Lincoln and the Immigrant

Lincoln and the Immigrant
Author: Jason H. Silverman
Publisher: SIU Press
Total Pages: 174
Release: 2015-09-03
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0809334348

Between 1840 and 1860, America received more than four and a half million people from foreign countries as permanent residents, including a huge influx of newcomers from northern and western Europe, hundreds of thousands of Mexicans who became U.S. citizens with the annexation of Texas and the Mexican Cession, and a smaller number of Chinese immigrants. While some Americans sought to make immigration more difficult and to curtail the rights afforded to immigrants, Abraham Lincoln advocated for the rights of all classes of citizens. In this succinct study, Jason H. Silverman investigates Lincoln’s evolving personal, professional, and political relationship with the wide variety of immigrant groups he encountered throughout his life, revealing that Lincoln related to the immigrant in a manner few of his contemporaries would or could emulate. From an early age, Silverman shows, Lincoln developed an awareness of and a tolerance for different peoples and their cultures, and he displayed an affinity for immigrants throughout his legal and political career. Silverman reveals how immigrants affected not only Lincoln’s day-to-day life but also his presidential policies and details Lincoln’s opposition to the Know Nothing Party and the antiforeign attitudes in his own Republican Party, his reliance on German support for his 1860 presidential victory, his appointment of political generals of varying ethnicities, and his reliance on an immigrant for the literal rules of war. Examining Lincoln's views on the place of the immigrant in America’s society and economy, Silverman’s pioneering work offers a rare new perspective on the renowned sixteenth president.

Lincoln and the Thirteenth Amendment

Lincoln and the Thirteenth Amendment
Author: Christian G. Samito
Publisher: SIU Press
Total Pages: 187
Release: 2015-08-24
Genre: History
ISBN: 0809334259

Long before the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln recognized the challenge American slavery posed to the ideals of the Declaration of Independence. A constitutional amendment would be the ideal solution to ending slavery, yet the idea of such an amendment conflicted with several of Lincoln’s long-held positions. In this study, Christian G. Samito examines how Lincoln’s opposition to amending the United States Constitution shaped his political views before he became president, and how constitutional arguments overcame Lincoln’s objections, turning him into a supporter of the Thirteenth Amendment by 1864. For most of his political career, Samito shows, Lincoln opposed changing the Constitution, even to overturn Supreme Court rulings with which he disagreed. Well into his presidency, he argued that emancipation should take place only on the state level because the federal government had no jurisdiction to control slavery in the states. Between January 1863 and mid-1864, however, Lincoln came to support a constitutional amendment to abolish slavery because it worked within the constitutional structure and preserved key components of American constitutionalism in the face of Radical Republican schemes. Samito relates how Lincoln made the amendment an issue in his 1864 reelection campaign, chronicles lobbying efforts and the final vote in the House on the amendment resolution, and interrogates various charges of corruption and back-room deals. He also considers the Thirteenth Amendment in the context of the Hampton Roads conference, Lincoln’s own thoughts on the meaning of the amendment, and the impact of Lincoln’s assassination on the reading of the amendment. Samito provides the authoritative historical treatment of a story so compelling it was recently dramatized in the movie Lincoln. Closing with a lively discussion that applies the Thirteenth Amendment to current events, this concise yet comprehensive volume demonstrates how the constitutional change Lincoln helped bring about continues to be relevant today.

Lincoln's White House

Lincoln's White House
Author: James B. Conroy
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2018-10-15
Genre: Presidents
ISBN: 9781538113912

Lincoln's White House is the first book devoted to capturing the look, feel, and smell of the executive mansion from Lincoln's inauguration in 1861 to his assassination in 1865.

Lincoln, Seward, and US Foreign Relations in the Civil War Era

Lincoln, Seward, and US Foreign Relations in the Civil War Era
Author: Joseph A. Fry
Publisher:
Total Pages: 248
Release: 2019
Genre: United States
ISBN: 9780813177120

"In Lincoln, Seward, and U.S. Foreign Relations, 1861-1869, Joseph A. Fry proposes to examine this crucial partnership and its legacy. Despite differences in upbringing, personality, and social status, Lincoln became much closer personally and professionally to Seward than to any other member of his cabinet. Seward shared Lincoln's adamant belief that the institution of slavery fatally impeded the country's ability to promote American values and influence abroad. They both advanced preservation of the Union as ultimate standard for foreign policy decisions, and, by forestalling European intervention in the Civil War, their actions were critical to the North's victory and resulting reunification of the states. Lincoln reinforced Seward's conviction that future empires would be based on international commerce, especially in the Pacific region, and that the construction of a transcontinental railroad and interoceanic canal, along with acquisition of strategic island outposts, would be essential to dominating world trade. After Lincoln's death, Seward served as secretary of state to President Andrew Johnson, and during his tenure, he not only skillfully navigated war-related issues such as the French intervention in Mexico and claims derived from Confederate ship building in Great Britain, he also acquired Alaska, one of the last North American additions to the ascendant American empire. Their policies provided the bridge between the nation's prewar emphasis on territorial acquisition and the great postwar pursuit of commercial markets abroad. Together, Lincoln and Seward formulated a remarkably prescient vision of late nineteenth-century U.S. imperial expansion"--

Abraham Lincoln, Philosopher Statesman

Abraham Lincoln, Philosopher Statesman
Author: Joseph R. Fornieri
Publisher: SIU Press
Total Pages: 250
Release: 2014-06-04
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0809333309

