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Abraham Lincoln

Known for leading the country through the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln was the 16th president of the United States.

Lincoln's Funeral Train It's a somber spring day on April 23, 1865, as Pennsylvania Railroad Engine 331 leads President Abraham Lincoln's funeral train between Philadelphia and Harrisburg. The train used 42 different locomotives to make the trek from Washington D.C. to President Lincoln's burial site in Springfield, Illinois.

For more than 50 years, western expansion had absorbed the energies of Americans and masked the deadly seriousness of the differences between slave and nonslave states. In the North, laissez-faire capitalism, the doctrine of equality before the law, and a belief in progress reigned supreme, whereas the South represented an older, feudal system inherited from colonial times. Northerners dreamed of a more prosperous future, southerners of a quieter, nobler past. Yet Dixie's agricultural economy was commercially dominated by the North - a control deeply resented by southerners. With the founding of the Confederacy following Lincoln's election on a Union platform, war became inevitable. The South banked heavily on the superiority of her military leadership (most U.S. career officers were southerners) but time, money, and numerical superiority were all with the North. The bloodbath was to continue for four bitter years - so bitter that to this day many an "unreconstructed Rebel" goes on fighting the Civil War, aided by the prophecy that "the South shall rise again." In the eyes of common folk, it was a war dominated by the tragic ironies of a fratricidal conflict. To be sure, both sides had their giants. To northerners, Lincoln was "Father Abraham," savior of the Union; in response to his call, 700,000 flocked to the colors - or "God's flag," as bluecoated doughboys called it. On the southern side, Lee was similarly idolized - his men would have proclaimed him emperor if they could. In folklore as in real life, a whole cast of stereotypes arose - "damn-Yankees," "Johnny Rebs," dastardly "scalawags," and self-serving carpetbaggers.

In life and death Abraham Lincoln has symbolized to many generations of Americans the embodiment of our national ideals of vigor; virtue, and human compassion. Born in 1809 in a rude cabin on what was then the frontier, the future president pulled himself up from poverty and ignorance to become the wise, bold chief of a country torn by civil strife. Assassinated in 1865 just a week after the Civil War ended, Lincoln became a Christ-like martyr to many of his countrymen. As a result he has figured as the hero of innumerable legends.

After the Second Battle of Bull Run President Lincoln attempted to visit the wounded in the 40-odd military hospitals around Washington. At one stop Lincoln came upon a dying Confederate boy. The president knelt beside the cot and prayed.

Then Lincoln started for his carriage, but before he could leave, a nurse came after him. The Confederate lad was pleading to see him again. Weary and worn though he was, he returned at once to the lad's bedside and asked, "What can I do for you?" "I am so lonely and friendless, Mr. Lincoln," whispered the lad, "and I am hoping that you can tell me what my mother would want me to say and do now." "Yes, my boy," said Lincoln as he knelt beside the dying lad, "I know exactly and 1 am glad that you sent for me. Now let us pray together." Then, while the lad rested his head upon the arm of Lincoln, the president repeated the prayer his mother had taught him to say before bedtime: "Now I lay me down to sleep. . . .

Lincoln is best known for his policies on abolishing slavery and his belief in self-government; he took his job as president very seriously. About the night he knew he'd won the election he later said, "I went home, but not to get much sleep, for I then felt as I never had before, the responsibility that was upon me."

Lincoln had another side to his personality; he had a good sense of humor and liked to make jokes. Here you can see Lincoln's "business card," a joke that the opposing Democratic party played on him during the 1864 presidential election. The card says that Lincoln will be returning to Springfield, Illinois, to his law practice, where he will be ready to "swap horses, dispense law, make jokes, split rails, and perform other matters." As it turned out, Lincoln and the Republicans had the last laugh on this joke because he won reelection as president in 1864.

Lincoln liked to tell tales about his experiences. After his time as a soldier in the Black Hawk War, Lincoln joked that he had seen no "live, fighting Indians" during the war but had "a good many bloody struggles with the mosquitoes." He knew that laughing with visitors helped break the ice and that he could tell a funny story to avoid a reporter's difficult question. His sense of humor was well-known. Here are the words to a song that was inspired by Lincoln, called "Hey! Uncle Abe, are you joking yet?" Keep in mind that it was written by members of the political party that opposed Lincoln's reelection.

From Young Abe's days as a storekeeper to his final days as president, Lincoln found humor and stories ready instruments for gaining friends, for driving home a lesson, for reducing his enemies to manageable size, and for easing the tensions of his troubled world. Take for example his response to a charge that he had made some mistakes in judgment:

Lincoln replied: "That reminds me of a minister and a lawyer who were riding together; says the minister to the lawyer, `Sir, do you ever make mistakes in pleading?' `I do,' says the lawyer. `And what do you do with mistakes?' inquired the minister. `Why, sir, if large ones, I mend them; if small ones, I let them go,' said the lawyer. `And pray, sir,' continued he, `do you ever make mistakes in preaching?' `Yes, sir, I do.' `And what do you do with mistakes?' said the lawyer. `Why, sir, I dispose of them in the same manner that you do. Not long since,' he continued, `as I was preaching, I meant to observe that the Devil was the father of liars, but made a mistake and said the father of lawyers. The mistake was so small that I let it go.’'

