Lincoln: A Life of Purpose and Power
Page 50
The 1864 election is the subject of David E. Long, The Jewel of Liberty: Abraham Lincoln’s Re-election and the End of Slavery (Mechanicsburg, PA: Stackpole Books, 1994). Although he probably understates the extent of treason amongst wartime dissidents, Frank L. Klement has done more than anyone to shed light on the antiwar Democrats and the 1864 climax of the peace movement: see, especially, The Copperheads in the Middle West (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960), and The Limits of Dissent: Clement L. Vallandigham and the Civil War (1970; rept. New York: Fordham University Press, 1998).
7. The Potency of Death
William Hanchett, in The Lincoln Murder Conspiracies (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1983), provides a coolheaded examination of Lincoln’s assassination and its subsequent interpretation and reinterpretation. Contemporary reactions to Lincoln’s death are considered in Thomas Reed Turner, Beware the People Weeping: Public Opinion and the Assassination of Abraham Lincoln (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1982), and David B. Chesebrough, “No Sorrow like Our Sorrow”: Northern Protestant Ministers and the Assassination of Lincoln (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1994). The evolving place of Lincoln and of the Civil War in the nation’s psyche is the focus, respectively, of Merrill D. Peterson, Lincoln in American Memory (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), and David W. Blight, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001).
Reference
Finally, two indispensable reference works deserve special mention: Earl Schenck Miers, ed., Lincoln Day by Day: A Chronology, 1809–1865, 3 vols. (Washington, DC: Lincoln Sesquicentennial Commission, 1960), and Mark E. Neely, Jr., The Abraham Lincoln Encyclopedia (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1982).
CHRONOLOGY OF LINCOLN’S LIFE
1809 February 12 Born near Hodgenville, Hardin County, Kentucky, son of Thomas and Nancy Hanks Lincoln
1811 Spring Family moves to a farm on Knob Creek, ten miles north
1816 December Family moves to Spencer County, Indiana
1818 October 5 Mother dies of “the milk sickness”
1819 December 2 Father marries Sarah Bush Johnston of Elizabethtown, Kentucky
1828 January 20 Older sister, Sarah, dies in childbirth
Spring Takes a flatboat to New Orleans
November Andrew Jackson elected president (1829–37)
1830 March Family moves to Macon County, Illinois
Summer Delivers his first political speech
1831 April–July Second flatboat trip to New Orleans
July Settles in New Salem
1832 April–July Serves in Black Hawk War and is elected captain
August 6 Defeated in election for Illinois state legislature
1833 January Buys a general store with William F. Berry
May 7 Appointed postmaster (and serves for three years)
1834 Supplements income by work as assistant surveyor
Begins to study law
August 4 Elected to Illinois House of Representatives
December 1 Begins first term in state legislature
1835 March Sells personal possessions to pay off debt
1836 August 1 Reelected to state legislature (second term)
September 9 Receives law license
November Martin Van Buren elected president (1837–41)
1837 March 1 Formally enrolled as a lawyer and permitted to charge legal fees
March 3 With Dan Stone enters protest in the legislature against slavery
April 15 Moves to Springfield and becomes John T. Stuart’s junior law partner
1838 August 6 Reelected to the state legislature (third term)
1840 August 3 Reelected to the state legislature (fourth and final term)
November William Henry Harrison elected president (1841; term completed by John Tyler 1841–45)
1841 January 1 Breaks off engagement with Mary Todd
April Dissolves partnership with Stuart and becomes Stephen T. Logan’s junior partner
1842 September 22 Challenged to a duel by James Shields
November 4 Marries Mary Todd
1843 August 1 Birth of their first son, Robert Todd Lincoln
1844 November James K. Polk elected president (1845–49)
December Forms legal partnership with William H. Herndon, dissolving his connection with Logan
1846 March 10 Birth of Edward Baker Lincoln (Eddie), second son
August 3 Elected to U.S. House of Representatives from the Seventh Congressional District of Illinois
1847 December 3 Takes his seat in Congress
1848 November Zachary Taylor elected president (1849–50; term completed by Millard Fillmore, 1850–53)
1849 March 4 Completes his congressional term
1850 February 1 Eddie dies from pulmonary tuberculosis
December 21 Birth of William Wallace Lincoln (Willie), third son
1852 November Franklin Pierce elected president (1853–57)
1853 April 4 Birth of Thomas Lincoln (Tad), fourth son
1854 May 30 Kansas-Nebraska Bill signed into law
October 16 Peoria speech
November 7 Elected to Illinois state legislature
November 27 Gives notice that he will resign to seek U.S. Senate seat
1855 February 8 Narrowly defeated for senator in the state legislature
1856 February 22 Joins those organizing the Republican party in Illinois
May 29 Speaks at Republican state convention and is nominated a presidential elector
June 19 Runner-up in Republican national convention ballot for vice presidential nominee
November James Buchanan elected president (1857–61)
1857 March Dred Scott decision
