Abraham Lincoln: The Life and Times of US 16TH President

Abraham Lincoln, sixteenth President of the United States, was born near Hodgenville, Kentucky on February 12, 1809. His family moved to Indiana when he was seven and he grew up on the edge of the frontier. He had very little formal education, but read voraciously when not working on his father’s farm.  A childhood friend later recalled Lincoln's "manic" intellect, and the sight of him red-eyed and tousle-haired as he pored over books late into the night.  In 1828, at the age of nineteen, he accompanied a produce-laden flatboat down the Mississippi River to New Orleans, Louisiana—his first visit to a large city--and then walked back home.  Two years later, trying to avoid health and finance troubles, Lincoln's father moved the family moved to Illinois.

After moving away from home, Lincoln co-owned a general store for several years before selling his stake and enlisting as a militia captain defending Illinois in the Black Hawk War of 1832.  Black Hawk, a Sauk chief, believed he had been swindled by a recent land deal and sought to resettle his old holdings.  Lincoln did not see direct combat during the short conflict, but the sight of corpse-strewn battlefields at Stillman's Run and Kellogg's Grove deeply affected him. As a captain, he developed a reputation for pragmatism and integrity.  Once, faced with a rail fence during practice maneuvers and forgetting the parade-ground instructions to direct his men over it, he simply ordered them to fall out and reassemble on the other side a minute later.  Another time, he stopped his men before they executed a wandering Native American as a spy.  Stepping in front of their raised muskets, Lincoln is said to have challenged his men to combat for the terrified native's life.  His men stood down.

After the war, he studied law and campaigned for a seat on the Illinois State Legislature. Although not elected in his first attempt, Lincoln persevered and won the position in 1834, serving as a Whig.

Abraham Lincoln met Mary Todd in Springfield, Illinois where he was practicing as a lawyer. They were married in 1842 over her family’s objections and had four sons.  Only one lived to adulthood.  The deep melancholy that pervaded the Lincoln family, with occasional detours into outright madness, is in some ways sourced in their close relationship with death. 

Lincoln, a self-described "prairie lawyer," focused on his all-embracing law practice in the early 1850s after one term in Congress from 1847 to 1849. He joined the new Republican party—and the ongoing argument over sectionalism—in 1856. A series of heated debates in 1858 with Stephen A. Douglas, the sponsor of the 1854 Kansas-Nebraska Act, over slavery and its place in the United States forged Lincoln into a prominent figure in national politics. Lincoln’s anti-slavery platform made him extremely unpopular with Southerners and his nomination for President in 1860 enraged them.

On November 6, 1860, Lincoln won the presidential election without the support of a single Southern state.  Talk of secession, bandied about since the 1830s, took on a serious new tone. The Civil War was not entirely caused by Lincoln’s election, but the election was one of the primary reasons the war broke out the following year.

Lincoln’s decision to fight rather than to let the Southern states secede was not based on his feelings towards slavery.  Rather, he felt it was his sacred duty as President of the United States to preserve the Union at all costs.  His first inaugural address was an appeal to the rebellious states, seven of which had already seceded, to rejoin the nation.  His first draft of the speech ended with an ominous message: "Shall it be peace, or the sword?" 

The Civil War with the opening bombardment of Fort Sumter, South Carolina, on April 12, 1861.  Lincoln forced the Confederate hand with his decision to resupply the fort, which had suddenly become an outpost in a hostile nation.  The Southern navy turned away the supply convoy and then fired the first shot of the war at Fort Sumter, forcing the Federal defenders to surrender after a 34-hour battle. 

Throughout the war Lincoln struggled to find capable generals for his armies.  As commander-in-chief, he legally held the highest rank in the United States armed forces, and he diligently exercised his authority through strategic planning, weapons testing, and the promotion and demotion of officers.  McDowell, Fremont, McClellan, Pope, McClellan again, Buell, Burnside, Rosecrans--all of these men and more withered under Lincoln's watchful eye as they failed to bring him success on the battlefield. 

He did not issue his famous Emancipation Proclamation until January 1, 1863 after the Union victory at the Battle of Antietam.  The Emancipation Proclamation, which was legally based on the President’s right to seize the property of those in rebellion against the State, only freed slaves in Southern states where Lincoln’s forces had no control. Nevertheless, it changed the tenor of the war, making it, from the Northern point of view, a fight both to preserve the Union and to end slavery.

