President Abraham Lincoln

President Abraham Lincoln 16th President of the United States, 16th U.S. President of the United State of America, Secession Crisis States’ Rights United States Constitution Supreme Court

Sixteenth President of the United States of America
1861-1865

(February 12, 1809 - April 15, 1865)

Library of Congress

Born: February 12, 1809, in Hodgenville, Hardin County, Kentucky.
Died: April 15, 1865. Lincoln died the morning after being shot at Ford's Theatre in Washington, D.C., by John Wilkes Booth, an actor.

The South's View Regarding President Abraham Lincoln:

(North's View Regarding President Abraham Lincoln is Below)

President Abraham Lincoln unilaterally: declared war without the consent of Congress, suspended habeas corpus, arrested scores of political opponents and newspaper editors, and deployed troops to New York City to force conscription on an unwilling populace.

To the majority of the North, President Abraham Lincoln was a great president, uniter, liberator, and staunch American. To most of the South, however, Lincoln was a tyrant, invader, and he trampled (and even trumped) states' rights and the U.S. Constitution (see Governor John Ellis). Lincoln even threatened to imprison the Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court for disagreeing with him on the legality of secession, and, when Lincoln suspended the writ of habeas corpus, the Chief Justice also strongly disagreed (see: Ex Parte Milligan, President Abraham Lincoln and the Supreme Court, President Abraham Lincoln and the Chief Justice, and President Abraham Lincoln and Ex Parte Merryman).

Lincoln never sought a Supreme Court decision stating whether or not secession was legal and allowed according to the Constitution; the Supreme Court was the only judicial and lawful arbiter.

Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation, which permitted and kept slavery intact in the border states, was a political decision to block the South from gaining recognition from England and France (The Trent Affair, Preventing Diplomatic Recognition of the Confederacy, and American Civil War and International Diplomacy). Whether slavery was intact or abolished, he stated that either was completely acceptable in order to preserve the Union. Lincoln was not completely against slavery, he was not an abolitionist. He was, in other words, completely and unequivocally pro-Union. Lincoln, moreover, didn't receive a single Southern electoral vote.

President Abraham Lincoln Echoes the North's Perspective and Sentiment:

President 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 Soldiers National Cemetery at Gettysburg (commonly referred to as "The Gettysburg Address"): "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.

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