Biography - Abraham Lincoln
Preserving the Union

Lincoln's presidency in detail. The emotional tragedy and the humorus side of the man. His thoughts on the early commanders and dicussions with Historians. DVD

Abraham Lincoln

Sixteenth President 1861-1865

Young Abraham Lincoln During the Civil War, telegraph wires were strung to follow the action on the battlefield. But there was no telegraph office in the White House, so Lincoln went across the street to the War Department to get the news.

Abe Lincoln's Hat
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Abraham Lincoln, started out in life as an absent-minded lawyer. How did he nudge his memory? He stuck letters, court notes, contracts, and even his checkbook in his trademark top hat

Fast Fact: Abhorring war, Abraham Lincoln accepted War as the only means to save the Union.

Biography: 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.

The son of a Kentucky frontiersman, Lincoln had to struggle for a living and for learning. Five months before receiving his party's nomination for President, he sketched his life:

"I was born Feb. 12, 1809, in Hardin County, Kentucky. My parents were both born in Virginia, of undistinguished families--second families, perhaps I should say. My mother, who died in my tenth year, was of a family of the name of Hanks.... My father ... removed from Kentucky to ... Indiana, in my eighth year.... It was a wild region, with many bears and other wild animals still in the woods. There I grew up.... Of course when I came of age I did not know much. Still somehow, I could read, write, and cipher ... but that was all."

Lincoln made extraordinary efforts to attain knowledge while working on a farm, splitting rails for fences, and keeping store at New Salem, Illinois. He was a captain in the Black Hawk War, spent eight years in the Illinois legislature, and rode the circuit of courts for many years. His law partner said of him, "His ambition was a little engine that knew no rest."

He married Mary Todd, and they had four boys, only one of whom lived to maturity.

In 1858 Lincoln ran against Stephen A. Douglas for Senator. He lost the election, but in debating with Douglas he gained a national reputation that won him the Republican nomination for President in 1860.

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.
16th president of the united states Abe Lincoln


President Abraham Lincoln



American Experience - Abraham and Mary Lincoln: A House Divided
Abraham Lincoln's legacy as the Great Emancipator reshaped the nation while his tragic death left Mary reclusive and forgotten. DVD


Mary Todd Lincoln


Illustrated London Times 1861
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Lincoln
The History Channel

Lincoln was able to employ his powerful wit and innate charm to transform his inner demons. A devastating and moving chronicle of a president's last moments, Lincoln captures the dark soul that fueled one of history's brightest lights

Unsolved History ~ Plots to Kill Lincoln
Discovery Channel

Before John Wilkes Booth fired that fatal shot in the balcony of Ford's Theater, President Lincoln was the target of at least five other assassination conspiracies.

Lincoln and Lee at Antietam:
The Cost of Freedom

Lincoln and Lee at Antietam covers the entire struggle of the Antietam Campaign. The political concept about why Lincoln needed a Union victory and Lee's need to take the war north were covered as well as the battle.

Abraham Lincoln
Journey though the life of America's heroic President. The story begins at Lincoln's birth. The history of what led this man to the White House, his freeing of the slaves, and the Civil War; This story delves into his personal life, including Lincoln's affair with Ann Ruthledge and courtship of Mary Todd. Lincoln struggles through his debates with Douglas and in the end is assassinated

Civil War History Reading Abraham Lincoln Book Titles


Blood on the Moon: The Assassination of Abraham Lincoln
The definative book on the Lincoln Assassination, and the escape of John Wilkes Booth. not only does the author give a clear and concise accounting, he takes us out of the vacuum and explains the minute details of the very knotted relationships between the conspirators, and the links of the Confederate underground to Canada and back.

Lincoln and the Decision for War: The Northern Response to Secession
Democratic leader Stephen Douglas to Republican party leader William Seward. More than just a politcal history, letters and quotes from common townspeople provide a complete view of the perceptions of the time

The Complete Lincoln-Douglas Debates of 1858
Zarefsky analyzes the rhetoric of the speeches, showing how Lincoln and Douglas chose their arguments and initiated a debate that shook the nation. Their eloquent, statesmanlike discussion of the morality of slavery illustrates the masterful use of rhetorical strategies and tactics in the public forum: a form of discourse that has nearly disappeared from the political scene today

Forced into Glory: Abraham Lincoln's White Dream
This dissenting view of Lincoln's greatness surveys the president's policies, speeches, and private utterances and concludes that he had little real interest in abolition. Pointing to Lincoln's support for the fugitive slave laws, his friendship with slave-owning senator Henry Clay, and conversations in which he entertained the idea of deporting slaves

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