Abraham Lincoln

Abraham Lincoln

Abraham Lincoln served as the 16th President of the United States during the American Civil War.  Abraham Lincoln was in office during perhaps the most critical time in the nation’s history and provided exceptional leadership.  Lincoln is remembered as a man of wit and strategic vision.  Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address is among the nation’s most treasured documents of freedom along with his Emancipation Proclamation, effective January 1, 1863, which freed slaves in territories in revolt against the United States.  Abraham Lincoln was mortally wounded by assassin John Wilkes Booth on April 14, 1865, and died the following morning at the age of 56.

Abraham Lincoln

West Virginia: Seceding from the Confederacy

By Don Roberts

During the Civil War western Virginia was crucial to the Union. The region that lay west of the Shenandoah Valley and north of the Kanawha River held nearly a quarter of Virginia’s nonslave population when the war began in 1861. Read more

Battle of Cerro Gordo by an unknown artist. New Orleans Picayune publisher George Kendall accompanied American troops during the fighting in Mexico.

Abraham Lincoln

The Pen & the Sword: A Brief History of War Correspondents

By Roy Morris Jr.

Men have been reporting their wars almost as long as they have fighting them. The first prehistoric cave drawings depicted hunters bringing down wild animals, and spoken accounts of battles, large and small, formed the starting point for the oral tradition of history. Read more

Abraham Lincoln

The Creation of the U.S. Sanitary Commission

By Lawrence Weber

In the spring of 1861, a group of influential northern men and women, led by Unitarian minister Henry Whitney Bellows and social reformer Dorothea Dix, met in New York City to discuss the formation of a sanitary commission, modeled after the British Sanitary Commission established during the Crimean War, to provide relief to sick and wounded soldiers in the Union Army. Read more

Abraham Lincoln

Clash of the Civil War Ironclads

By David A. Norris

Smoke swirled amid the thunderous noise that roared from powerful Dahlgren guns and Brooke rifles. Thousands of spectators along the shore watched the two most dangerous warships in the world at each other at point-blank range. Read more

Abraham Lincoln

Sealing Vicksburg’s Fate

By Lawrence Weber

During the Civil War, the strategic importance of Vicksburg, Mississippi, was readily apparent to both the Union and the Confederacy. Read more

Abraham Lincoln

The Death of General Robert McCook

By Stuart W. Sanders

When the Civil War erupted, so many of Lisbon, Ohio-born Robert McCook’s large extended family joined the Union Army that the clan became known as the “Fighting McCooks.” Read more

Abraham Lincoln

Battle of Mechanicsville: McClellan’s Unexploited Victory

By John Walker

After an almost uninterrupted, four-month-long string of Union successes beginning in early 1862, followed by the advance of a 100,000-man enemy army to the eastern outskirts of its capital at Richmond, Virginia, the Confederacy suddenly found itself in a life-or-death struggle for its very survival. Read more

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