Lincoln On Elections Quotes

Elections belong to the people. It's their decision. If they decide to turn their back on the fire and burn their behinds, then they will just have to sit on their blisters.

The ballot is stronger than the bullet.

Someone asked me...how it felt and I was reminded of a story that a fellow townsman of ours used to tell--Abraham Lincoln. They asked him how he felt once after an unsuccessful election. He said he felt like a little boy who had stubbed his toe in the dark. He said that he was too old to cry, but it hurt too much to laugh.

The Bible is right: A deluge of images does encourage idolatry. Look at the cults of personality in America today. Look at Hollywood. Look at Washington. I'd like to see the next presidential race be run according to Second Commandment principles. No commercials. A radio-only debate. We need an ugly president. I know we're missing out on some potential Abe Lincolns because they'd look gawky and gangly on TV.

In March 1861 alone—Lincoln’s first month in office—the U.S. Senate would receive for its advice and consent some sixty pages of names submitted for civilian and military appointments ranging from secretary of state to surveyor-general of Minnesota.

Lincoln said that elections in America were like “ ‘big boils’—they caused a great deal of pain before they came to a head, but after the trouble was over the body was in better health than before.

Douglas understood what the Republicans failed to see—that Southerners were serious in their threats to secede from the Union if Lincoln won the election.

Abraham Lincoln. He was the first president elected to office under the Republican Party’s new banner—a party established to oppose slavery and defend human freedom.

Such will be a great lesson of peace: teaching men that what they cannot take by and election, neither can they take by war; teaching all the folly of being the beginners of a war.

Let me share a famous life history with you. This was a man who failed in business at the age of twenty-one; was defeated in a legislative race at age twenty-two; failed again in business at age twenty-four; had his sweetheart die when he was age twennty-six; had a nervous breakdown at age twenty-seven; lost a congressional race at age thirty-four; lost a senatorial race at age forty-five; failed in an effort to become vice-president at age forty-seven; lost a senatorial race at age forty-nine; and was elected president of the United States at age fifty-two. This man was Abraham Lincoln.

After his failed political career, Lincoln often pondered the question of the purpose of the meaning of life. In 1850 [ten years before he was elected President], Lincoln told Herdon [his law partner] "How hard, oh how hard it is to die and leave one's country no better than if one had never lived.

There are only two sides to the question, (Stephen A.) Douglas thundered in conclusion. Every man must be for the United States or against it. There can be no neutrals in this war, only patriots -- or traitors.

What do you have to forget or overlook in order to desire that this dysfunctional clan once more occupies the White House and is again in a position to rent the Lincoln Bedroom to campaign donors and to employ the Oval Office as a massage parlor? You have to be able to forget, first, what happened to those who complained, or who told the truth, last time. It's often said, by people trying to show how grown-up and unshocked they are, that all Clinton did to get himself impeached was lie about sex. That's not really true. What he actually lied about, in the perjury that also got him disbarred, was the women. And what this involved was a steady campaign of defamation, backed up by private dicks (you should excuse the expression) and salaried government employees, against women who I believe were telling the truth. In my opinion, Gennifer Flowers was telling the truth; so was Monica Lewinsky, and so was Kathleen Willey, and so, lest we forget, was Juanita Broaddrick, the woman who says she was raped by Bill Clinton. (For the full background on this, see the chapter 'Is There a Rapist in the Oval Office?' in the paperback version of my book No One Left To Lie To. This essay, I may modestly say, has never been challenged by anybody in the fabled Clinton 'rapid response' team.) Yet one constantly reads that both Clintons, including the female who helped intensify the slanders against her mistreated sisters, are excellent on women's 'issues.

In the U.S. election of 1860, the New York Herald's owner James Gordon Bennett Sr. warned the white workers of New York, "... if Lincoln is elected, you will have to compete with the labor of four million emancipated negroes.

By privately endorsing Seward’s spirit of compromise while projecting an unyielding public image, President-elect Lincoln retained an astonishing degree of control over an increasingly chaotic and potentially devastating situation.