On one occasion Lincoln dismissed Stephen Douglas, his esteemed opponent in Illinois politics, thus: "I had understood before that Mr. Douglas had been bound out to learn the cabinetmaking business, but I was not aware until now that his father was a cooper. I have no doubt, however, that he was a very good one, for he has made one of the best whisky casks I have ever seen," Lincoln said bowing gravely toward Douglas.

In condemning President Polk's land grab in the Mexican War, he told his fellow representatives that it reminded him of an Illinois farmer he knew. "`I ain't greedy about land,' the farmer told me. `I only want what 'jines mine.’”

On his favorite subject of horse trading, Lincoln told a story of a contrary nag whose owner had touted it as a first-rate bird hunter. When the potential buyer mounted up and the horse promptly carried him into a nearby stream, the horse trader shouted: "Ride him! Ride him! He's as good for fish as he is for birds!"

When a story or saying had a certain color or smack, it would often be tagged as coming from Lincoln. He was the man walking along a dusty road when a stranger driving a buggy came along. He asked the stranger, "Will you be so good as to take my overcoat to town for me?" The man in the buggy said he would. "But how will you get your overcoat back again?" "Oh, that's easy! I'm going to stay right inside of it."

Lincoln frequently turned his quick wit on himself. One story he told had to do with 'being stopped on a street one day by a man who thrust a revolver in his face. "What seems to be the matter?" inquired Lincoln with as much calmness as he could muster. "Well," replied the stranger, "some years ago I swore an oath that if I ever came across an uglier man than myself I'd shoot him on the spot." A feeling of relief came over Lincoln on hearing this and he answered, "Shoot me, then, for if I am an uglier man than you, I don't want to live."

Social historian Constance Rourke states: "As a storyteller, Lincoln used ... stories as weapons. In a political contest in 1840 he mimicked his opponent ... with so bitter a ridicule that at the end the man was reduced to tears . . ." He was also capable of tact and kindliness. Once lie was confronted by two rival hatters; each bestowed a gift on him and stood back expectantly awaiting a compliment. Lincoln looked over the two hats very carefully and then remarked: "Gentlemen, they mutually excel each other."

Lincoln warned the South in his Inaugural Address: "In your hands, my dissatisfied fellow countrymen, and not in mine, is the momentous issue of civil war. The government will not assail you.... You have no oath registered in Heaven to destroy the government, while I shall have the most solemn one to preserve, protect and defend it."

Lincoln thought secession illegal, and was willing to use force to defend Federal law and the Union. When Confederate batteries fired on Fort Sumter and forced its surrender, he called on the states for 75,000 volunteers. Four more slave states joined the Confederacy but four remained within the Union. The Civil War had begun.

As President, he built the Republican Party into a strong national organization. Further, he rallied most of the northern Democrats to the Union cause. On January 1, 1863, he issued the Emancipation Proclamation that declared forever free those slaves within the Confederacy.

Lincoln never let the world forget that the Civil War involved an even larger issue. This he stated most movingly in dedicating the military cemetery at Gettysburg: "that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain--that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom--and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth."

Lincoln won re-election in 1864, as Union military triumphs heralded an end to the war. In his planning for peace, the President was flexible and generous, encouraging Southerners to lay down their arms and join speedily in reunion.

The spirit that guided him was clearly that of his Second Inaugural Address, now inscribed on one wall of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D. C.: "With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation's wounds.... "

On Good Friday, April 14, 1865, Lincoln was assassinated at Ford's Theatre in Washington by John Wilkes Booth, an actor, who somehow thought he was helping the South. The opposite was the result, for with Lincoln's death, the possibility of peace with magnanimity died.

After 11 Southern states withdrew from the Union to form the Confederate States of America, the Confederacy printed its own money, which was different from the money used in the North. When the Civil War ended, the South had lost to the North, and its money was worth very little. The day he was killed Lincoln had a $5 Confederate note in his pocket, but no one is sure why. Do you know whose face is on the $5 bill we use today?

Come Retribution This is the first book to explore the Confederate Secret Service's link to the death of Abraham Lincoln. Investigating the assassination from their perspective as career intelligence officers, Tidwell and Gaddy, joined by James Hall, one of the leading authorities on the assassination, find and follow the clues, interpret the clandestine evidence, and draw well-founded conclusions.

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