation work for the utter end of slavery. As the war progressed, the North was able to bring its full industrial might to bear. The clear gains of the North helped secure Lincoln's re-election in 1864. (In that election he ran not as a Republican but as the leader of the National Union Party, a fusion ticket which included Lincoln and Democrat Andrew Johnson. The National Union Party's presidential ticket was formally endorsed by the Republican Party.)

In the early months of 1865, it was clear that the South was a defeated entity. On April 9, 1865, the Confederate general Robert E. Lee surrendered, effectively ending the war. (Fighting continued in the outer regions for another month.) It had lasted for more than four years and 600,000 Americans had died. Lincoln planned to reintegrate the Southern states into the Union with a program focused more on rehabilitation than punishment. On the night of April 14, tragically, Lincoln was shot by famed actor and Southern sympathizer, John Wilkes Booth, at Ford's Theatre in Washington, DC. The mortally wounded Lincoln was carried across the street to Petersen House where he died the next morning. His successor, President Johnson, was left to carry out Lincoln's post war plans with less skill than the Great Emancipator.

Abraham Lincoln in "Before the Beginning"
Recordings of the assassination of Abraham Lincoln by John Wilkes Booth at Ford's Theatre were quite popular after the time-viewer was invented.

Abraham Lincoln in Joe Steele
President Joe Steele frequently quoted Abraham Lincoln early in his presidency, using Lincoln's suspension of habeas corpus during the American Civil War to justify his own suspension of it in 1934. The fact that the country was facing war when Lincoln made that decision did not halt Steele, who argued that the country was now at war against hunger, poverty and want.

Joe Steele also quoted Lincoln stating "Must I shoot a simple-minded deserter, while I must not touch a hair of a wily agitator who induces him to desert?" when he refused to grant Father Coughlin's appeal of his death sentence for treason.

Abraham Lincoln in "Must and Shall"
President Abraham Lincoln (1809-1864) was killed by a sharpshooter's bullet while observing Jubal Early's attack on Fort Stevens on July 12, 1864. He was succeeded by Vice President Hannibal Hamlin, who used Lincoln's death as a justification for the oppressive peace imposed upon the Southern States after the Great Rebellion.

Lincoln's image was on the U.S. half-dollar coin. In 1942, FBS agent Neil Michaels found Southerners hesitant to accept it as payment for services. In one instance, a bellboy he gave such a coin to as a tip, disgustedly dropped it in the hotel lobby after he had left Michaels.

Abraham Lincoln in The Guns of the South
In January 1864, President Abraham Lincoln, along with those of several of his generals, were used as "imaginary" targets when the Rivington Men demonstrated the AK-47 to Robert E. Lee and his staff.

Lincoln remained in Washington City even after the Federal military collapsed in the face of the AK-47s at the Battle of Bealeton in Virginia. Upon the arrival of Lee Army of Northern Virginia, Lincoln invited the Confederate commander into the White House to negotiate an armistice, ending major combat of the Second American Revolution. Lincoln was initially unwilling to yield, and was entirely willing to raze the capital and sacrifice himself to drive the Confederates out. But he was forced to give in when he learned Federal supply lines had been captured by Confederate Cavalry.

For his part, Lee ordered his troops not to enter the White House and keep it as a kind of extra-territorial enclave in Confederate-occupied Washington, a goodwill gesture which helped create a positive atmosphere in the post-war relations between the USA and CSA, and between Lee and Lincoln personally.

Lincoln spent the period between the armistice and the election attempting to gain favorable terms from the Confederacy in the final peace, but with the upcoming elections, he was not very successful.

In the election of November 1864, Lincoln's Republican ticket was defeated by Democrat Horatio Seymour, though only by a few thousand votes. He carried 83 electoral votes and 12 states compared to Seymour's 138 electoral votes and 10 states.

After his term of office expired, he toured Missouri and Kentucky during the referenda on their continuing status, 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 his law practice in Springfield, Illinois. Upon receiving news of the March 4, 1868 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 the Confederate States.

Abraham Lincoln in Southern Victory
Abraham Lincoln (1809-after 1882) presided over an administration (1861-1865) which, despite his best effort, saw the truncation of the United States and the emergence of the Confederate States. While soon becoming the most hated man in the country, Lincoln successfully spent his twilight years establishing a new Socialist Party in the United States.

The War of Secession and Aftermath
Lincoln's leadership during the War of Secession was widely criticized. One of the most frequent criticisms heard was 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 the Battle of Camp Hill in 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 Lyons. At the time the bitter Lincoln told the Ambassador that sooner or later the USA would get even by finding a European ally which would be the match of Britain and France together - which at the time seemed utterly ridiculous to Lord Lyons, but in fact accurately prefigured the United States' alliance with Germany during the Great War.

