lincoln's existence. lincoln once gave his wife a copy of a book called the elements of character publishes publishes -- [inaudible] he had underlined a package indicating that marriage could deteriorate from, quote, the highest happiness that can exist on earth to a -- of misery, absolutely infernal. the lincolns' marriage was such a fountain of misery, yet incalculable good for the nation. lincoln -- [audio difficulty] he had not had so much practice at home. as his friend and colleague at the -- and biographer wrote, lincoln possessed an equanimity and patience which captivated the masses while tired out petulant -- [inaudible] and the like. which enabled him to -- unwelcome policies on the nation and frankly to restore peace to his grieving country and give physical freedom to the blacks and political freedom to the why notes. speculated if lincoln had not undergone the, quote, harsh discipline he experienced at the hands of his wife, he may have failed as president. quote, the nation is mostly indepa

and so lincoln agrees and lincoln decides to wait until there's a union victory the problem is lincoln's generals can't get their act together. and so there's a major loss at manassas and i in august and then there's not a victory until september of september 17th at antietam. and so while this is going on while lincoln is waiting for this victory to come he does several things to try to prepare the white racist north the white racist electorate in the north for what is coming. he knows he's going to issue an emancipation proclamation. he knows he's got to wait, but he might as well begin to prepare and shape public sentiment on this issue. so he does several things one of which is he writes a very famous letter to horace freely where he says my paramount object in this struggle is to save the union and it's not to either save her to destroy slavery. he's trying to get people on board if if you are willing to fight for the union think about how ending slavery might help do that and then he also calls in this black delegation and he brings us stenographer into the room to write down every

what lincoln of what lincoln called the original idea of american independence? consider alexander stevens of georgia a former whig. collie a lincoln's during his sole term in congress in the late 1840s. as the vice president future vice president of the confederate states of america stevens argued that their constitution was a better one than the old one that lincoln was trying to save. steven said it was better. not simply because it protected slavery by mentioning it explicitly where the original constitution never even used the word. there were plenty of regimes throughout human history that condone slavery. but stevens argued that the confederacy was the first to base its slave society on white supremacy. there's your systemic racism. steven said that the american founders believed quote the enslavement of the african was in violation of the laws of nature. that it was wrong in principle socially morally politically. however he lauded the confederate constitution because it was quote founded upon exactly the opposite idea. its foundations are laid. he declar

amram lincoln. abraham lincoln it was born in 18 oh nine, under john brown and abraham lincoln was born in kentucky and indiana that he moves to illinois and he inherited this white slavery ant was shared many working-class whites who expected to make a living by the sweat of the drop in part because simply harder than they could make a decent living when you had to compete with the slave labor they can always undercut your wage. there's a general feeling that slavery many community a bad place to live. and then abraham moved to illinois as a sad and abraham lincoln himself had this inherited, this kind of moderate into the display rating his case epiphany came as he explains on a trip to the north, anyone down the mississippi to wear for the first time, he saw slave auction. and again, lincoln was familiar with slaves working on the docks and he had seen slaves working and doing this and that in the other thing and doing the kind of stuff that whites did as well and so, they don't have many freedom

so that's lincoln's view. and once he becomes president he confronts the reality that there have been secessions by at that point seven states and he has to decide what to do about that. and of course that's secession is a fundamental breaking of the constitution and lincoln responded by himself breaking the constitution in i argue three ways, which i'll just mention each very briefly. the first is sort of surprising. we don't necessarily think of it as breaking the constitution, but the decision to go to war unilaterally to obligate the seceding states to return to the union was not under contemporary constitutional norms an obvious authority or right of the presidency or even of the whole government the buchanan administration in an official opinion by the attorney general embraced by buchanan in his state of the union address had said that although secession was revolution. the president congress indeed no part of the federal government have the authority to force the states back into the union because noth

but lincoln. lincoln was the savior. and his story continues be revealed and revered as the russian author leo tolstoy once wrote. the greatness of napoleon caesar or washington is only moonlight by the sun of lincoln. his example is and will last thousands of years. he was bigger than his country, bigger all the presidents together. lincoln lived and died a hero. and as a great character he will live as long the world lives. and in the end, i will leave it to william shakespeare, who i would have loved to have 272 words from shakespeare, one of lincoln's favorite literary figures, and shakespeare presently said, take him and cut him out in little stars, and he shall make the face heaven so fine that all the world will be in love with night and pay no worship to the garish sun. and with that i thank you for sharing this with me. i encourage each of you to write your own 272 words. we're still collecting and they would become a permanent part of the archive of abraham lincoln presidential library and museum. they're all 1

land of lincoln is certainly a springfield is the city of lincoln. his home is here the old state capitol where you get the house divided speeches here his o law offices are here and of course he's buried on the outskirts of town in oak ridge cemetery. so lincoln is extraordinarily important to the city of springfield. this museum was built in 2005 at open to the public it been a dream a long time of many folks here in central, illinois a presidential library for the greatest president the purpose of the library is very basic to preserve and pass on the legacy of abraham lincoln. he's a man who i think best encapsulated what it means to be american. what the whole idea of america is all about it is a freedom and equality an opportunity. we do put him on a pedestal rightly. but also he was a human being and he had great ambitions to do great things and he certainly succeeded in that. abraham lincoln was born in 1809 in kentucky. he lived there just for fear as he moved me six or seven up to indiana and lived through his teens in indiana. he grew up on