1858 June 16 Nominated for U.S. Senate by the Republican state convention; House Divided speech
August 21– Debates publicly with Douglas
October 15
November 2 Republicans’ plurality in state election fails to prevent Douglas’s reelection to Senate
1859 October 16 John Brown’s raid at Harpers Ferry
1860 February 27 Address at Cooper Union, New York
May 9–10 State Republican nominating convention at Decatur instructs delegates to support Lincoln at national convention in Chicago
May 18 Nominated for president by the Chicago convention
November 6 Elected president
December 20 South Carolina passes ordinance of secession
1861 February 11 Leaves Springfield for Washington
March 4 Inaugurated as sixteenth president
April 12 Confederate forces bombard Fort Sumter
April 15 Issues call for 75,000 volunteers
April 19 Proclaims a blockade
April 27 Suspends writ of habeas corpus along the Philadelphia–Washington military line
July 4 Special message to Congress
July 21 First battle of Bull Run
August 6 First Confiscation Act
September 12 Revokes Frémont’s proclamation
November 1 Appoints McClellan to command of U.S. army
1862 February 6 Capture of Fort Henry
February 16 Capture of Fort Donelson
February 20 Son Willie dies
March 6 Special message to Congress on compensated emancipation
April 6–7 Battle of Shiloh
April 16 Signs into law the District of Columbia Emancipation Bill
April 25 Union capture of New Orleans
May 19 Revokes Hunter’s proclamation
May 31–June 1 Battle of Seven Pines
June 25–July 1 Seven Days’ Battles
July 12 Meets border-state representatives
July 17 Second Confiscation Act
July 22 Submits draft Emancipation Proclamation to cabinet
July 23 Names Halleck general-in-chief
August Institutes militia draft under Militia Act of July 17
August 29–30 Second battle of Bull Run
/> September 17 Battle of Antietam
September 22 Issues preliminary Emancipation Proclamation
September 24 Issues proclamation suspending writ of habeas corpus throughout the Union
October–November Union-Republican losses in state elections
November 5 Removes McClellan and appoints Burnside as commander of the Army of the Potomac
December 13 Battle of Fredericksburg
1863 January 1 Issues final Emancipation Proclamation
January 25 Replaces Burnside with Hooker
May 1–4 Battle of Chancellorsville
May 6 Arrest of Vallandigham
May 18 Siege of Vicksburg begins
June 28 Replaces Hooker with Meade
July 1–3 Battle of Gettysburg
July 4 Fall of Vicksburg
July 13–16 Draft riots in New York City
September 19–20 Battle of Chickamauga
October–November Union-Republican gains in state elections
November 19 Gettysburg Address
November 23–25 Battle of Chattanooga
December 8 Issues Proclamation of Amnesty and Reconstruction
1864 February 20 Pomeroy Circular published, promoting Chase for president
March 10 Assigns Grant to command of all Union armies
May–June Grant’s Virginia offensive
June 8 Renominated for presidency by National Union convention
June 19 Siege of Petersburg begins
June 30 Accepts Chase’s resignation from cabinet
July 4 Pocket-vetoes Wade-Davis Bill
July 18 Appoints Greeley to peace mission
August 5 Battle of Mobile Bay
August 29 Democratic convention nominates McClellan for president
September 2 Atlanta falls to Sherman
September 17 Frémont withdraws from presidential contest
September 23 Asks Blair to resign
November 8 Reelected president
November 16 Sherman starts March to the Sea
December 15–16 Confederate defeat in battle of Nashville
December 22 Sherman occupies Savannah
1865 January 31 Congress passes Thirteenth Amendment
February 3 Attends Hampton Roads Peace Conference
March 4 Delivers Second Inaugural address
April 4 Visits Richmond, two days after the Confederate evacuation
April 9 Lee surrenders at Appomattox Court House
April 11 Delivers his last speech
April 14 Shot by John Wilkes Booth at Ford’s Theatre
April 15 Dies at 7:22 a.m.
May 4 Buried in Springfield
SELECT GLOSSARY OF TERMS
abolitionists: The militant reformers who, from the mid-1820s, sought an immediate start to the nationwide removal of slavery. Commonly driven by a perfectionist Protestant religious impulse and a belief that slavery was a personal sin, these absolutists split during the later 1830s: some followed William Lloyd Garrison into “Christian anarchism” and the rejection of political activity; others aimed to use the political system—by organizing a third force, the Liberty party—to bring pressure to bear on the major parties. Abolitionists represented only a small portion of the larger antislavery constituency in the United States. The majority, hostile to the radicals, looked to prevent slavery’s spread into the federal territories and to quarantine it within the slave states, where it would gradually wither away; many advocated the transfer of the free black population to colonies abroad.
American party: see Know-Nothing party
antimission Baptists: Doctrinally strict (“hard-shell”) immersionists, found mostly in the rural Midwest and South, who “out-Calvined” the sixteenth-century theologian John Calvin. Building on Calvin’s understanding of a sovereign God’s foreordination of events, they fashioned a rigid predestinarian theology, and condemned evangelism and all other missionary activity, including organized benevolence, which they particularly associated with New England religious reformers.