2015 ISHS Superior Achievement Award What constitutes Lincoln’s political greatness as a statesman? As a great leader, he saved the Union, presided over the end of slavery, and helped to pave the way for an interracial democracy. His great speeches provide enduring wisdom about human equality, democracy, free labor, and free society. Joseph R. Fornieri contends that Lincoln’s political genius is best understood in terms of a philosophical statesmanship that united greatness of thought and action, one that combined theory and practice. This philosophical statesmanship, Fornieri argues, can best be understood in terms of six dimensions of political leadership: wisdom, prudence, duty, magnanimity, rhetoric, and patriotism. Drawing on insights from history, politics, and philosophy, Fornieri tackles the question of how Lincoln’s statesmanship displayed each of these crucial elements. Providing an accessible framework for understanding Lincoln’s statesmanship, this thoughtful study examines the sixteenth president’s political leadership in terms of the traditional moral vision of statecraft as understood by epic political philosophers such as Aristotle and St. Thomas Aquinas. Fornieri contends that Lincoln’s character is best understood in terms of Aquinas’s understanding of magnanimity or greatness of soul, the crowning virtue of statesmanship. True political greatness, as embodied by Lincoln, involves both humility and sacrificial service for the common good. The enduring wisdom and timeless teachings of these great thinkers, Fornieri shows, can lead to a deeper appreciation of statesmanship and of its embodiment in Abraham Lincoln. With the great philosophers and books of western civilization as his guide, Fornieri demonstrates the important contribution of normative political philosophy to an understanding of our sixteenth president. Informed by political theory that draws on the classics in revealing the timelessness of Lincoln’s example, his interdisciplinary study offers profound insights for anyone interested in the nature of leadership, statesmanship, political philosophy, political ethics, political history, and constitutional law.

The Gettysburg Address

The Gettysburg Address
Author: Abraham Lincoln
Publisher: Open Road Media
Total Pages: 9
Release: 2022-11-29
Genre: History
ISBN: 1504080246

The complete text of one of the most important speeches in American history, delivered by President Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War. On November 19, 1863, Abraham Lincoln arrived at the battlefield near Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, to remember not only the grim bloodshed that had just occurred there, but also to remember the American ideals that were being put to the ultimate test by the Civil War. A rousing appeal to the nation’s better angels, The Gettysburg Address remains an inspiring vision of the United States as a country “conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.”

Abraham Lincoln

Abraham Lincoln
Author: Michael Burlingame
Publisher: JHU Press
Total Pages: 659
Release: 2023-10-10
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1421445565

Hailed as the definitive portrait of the sixteenth president, Lincoln scholar Michael Burlingame's impressive two-volume biography has been masterfully abridged and revised. Sixteenth president of the United States, the Great Emancipator, and a surpassingly eloquent champion of national unity, freedom, and democracy, Abraham Lincoln is arguably the most studied and admired of all Americans. Michael Burlingame's astonishing Abraham Lincoln: A Life, an updated, condensed version of the 2,000-page two-volume set that The Atlantic hailed as one of the five best books of 2009, offers fresh interpretations of this endlessly fascinating American leader. Based on deep research in unpublished sources as well as newly digitized sources, this work reveals how Lincoln's character and personality were the North's secret weapon in the Civil War, the key variables that spelled the difference between victory and defeat. He was a model of psychological maturity and a fully individuated man whose influence remains unrivaled in the history of American public life. Burlingame chronicles Lincoln's childhood and early development, romantic attachments and losses, his love of learning, legal training, and courtroom career as well as his political ambition, his term as congressman in the late 1840s, and his serious bouts of depression in early adulthood. Burlingame recounts, in fresh detail, the Abraham and Mary Todd Lincoln marriage and traces the mounting moral criticism of slavery that revived his political career and won this Springfield lawyer the presidency in 1860. This abridgement delivers Burlingame's signature insight into Lincoln as a young man, a father, and a politician. Lincoln speaks to us not only as a champion of freedom, democracy, and national unity but also as a source of inspiration. Few have achieved his historical importance, but many can profit from his personal example, encouraged by the knowledge that despite a lifetime of troubles, he became a model of psychological maturity, moral clarity, and unimpeachable integrity. His presence and his leadership inspired his contemporaries; his life story will do the same for generations to come.

Abraham Lincoln

Abraham Lincoln
Author: Michael Burlingame
Publisher: SIU Press
Total Pages: 200
Release: 2007-02-20
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9780809327386

Editor Michael Burlingame sifted through the the ten-volume biography Abraham Lincoln: A History and selected only the personal observations of the secretaries during the Lincoln presidency. The result is an important collection of Nicolay and Hay's interpretations of Lincoln's character, actions, and reputation.

The War Worth Fighting

The War Worth Fighting
Author: Stephen D. Engle
Publisher: University Press of Florida
Total Pages: 277
Release: 2015-05-12
Genre: History
ISBN: 0813055342

This volume of original essays, featuring an all-star lineup of Civil War and Lincoln scholars, is aimed at general readers and students eager to learn more about the most current interpretations of the period and the man at the center of its history. The contributors examine how Lincoln actively and consciously managed the war—diplomatically, militarily, and in the realm of what we might now call public relations—and in doing so, reshaped and redefined the fundamental role of the president.