it's a book about lincoln. so i focus on what abraham lincoln did. and when you get to the war, i'm just going to show pictures. but i'm not going to talk about this because do i'm going to talk about these in depth when i do the civil war roundtable later. so basically, lincoln, though, encouraged and had the increase in technology and the advancement of technology in weaponry and in other areas during, the war, especially the use of the telegraph, the railroad. so i'll talk about that. i'll do a whole lecture on that. so i'm like, i spend much time, but i do want to spend the last part of this on how lincoln of institutionalized science prior to the civil war, there really wasn't much science institutionalized at the federal level. you know, the british had the royal society, the french had their royal academy, you know. there were other countries had things we basically didn't have much of anything other than some private clubs. what we did have with the smithsonian, thanks to a british guy named smithson who gave all this money to the u.s., even

this is lincoln's solution. this is one major problem, right the question of what to do with these folks. it's going to last well into even the late 19th century. how do we handle the people who are in rebellion against the united states the 14th amendment is going to have a lot to say about that. but it's not the only major problem. another problem is what are we going to do about our military approach to defeating the confederacy? so some of you may know that winfield scott a great military hero at this point in time had designed a plan for how to approach defeating the confederacy that newspapers began to call the anaconda plan. it was called this because you can see that this line around the confederacy sort of looks like a snake they called it scott's great snake or the anaconda plan and the idea was that you are going to blockade the coastline. and the rivers so that confederates could not receive foodstuffs and goods and military supplies, and then you are going to march your armies right into the heart o

this is in july of 1861, and a government official criticized, lincoln's choice and said to tell lincoln that carney not exactly a moral man. and lincoln said that may be, but i cannot say i do know that i have more boudoir now and war means and fight means kill. and i think mr. carney is our of man. that these gentlemen are carney's veterans. these are men members of the grand army republic photographs probably taken around 1926 in what became carney new jersey. now new jersey the first state to create a disabled soldier's home. the men were coming back from the war minus limbs and these men were going to need a care for the rest of their lives. so the state built a home in carney and over 2000 union veterans spent their final years there warm, hot food, camaraderie and what the children in the neighborhood they loved going to the front porch and the old soldiers sitting in the rocking chairs and these and girls would hear stories of run gettysburg, antietam and of course, stories of the one armed devil philip kearny. those stories are told to the children at the old soldiers home were

and of course, after fort sumter and lincoln's firing, lincoln's order for troops, several days later, the convention votes us out of the union. now, as you can see, there's going to be about a month or so later a statewide vote on secession. obviously, both armies are mobilizing during this period. so there is a lot of action that's going to take place during this particular time. and as you can see from this cartoon, and this is it says how virginia was voted out of the union. yes. and if you said no in the east, well, you got a bayonet pointing at you there. now, obviously, in the west, there is a large amount of support for staying in the union, but there is a lot of debate over what to do next. now, just a little bit of review, just to note that there are several key figures in this statehood movement. we're going to talk about mainly three of them today. the two early leaders, of course, are john carlisle, seen here on the on the right. he is a former congressman from harrison county. he was very vocal in his support of the union, but also in his support of maintaining slavery.

abraham lincoln is elected and in 30 years of democrat rule in d.c., rose despises lincoln she refersto him as the bean pole. was certainly unhappy about lincoln's election. not only did abraham lincoln's election cause or lead to the breakup of the union and the deep south states succeed after he wins, but the election divided rose's family. her niece, eddie cuts and her husband steven douglas befriended lincoln even though prior to lincoln's election douglas was one of his rivals. her son-in-law is treadwell moore becomes a captain in the u.s. army. it's interesting more asked rose to help them. he wanted to be sent to ohio to raise a regiment. he asked rose to use her influence and she didn't. she wrote to the secretary of treasury and more was able to do as he hoped. now rose was recruited as a spy in the spring of 1861 by captain thomas jordan. he was a west point is a quartermaster in the u.s. army and he was planning to leave the army inside with the confederates. he acts upon general beauregard staff. he wanted to create a spy ring. he recruited rose to do that. then taught he

so this is what's going on the lincoln administration. so lincoln and is a pointy is where most interested in concentrating native people on reservation lands and taking their land then for settler expansion. and if authorities or or militia groups felt it was necessary to commit genocidal violence to achieve that they did so and we've seen that of course with you know, sand creek bear river in various other others of these massacres. so often scholars right of lincoln as just being too busy during his administration with the civil war to do anything to to help native people or really to, you know carry out policies, that would be you know protective of native people in their lands and those kinds of things. but rather lincoln was the architect of his administration. he was the architect of the policies of his administration. he was the architect of the actions that his appointees and people carried out. but anyway, so i want to wrap up my comments just as a kind of historiographical question here of just to thinking about this this histo

but let's also look at the point of view clearly, this is a kind of familiar lincoln, a lincoln who is speaking against the institution of slavery. but we know from its situation he is probably arguing against its extension. lincoln was very careful about promoting abolitionist politics at least until he was elected president. and in fact, even a couple of years into the civil war. and so the point of view here is. expressed in terms of if slavery is allowed to extend the audience of voters who are going to be white men in edwardsville, illinois, in 1858, put their own liberty in jeopardy. so it's a very complicated argument in that he is saying if extends you yourselves are in danger. and if students remember the free soil movement, which was a movement primarily in the democratic party against the extension of slavery lincoln is really making a free soil argument here and to a certain extent appealing to democrats, though he himself is a republican, which would make sense because he's running against stephen douglas, a democrat. so what we think about situation are we think about the