In 1864, Lincoln ran again for President.  After years of war, he feared he would not win.  Only in the final months of the campaign did the exertions ofUlysses S. Grant, the quiet general now in command of all of the Union armies, begin to bear fruit.  A string of heartening victories buoyed Lincoln's ticket and contributed significantly to his re-election.  In his secondinauguration speech, March 4, 1865, he set the tone he intended to take when the war finally ended. His one goal, he said, was “lasting peace among ourselves.” He called for “malice towards none” and “charity for all.” The war ended only a month later.

The Lincoln administration did more than just manage the Civil War, although its reverberations could still be felt in a number of policies.  The Revenue Act of 1862 established the United States' first income tax, largely to pay the costs of total war.  The Morrill Act of 1862 established the basis of the state university system in this country, while the Homestead Act, also passed in 1862, encouraged settlement of the West by offering 160 acres of free land to settlers.  Lincoln also created the Department of Agriculture and formally instituted the Thanksgiving holiday.  Internationally, he navigated the "Trent Affair," a diplomatic crisis regarding the seizure of a British ship carrying Confederate envoys, in such a way as to quell the saber-rattling overtures coming from Britain as well as the United States.  In another spill-over from the war, Lincoln restricted the civil liberties of due process and freedom of the press. 

On April 14, 1865, while attending a play at Ford’s Theatre in Washington, D.C., Abraham Lincoln was shot by Confederate sympathizer, John Wilkes Booth.  The assassination was part of a larger plot to eliminate the Northern government that also left Secretary of State William Seward grievously injured.  Lincoln died the following day, and with him the hope of reconstructing the nation without bitterness.

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Biography: The Ben Carson Story

Overview

Ben Carson overcame his troubled youth in inner-city Detroit to become a neurosurgeon famous for successfully separating conjoined twins. In 2015, he became one of many candidates seeking to gain the official Republican presidential nomination.

Ben Carson was born in Detroit, Michigan, on September 18, 1951. His mother, though under-educated herself, pushed her sons to read and to believe in themselves. Carson went from being a poor student to receiving academic honors and eventually attending medical school. As a doctor, he became director of pediatric neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins Hospital at age 33 and earned fame for his groundbreaking work separating conjoined twins. In 2015 he announced that he was running for the following year's presidential election, hoping to gain the Republican nomination. He is one of the party's leading candidates in the polls. 

Birth and Family Background

Benjamin Solomon Carson was born in Detroit, Michigan, on September 18, 1951, the second son of Sonya and Robert Solomon Carson. His mother was raised in Tennessee in a very large family and dropped out of school in the third grade. With limited prospects in life, she married Baptist minister and factory worker Robert Carson when she was 13. The couple moved to Detroit and had two children. But Sonya eventually discovered her husband was a bigamist and had another secret family. The two divorced, with Robert going to live with his other family and thus leaving Sonya and her children financially devastated.

Influential Mother

Ben was 8 and Curtis, his brother, was 10 when Sonya began to raise them as a single mother, reportedly moving to Boston to live with her sister for a time and eventually returning to Detroit. The family was very poor and to make ends meet Sonya sometimes toiled at two or three jobs simultaneously in order to provide for her boys. Most of the jobs she had was as a domestic worker.

As Carson later detailed in his autobiography, his mother was frugal with the family's finances, cleaning and patching clothes from the Goodwill in order to dress the boys. The family would also go to local farmers and offer to pick vegetables in exchange for a portion of the yield. Sonya would then can the produce for the kids' meals. Her actions, and the way she managed the family, proved to be a tremendous influence on Ben and Curtis.

Sonya also taught her boys that anything was possible. By his recollection many years later, Carson had thoughts of a career in medicine. Because his family was on medical assistance, they would have to wait for hours to be seen by one of the interns at hospitals in Boston or Detroit. Ben would listen to the pulse of the hospital as doctors and nurses went about their routines, fantasizing that one day they'd be calling for a "Dr. Carson."

Power of Reading

Both Carson and his brother experienced difficulty in school. Ben fell to the bottom of his class and became the object of ridicule by his classmates. Determined to turn her sons around, Sonya limited their TV time to a few select programs and refused to let them go outside to play until they'd finished their homework.

