|
|||||||
|
|
|
|||||
|
|
|||||||
|
|||||||
|
|
|
|||||
|
|
|||||||
Abraham Lincoln
August 21, 1858: Lincoln-Douglas debates begin
Senator Stephen Douglas of Illinois and Abraham Lincoln, a Kentucky-born lawyer and one-time U.S. representative from Illinois, begin a series of famous public encounters on the issue of slavery. The two politicians, the former a Northern Democrat and the latter a Republican, were competing for Douglas' U.S. Senate seat. In the seven Lincoln-Douglas debates--all about three hours along--Lincoln argued against the spread of slavery while Douglas maintained that each territory should have the right to decide whether it would become free or slave. Lincoln lost the Senate race, but his campaign brought national attention to the young Republican Party.
In 1860, Lincoln won the Republican Party's presidential nomination. In that election, he again faced Douglas, who represented the Northern faction of a heavily divided Democratic Party, as well as Southern Democrat John C. Breckinridge and Constitutional Union candidate John Bell. On November 6, 1860, Lincoln defeated his opponents with only 40 percent of the popular vote, becoming the first Republican to win the presidency.
The announcement of his victory signaled the secession of the Southern states, which since the beginning of the year had been publicly threatening secession if the Republicans gained the White House. By the time of Lincoln's inauguration on March 4, 1861, seven states had seceded and the Confederate States of America had been formally established with Jefferson Davis as its elected president. One month later, the American Civil War began when Confederate forces under General P.G.T. Beauregard opened fire on Union-held Fort Sumter in South Carolina.
May 18, 1860: Lincoln nominated for presidency
Abraham Lincoln, a one-time U.S. representative from Illinois, is nominated for the U.S. presidency by the Republican National Convention meeting in Chicago, Illinois. Hannibal Hamlin of Maine was nominated for the vice presidency.
Lincoln, a Kentucky-born lawyer and former Whig representative to Congress, first gained national stature during his campaign against Democratic Senator Stephen Douglas of Illinois for a U.S. Senate seat in 1858. The senatorial campaign featured a remarkable series of public encounters on the slavery issue, known as the Lincoln-Douglas debates, in which Lincoln argued against the spread of slavery while Douglas maintained that each territory should have the right to decide whether it would become free or slave. Lincoln lost the Senate race, but his campaign brought national attention to the young Republican Party. In 1860, Lincoln won the party's presidential nomination.
In the November election, Lincoln again faced Douglas, who represented the Northern faction of a heavily divided Democratic Party, as well as Southern Democrat John C. Breckinridge and Constitutional Union candidate John Bell. On November 6, 1860, Lincoln defeated his opponents with only 40 percent of the popular vote, becoming the first Republican to win the presidency. The announcement of Lincoln's victory signaled the secession of the Southern states, which since the beginning of the year had been publicly threatening secession if the Republicans gained the White House.
By the time of Lincoln's inauguration on March 4, 1861, seven states had seceded, and the Confederate States of America had been formally established, with Jefferson Davis as its elected president. One month later, the American Civil War began when Confederate forces under General P.G.T. Beauregard opened fire on Union-held Fort Sumter in South Carolina.
February 23, 1861: Lincoln arrives in Washington
President-elect Abraham Lincoln arrives in Washington amid secrecy and tight security. With seven states having already seceded from the Union since Lincoln's election, the threat of civil war hung in the air.
Allen Pinkerton, head of a private detective agency, had uncovered a plot to assassinate Lincoln when he passed through Baltimore on his way to the capital. Lincoln and his advisors disagreed about how to respond to the threat. Some, including Pinkerton, wanted Lincoln to slip secretly into Washington, which would mean skipping an address to the Pennsylvania legislature in Harrisburg. Lincoln did not want to appear cowardly, but he felt the threats were serious.
Lincoln agreed to the covert arrival. With Pinkerton and Ward Hill Lamon, his former law partner, Lincoln slipped out of the hotel in Harrisburg on the evening of February 22. He wore a soft felt hat instead of his customary stovepipe hat, and he draped an overcoat over his shoulders and hunched slightly to disguise his height. The group boarded a sleeper car and arrived in Baltimore in the middle of the night. The trio slipped undetected from the Calvert Street station to Camden station across town. There, they boarded another train and arrived without incident in Washington at 6:00 a.m. On the platform, the party was surprised when a voice boomed, "Abe, you can't play that on me." It was Congressman Elihu B. Washburne, a friend of Lincoln's from Illinois. Washburne escorted Lincoln to the Willard Hotel.