Arminianism: The anti-Calvinist theological doctrine emphasizing human ability and Christ’s general atonement for all (taking its name from the sixteenth-century Dutch reformer Jacobus Arminius). This system of beliefs provided the ideological engine for the most powerful of all the mid-nineteenth-century American denominations, the Methodists.
Baptists: see evangelical Protestants
border states: The northernmost tier of slave states (Missouri, Kentucky, Virginia, Maryland, and Delaware), linked economically and culturally to both North and South. Of these, only Virginia seceded when war broke out, and it would suffer its own fracture, with the secession of West Virginia to the Union.
Campbellites: see Disciples of Christ
Compromise of 1850: The political settlement—proposed by Henry Clay and eventually achieved through the shrewd congressional management of Stephen Douglas—which resolved the growing crisis occasioned by disputes over states’ rights and the future of slavery in the lands wrested from Mexico. Northern antislavery and free-soil advocates secured California’s entry to the Union as a free state, and the abolition of the slave trade in the District of Columbia. Southerners won a strict new Fugitive Slave Law, and federal settlement of the Texas debt. At the heart of the settlement—more an armistice than a true compromise—stood the organization of New Mexico and Utah territories on the principle of “popular sovereignty”: the issue of slavery would be left for the settlers themselves to decide (subject to the verdict of the courts). Douglas’s application of this principle to the Nebraska Territory in 1854 brought to an end the relative political calm secured by his efforts four years earlier.
Confiscation Acts: The First Confiscation Act, of August 6, 1861, allowed the federal army to free any slaves being used by the Confederacy for military purposes. The Second Confiscation Act, of July 17, 1862, meeting demands for a harsher (“hard war”) policy, empowered the military authorities to confiscate the property, including slaves, owned by those deemed active rebels.
Copperheads: The antiwar element of the wartime Democratic party, so named by their opponents after the poisonous snake that strikes without warning. Their heartland was the Midwest, where they were particularly strong in the southern counties of Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois.
Democratic party: The political coalition fostered in the 1820s by Martin Van Buren on the bisectional foundations of Jefferson’s Democratic-Republican party. From 1828—when Andrew Jackson won the presidency—until 1860, the party dominated national politics, offering a mix of states’ rights philosophy, laissez-faire doctrine, and territorial expansion. It suffered devastating losses in the North following the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act. Sectionally unbalanced, it split in 1860 over the issue of the federal government’s power over, and responsibilities toward, slavery. During wartime a minority offered robust support to the Lincoln administration, while a “legitimist” majority contended electorally against the Union-Republican party, and an antiwar element labored under the charge of treason for pursuing peace on what appeared to be southern terms.
Disciples of Christ: Also known as the Campbellites (after Alexander Campbell and his father, Thomas), the movement was a fusion in 1832 of mostly midwestern and southern church separatists and immersionists—so-called Christians and Disciples—who insisted on the primacy of Scripture and the obligation of individuals to interpret the Bible for themselves. The movement numbered 170,000 members by mid-century.
evangelical Protestants: Evangelicals stressed the individual’s personal need for God’s grace in conversion (“new birth”) and recognized the Bible as the sole authority for the rule of life. They formed the largest subculture in the United States during the Civil War era, the main denominational families being Methodists (who numbered 1,738,000 members nationwide by 1860), missionary Baptists (1,025,000 members), and Presbyterians (426,000 members). Membership numbers understate the churches’ cultural presence, since for each member there were commonly two o
r three “adherents”: namely those who attended but had made no formal profession of faith.
free-soil doctrine: The creed deriving from the view that the Founding Fathers had never intended slavery to spread beyond the limits of 1787, and that the U.S. Constitution gave the federal government the power and responsibility to keep the territories free from contamination by slave labor. For some the doctrine was a means of preserving the territories exclusively for white labor; for others it was an essential means of bringing about an antislavery republic.
Free-Soil party: A coalition of antislavery forces—abolitionists, “conscience” Whigs, and antiadministration Democrats—who, following the defeat of the Wilmot Proviso (see below), sought to keep slave labor out of the territories acquired in the war with Mexico (1846–48). The party ran a presidential ticket in the elections of 1848 and 1852 (“free soil, free speech, free labor and free men”); its members provided much of the energy that went into creating the Republican party during 1854 and 1855.
Fugitive Slave Law: A part of the political compromise of 1850, this stringent congressional act provided slaveholders in pursuit of runaways with federal guarantees and mechanisms that effectively removed from free blacks the protections of the Bill of Rights (including jury trials). Several northern states passed “personal liberty laws” to frustrate the act’s operation.
habeas corpus: The common-law writ, a protection of civil liberties, which directs that a detainee must be brought before a judge for a hearing (habeas corpus: “you should have the body”). The U.S. Constitution, under Article 1, Section 9, stipulates that the privilege can be set aside only in cases of invasion or rebellion, but it does not say who has the right to suspend the writ.
Kansas-Nebraska Act: Stephen A. Douglas’s controversial measure, which passed on May 30, 1854, but only after a bitter congressional struggle. The act repealed the Missouri Compromise and invoked “popular sovereignty” as the principle for allowing the settlers of these territories (mostly north of the line of latitude 36�30¢) to decide whether or not to sanction slavery.