She required them to read two library books a week and give her written reports, even though with her poor education, she could barely read them. At first, Ben resented the strict regimen, but after several weeks, he began to find enjoyment in reading, discovering he could go anyplace, be anybody and do anything between the covers of a book.

Ben began to learn how to use his imagination and found it more enjoyable than watching television. This attraction to reading soon led to a strong desire to learn more. Carson read literature on all types of subjects, seeing himself as the central character of what he was reading, even if it was a technical book or an encyclopedia.

Carson would later say that he began to view his prospects differently, that he could become the scientist or physician he had dreamed about, and thus, he cultivated an academic focus. A fifth grade science teacher was one of the first to encourage Carson's interests in lab work after the youngster was the only student able to identify an obsidian rock sample brought to school. 

Within a year, Carson was amazing his teachers and classmates with his scholastic improvement. The children's books he read, while he was confined to quarters, now had true educational relevancy. He was able to recall facts and examples from his books at home and relate them to what he was learning in school.

Still, there were challenges. After Carson received a certificate of achievement in the eighth grade for being at the top of his class, a teacher openly berated his fellow white students for letting a black boy get ahead of them academically.

At Southwestern High School in inner-city Detroit, Carson's science teachers recognized his intellectual abilities and mentored him further. Other educators helped him to stay focused when outside influences pulled him off course.

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10 Memorable Facts about the First American President, George Washington

Unanimously elected President of the United States twice, George Washington played an essential part in shaping the role and function of the President of the United States.

Here are ten memorable facts about him, every American should know:

1. Washington is the only president to have been unanimously elected by the Electoral College

In both the election of 1789 and 1792 Washington received all votes from the Electoral College. During the first election, Washington won the electors of all ten eligible states. Three states, however, did not contribute to the vote total. Both North Carolina and Rhode Island were ineligible; neither had ratified the Constitution yet. In addition, New York was unable to participate in the election, as the legislature had not passed a bill in time to appoint its eight electors. In 1792, Washington received all 132 electoral votes, winning each of the fifteen states.

2. Washington was the only president inaugurated in two cities

However, neither of those cities was Washington, D.C., as the seat of government did not move there until 1800. Washington’s first inauguration occurred in New York City on the portico of Federal Hall in Lower Manhattan on April 30, 1789. The second inauguration was in Philadelphia, held in the Senate Chamber of Congress Hall on March 4, 1793.

3. George Washington was strapped for cash during his presidency

Washington was frequently short on cash, with much of his wealth tied up in land holdings. In order to afford the move to New York City to become president, Washington borrowed £600 on a promissory note to cover his relocation expenses for the move from Mount Vernon to the presidential household at 3 Cherry Street in Manhattan. Washington explained that the situation forced him “to do what I never expected to be driven to, that is, to borrow money on Interest."

Despite Washington’s difficulties in liquid finance, he was initially reticent to accept a salary as President. Washington had previously refused payment as Commander in Chief of the Continental Army and struggled with the ethics of receiving payment for public service. He eventually relented, believing that denying a salary would set a poor precedent. Washington's annual salary as President was $25,000, and despite his unease with receiving compensation, he also complained that his pay was not sufficient to cover the expenses of his household and at times he even had to pay expenses out of pocket.

4. George Washington established the tradition of a cabinet of advisors

Thomas Jefferson, 1788 (White House Historical Association)

While the Constitution calls for the creation of executive departments, it only explained that the heads of executive departments were unelected officials who had to answer to the president. Washington defined how these roles would function.

While the current presidential cabinet includes sixteen members (fifteen heads of executive agencies and the vice president), Washington’s cabinet included just four original members: Secretary of StateThomas Jefferson, Secretary of TreasuryAlexander Hamilton, Secretary of War Henry Knox, and Attorney General Edmund Randolph. Washington set the precedence for how these roles would interact with the presidency, establishing the cabinet as the chief executive’s private, trusted advisors. Further, Washington sought to include multiple perspectives in the cabinet, perhaps best exhibited by the political spectrum ranging from Hamilton to Jefferson.