Lincoln was soundly defeated by his Democratic opponent in the 1864 election. Returning to private life, Lincoln developed an interest in workers' rights, on which he had already made some strong statements during his Presidency such as telling Congress that the toil of workers, rather than the money of their employers, was the source of all wealth. In this, Lincoln's views intersected and were influenced by the works of Karl Marx, whose works Lincoln as an ex-President studied. This ultimately led Lincoln to declare himself a staunch Socialist, and as such he spent the next two decades traveling the country, lecturing and making speeches to a variety of audiences. Among more affluent people 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, in working class audiences his message was eagerly taken up and he increasingly got the name of a rabble-rouser. This further increased his alienation from mainstream Republicans, who often tended equate Socialists with violent revolutionaries - which Lincoln certainly was not.

His travels came with a price: during a trip to St. Louis in 1877, both Lincoln and his wife, Mary caught typhoid. Lincoln survived, but Mary did not. Moreover, Lincoln's relationship with his only surviving son Robert was strained by Lincoln's more radical politics.

The Second Mexican War and the founding of the Socialist Party
In 1880, the people of the US, exhausted with the Democratic Party's conciliatory stance towards the CS, returned the Republicans to power by electing James G. Blaine to the presidency. This helped precipitate the Second Mexican War. When 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 A. Custer. Blaine did not allow Pope and Custer to execute Lincoln, but ordered them to exile Lincoln to his choice of Idaho or New Mexico for the duration of the War. Lincoln chose Idaho.

When the war ended, Lincoln traveled to Chicago; on this trip, he encountered two young men who would eventually became president: Theodore Roosevelt (who challenged Lincoln after a speech in Montana, and concluded Lincoln's ideas were dangerous for the country) and Hosea Blackford (who shared a conversation with Lincoln while on a train crossing Dakota Territory; for Blackford, it was a political awakening).

On reaching Chicago, after one last attempt to convince Republican Party leaders to make workers' rights the central issue of their platform, he watched as the Republicans effectively disintegrated, as several leaders saw an opportunity to remould the now rudderless Democrats into a new anti-C.S. party. Lincoln struck out on his own, and helped create the Socialist Party from a coalition of socialist groups from around the country. Hitherto Socialists in the US were marginal groups of radicals, who contested elections as a means of agitating and speaking out rather than with a real hope of gaining public office. The adhesion of Lincoln and his supporters gave for the first time the chance of creating a Socialist party with a mass following and genuine chance to eventually gain power through the ballot box. Socialist leaders seized this chance offered by Lincoln, though his version of Socialism was far milder than theirs. Lincoln's ideas helped tame the Socialists, convincing them that more could be gained with ballots than through radical revolutionary tactics. This helped bring the party more into the mainstream of US politics, although it wasn't until 1920 that the Party actually gained national power.

Legacy
Lincoln was despised in the Confederate States, even after their victory. However, the oppressed Negro population embraced Lincoln to an extent, particularly his writings on equality. Many of the leaders of the Red Rebellion of 1915 were well versed in Lincoln.

Confederate cavalry officer Hiram Lincoln felt an acute embarrassment at sharing the name of a person so much disliked by fellow white Confederates; nevertheless, he obstinately refused to consider changing his name.

Literary comment
Lincoln dabbled in poetry as a young man. His poem "My Childhood Home I See Again" inspired the title of the first Southern Victory novel, How Few Remain. Three stanzas of the poem are excerpted in the book's front matter.

Abraham Lincoln in "Lee at the Alamo"
The election of Abraham Lincoln to the presidency in 1860 prompted several southern slave-holding states to secede from the Union and form the Confederate States. Texas was among those, declaring its secession in February 1861, a month before Lincoln's inauguration. While Lincoln was quite publicly determined to preserve the Union, he could not act until he took office, and his predecessor, James Buchanan, would not act.

The first battle of the American Civil War took place in San Antonio, Texas from February-March 1861, as Lt. Colonel Robert E. Lee opted to defend U.S. property at the Alamo, rather than surrender it to the Texas Militia. While Lee was ultimately forced to surrender, he became a national hero. When Lincoln learned that Lee had refused the position of Commander of the Army, he arranged to meet with Lee. With some careful words and persuasion, Lincoln convinced Lee to remain with the Union, rather than join his home state of Virginia in secession. Lee, realizing Lincoln's sincerity, agreed to take a commanding position in the west, and stipulated that he be allowed to retire if he were asked to fight his fellow Virginians. Lincoln agreed, and went one better, promising Lee a farm should Lee retire.