A myth arose that Lincoln had dressed as a woman to avoid detection, but this was not the case. He did draw considerable criticism in the press for his unceremonious arrival. Northern diarist George Templeton Strong commented that if convincing evidence of a plot did not surface, "the surreptitious nocturnal dodging...will be used to damage his moral position and throw ridicule on his Administration." Lincoln later regretted the caper and commented to a friend "I did not then, nor do I now believe I should have been assassinated had I gone through Baltimore..." Regardless of how he had arrived, Lincoln was safely in Washington, ready to assume the difficult task ahead.
March 4, 1861: Lincoln inaugurated
Abraham Lincoln becomes the 16th president of the United States. Although he extended an olive branch to the South, he also made it clear that he intended to enforce federal laws in the seceded states.
Since Lincoln's election in November, seven states had left the Union. Worried that the election of a Republican would threaten their rights, especially slavery, the lower South seceded and formed the Confederate States of America. In the process, some of those states had seized federal properties such as armories and forts. By the time Lincoln arrived in Washington for his inauguration, the threat of war hung heavy in the air. Lincoln took a cautious approach in his remarks, and he made no specific threats against the southern states. As a result, he had some flexibility in trying to keep the states of the upper South--North Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia, Arkansas, Missouri, Kentucky, Maryland, and Delaware--in the Union.
In his address, Lincoln promised not to interfere with the institution of slavery where it existed, and he pledged to suspend the activities of the federal government temporarily in areas of hostility. However, he also took a firm stance against secession and the seizure of federal property. The government, insisted Lincoln, would "hold, occupy, and possess" its property and collect its taxes. He closed his remarks with an eloquent reminder of the nation's common heritage:
"In your hand, my fellow countrymen, and not in mine, is the momentous issue of civil war. The government will not assail you. You can have no conflict without being yourselves the aggressors. You have no oath in Heaven to destroy the government, while I shall have the most solemn one to "preserve, protect, and defend" it...We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave, to every living heart and hearthstone, all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature."
Six weeks later, the Confederates fired on Fort Sumter in Charleston, South Carolina, and the Civil War began.
1864 Lincoln inaugurated for a second term
President Lincoln begins his second term, expressing his desire for the war to end and extending a gracious hand to the South. "Fondly do we hope--fervently do we pray--that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away." He concluded with the following stirring statement: "With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right...let us strive on to finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation's wound...to do all which may achieve and cherish a just, and a lasting peace, among ourselves, and with all nations."
Within six weeks, the war was over and an assassin had killed Abraham Lincoln. Return to March 4
May 20, 1862 The Homestead Act
In a milestone in the settlement of the American West, President Abraham Lincoln signs into law the Homestead Act, a program designed to grant and from the public domain to small farmers at low cost. The act gave 160 acres of land to any applicant , male or female, who was the head of a household and 21 years or older. Eligible persons had to cultivate the land and improve it by building a barn or house, and live on the claim for five years, at which time the land became theirs with a $10 filing fee. If settlers wished to obtain title earlier, they could do so after six months by paying $1.25 an acre.
The government of the United States had long wrestled with the problem of how to get land into the hands of productive farmers. Throughout the 19th century, politicians had pursued a variety of schemes to raise revenues from land sales, but the results were always mixed. The Homestead Act was first proposed in the 1850s. By the mid-19th century the issue of land became embroiled in sectional politics. In the 1850s, the fledgling Republican Party endorsed a homestead act as a way to develop an alliance between the Northeast and Midwest. But the South wanted no part of such a scheme. The expansion of slavery had become too important to the South, and they felt expansion to the west was the only way to keep the institution healthy. Filling the West with small individual farmers did not sit well with southern congressmen who feared that the settlement of the West by small farmers would create an agricultural alternative to the Southern slave system.
Consequently, it was impossible to agree upon a proposal while the struggle over slavery continued. In 1858, a homestead bill was defeated by only one vote in the Senate. The Republicans were strong enough by 1859 to push an act through Congress, but Democratic president James Buchanan vetoed the measure. Passage of the bill was high on President Lincoln's agenda, and the loss of Southern congressmen in the secession removed most of the bill's congressional opposition. The president signed the Homestead Act into law on May 20, 1862. By the end of the Civil War, some 15,000 land claims had been made.