While variance helped ensure that differing ideas would be aired, it also created tensions, particularly regarding debates over the establishment of a national bank. As Jefferson himself admitted, "Hamilton and myself were daily pitted in the cabinet like two cocks.” Despite the harsh disagreements, Jefferson believed that the tone had little impact on quality of governance, explaining that "The pain was for Hamilton and myself, but the public experienced no inconvenience."

5. Washington signed into law the first copyright law

On May 31, 1790, President Washington signed the Copyright Act of 1790 into law. Formally titled, “An act for the encouragement of learning by securing the copies of maps, charts, and books, to the authors and proprietors of such copies, during the times therein mentioned,” the legislation was the first law protecting copyright in the United States. The act explained that it intended to protect “the author and authors of any map, chart, book or books already printed within these United States,” and that authors would “have the sole right and liberty of printing, reprinting, publishing and vending such map, chart, book or books.” Copies of the law bearing Washington’s signature were re-printed in newspapers throughout the country.

6. Washington set precedents for the social life of the president

Washington was concerned that the presidents of the Confederation Congress had been overwhelmed by visitors in the past. As a result, during the presidency Washington set aside the late afternoon for meetings with the public and evenings for dinner parties with invited guests. On Tuesday afternoons Washington received male callers from three until four o'clock in the afternoon. The reception was a series of gentlemanly introductions and greetings where Washington was visited in a formal manner as President of the United States. Friday evenings included both women and men and were less formal affairs featuring interaction with colleagues and other politicians.

7. The first Thanksgiving Proclamation was issued by President Washington

Days of thanksgiving were celebrated since the beginning of European settlement in North America. In 1789, President Washington formalized the holiday by issuing a proclamation designating November 26 as a national day of thanksgiving. Washington declared that the day sprung from the Almighty’s care of Americans both during and after the Revolution. The proclamation was distributed to state governors, requesting that they announce and observe the day within their states. Newspapers subsequently published the proclamation and celebrations were held throughout the United States. Washington himself marked the day by attending services at St. Paul's Chapel in New York City, and subsequently donating beer and food to imprisoned debtors in the city.

8. Washington vetoed only two bills while President

Washington rejected both pieces of legislation based on ideological concerns and in each instance Congress was unable to overturn the veto. The first bill that Washington vetoed was the Apportionment Bill of April 5, 1792 which aimed at providing guidelines for the number of congressional representatives based on the results of 1790 census. Washington vetoed the legislation based on constitutional concerns, believing that the law would not divide each state’s population evenly when determining representation. Further, Washington argued that the law had unfairly “allotted to eight of the States, more than one [representative] for thirty thousand,” potentially creating an imbalance in power.

On February 28, 1797 (shortly before leaving office), Washington vetoed a bill aimed at cutting the size and cost of the military. The veto was utilized based on the advice of Secretary of War James McHenry and was policy-driven, objecting to one specific provision that dissolved two companies of light cavalry.

9. Washington’s second inaugural address is the shortest ever delivered

Washington’s second inaugural, delivered March 4, 1793, clocked in at less than two minutes and was only 135 words in length. The text of that ever-so-brief address reads:

“I am again called upon by the voice of my country to execute the functions of its Chief Magistrate. When the occasion proper for it shall arrive, I shall endeavor to express the high sense I entertain of this distinguished honor, and of the confidence which has been reposed in me by the people of united America.”

“ Previous to the execution of any official act of the President the Constitution requires an oath of office. This oath I am now about to take, and in your presence: That if it shall be found during my administration of the Government I have in any instance violated willingly or knowingly the injunctions thereof, I may (besides incurring constitutional punishment) be subject to the upbraidings of all who are now witnesses of the present solemn ceremony.”

10. Washington’s Farewell Address is one of the most celebrated speeches in American history.

Washington’s Farewell Address, which warned against “the baneful effects of the Spirit of Party,” encouraged a focus on education and morality, cautioned against sectionalism within the nation, and admonished against entangling foreign alliances, has continued to have influence over American culture and political debates long past when it was first published.

In the midst of the Civil War, on February 19, 1862, President Abraham Lincoln issued a proclamation calling on Americans to mark Washington’s birthday. Lincoln “recommended to the people of the United States that they assemble in their customary places of meeting for public solemnities on the 22d day of February” to “celebrate the anniversary of the birth of the Father of his Country by causing to be read to them his immortal Farewell Address.”

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