Most homesteaders were experienced farmers from the crowded east or Europe. By 1900, 600,000 claims had been made for some 80 million acres of public land. Although numerous claims continued to be made into the 20th century, the mechanization of American agriculture in the 1930s and 1940s led to the replacement of individual homesteads with a smaller number of much larger farms.
The Homestead Act was important symbolically if not in practice. By 1890, only about three percent of the lands west of the Mississippi had been given away under the act. This measure was far less effective in making vacant land productive than were liberal mining laws and grants to railroads. Nevertheless, it stands as a shining example of legislation that passed in the North while the South had seceded from the Union.
April 14 1865, President Lincoln shot
At Ford's Theater in Washington, D.C., John Wilkes Booth, an actor and Confederate sympathizer, fatally wounds President Abraham Lincoln. The attack came only five days after Confederate General Robert E. Lee
surrendered his massive army at Appomattox, effectively ending the American Civil War.Booth, who remained in the North during the war despite his Confederate sympathies, initially plotted to capture President Lincoln and take him to Richmond, the Confederate capital. However, on March 20, 1865, the day of
the planned kidnapping, the president failed to appear at the spot where Booth and his six fellow conspirators lay in wait. Two weeks later, Richmond fell to Union forces. In April, with Confederate armies near collapse across the South, Booth hatched a desperate plan to save the Confederacy.Learning that Lincoln was to attend Laura Keene's acclaimed performance in Our American Cousin at Ford's Theater on April 14, Booth plotted the simultaneous assassination of Lincoln, Vice President Andrew Johnson, and Secretary of State William H. Seward. By murdering the president and two of his possible successors, Booth and his conspirators hoped to throw the U.S. government into a paralyzing disarray.
When April 14 came around, Atzerodt backed out of his part to kill Johnson. Upset, Booth went to drink at a saloon near Ford's Theatre. At about 10 p.m. he walked into the theater and up to the president's box. Lincoln's
guard, John Parker, was not there because he had gotten bored with the play and left his post to get a beer. Booth easily slipped in and shot the president in the back of the head. The president's friend, Major Rathbone,
attempted to grab Booth but was slashed by Booth's knife. Booth jumped to the stage and shouted "Sic semper tyrannis! [Thus always to tyrants]--theSouth is avenged!" Booth injured his leg badly when he jumped to the stage
to escape, but he managed to hobble outside to his horse. Meanwhile, Lewis Paine forced his way into William Seward's house and stabbed the secretary of state several times before fleeing.The president, mortally wounded, was carried to a cheap lodging house opposite Ford's Theater. About 7:22 a.m.
the next morning, he died--the first U.S. president to be assassinated. Booth rode to Virginia with David Herold and stopped at the home of Dr. Samuel Mudd, who placed splints on Booth's legs. They hid in a barn on
Richard Garrett's farm as thousands of Union troops combed the area looking for them. The other conspirators were captured, except for John Surratt, who fled to Canada.When the troops finally caught up with Booth and Herold on April 26, they gave them the option of surrendering before the barn was burned down. Herold decided to surrender, but Booth remained in the barn as it went up
in flames. When the dying Booth, possibly from a self-inflicted bullet wound, was finally pulled from the flames, he reportedly said, "Tell my mother I died for my country."Of the eight other persons eventually charged with the conspiracy, four were hanged and four were jailed. On July 17, George Atzerodt, Lewis Paine, David Herold, and John Surratt's mother, Mary, were hanged in Washington.
The execution of Mary Surratt was an egregious miscarriage of justice. Although there was no proof of her involvement in the conspiracy, she was nonetheless killed. Her son John was eventually tracked down in Egypt and brought back to trial, but he managed, with the help of clever lawyers, to win an acquittal.Ironic note: On the same day he was assassinated, one of President Abraham Lincoln's last legislative acts, was to green light a proposal to create the Secret Service. Ironically enough, the new agency was formed to fight
the rise of counterfeit cash, rather than to protect the president. However, by the 1890s, the Secret Service was increasingly called on to play its more familiar role of guarding the nation's commander in chief; in 1901, presidential protection was officially adopted as one of the agency's chief duties. Along the way, the Secret Service's job description was also expanded to include quelling frauds against the government.
If you have other Birthdays or events to add for this day please E-Mail me.
 |
 |
 |
||||||
 |
|
 |
||||||
 |
 |
 |
 |
Today | Tomorrow |  |