Michael Jordan was cut from his high school basketball team. Albert Einstein didn’t speak until he was four years old and was considered not very bright. Oprah Winfrey was demoted from a news anchor job because she was thought to be unfit for television. Walt Disney was fired from a newspaper for lacking imagination. Thomas Edison was called stupid by his teachers. The Beatles were told they didn’t have a great sound and rejected by Decca Recording Studios. Dr. Suess was rejected by twenty-seven publishers. Abraham Lincoln had a long list of failures, including eight election losses and a nervous breakdown.

Harvard students rallied on campus to offer formal, but “cordial,” congratulations to their fellow student, Robert T. Lincoln, son of the president-elect and newly dubbed—in honor of the Prince of Wales’s recent triumphant American tour—the “Prince of Rails.

At Mount Holyoke, a band of female Wide-Awakes described as “running hither and thither…laughing and shouting, and drinking lemonade,” marched in a celebratory torchlight procession, unfurling a banner that read: “PRESIDENT—ABRAHAM LINCOLN. Behind a homely exterior, we recognize inward beauty.

Not only was he sorrowful at the prospect of leaving home, he was convinced, he whispered, that he would never return alive. Herndon implored him to abandon such thoughts.

Mr. Lincoln is already defeated. He cannot be re-elected.

Sensing a violent new irritability in the American character in the 1830s, one observer in South Carolina wrote, “The whole country seems ready to take fire on the most trivial occasion.

An enthusiastic reader of English poetry, Lincoln forgot or ignored Dryden’s warning from “Astraea Redux”: “An horrid stillness first invades the ear,/ And in that silence we the tempest fear.

Asked by a journalist how he had felt after an unsuccessful election, Abraham Lincoln said, Like a little boy who stubbed his toe in the dark, he was too old to cry but it hurt too much to laugh.

Lincoln said that elections in America were like “ ‘big boils’—they caused a great deal of pain before they came to a head, but after the trouble was over the body was in better health than before

As the endlessly patient husband explained of his volatile wife’s outbursts some years later: “If you knew how little harm it does me, and how much good it does her, you wouldn’t wonder that I am meek.

Lincoln must have welcomed the chance that evening to escape from such friends, if only to submit to a final fitting for the recently delivered inaugural suit from the Chicago tailors Titsworth & Brother.

THE APPROACH OF Thanksgiving on November 29 sent Springfield into a panic—not over the nation-imperiling crisis plaguing its leading citizen, but the apparently more dismaying prospect of a local turkey shortage.

Grant’s fortuitous move to Illinois on the eve of the election had monumental consequences, conveniently situating him in the president’s home state and overtly pro-Union northern Illinois. It also placed him in the district of Congressman Elihu B. Washburne, an emphatic Lincoln supporter. Had Grant remained in Missouri, riven by internal strife, he would never have enjoyed the same chance for rapid advancement in the coming war.

While attending to the customary tasks of assembling a cabinet, rewarding political loyalists with federal appointments, and drafting an inaugural address alone—he employed no speechwriters—Lincoln was uniquely forced to confront the collapse of the country itself, with no power to prevent its disintegration. Bound to loyalty to the Republican party platform on which he had run and won, he could yield little to the majority that had in fact voted against him.

If the two Houses refuse to meet at all, or meet without a quorum of each, where shall we be?” Lincoln wrote. “I do not think that this counting is constitutionally essential to the election; but how are we to proceed in absence of it?

Henry Villard took sarcastic note of the sudden “adornment of whiskers” on November 19. “His old friends, who have been used to a great indifference as to the ‘outer man,’ on his part,” the journalist punned, “say that ‘Abe is putting on airs.

By mid-November, his protests notwithstanding, whiskers began sprouting from his face. A few weeks later, his assistant private secretary, John Hay, approvingly punned: Election news Abe’s hirsute fancy warrant— Apparent hair becomes heir apparent.44

Saying nothing was preferable to saying too much. Well versed in the Bible, Lincoln may also have remembered the lines from Isaiah: “You silence the uproar of foreigners; as heat is reduced by the shadow of a cloud, so the song of the ruthless is stilled.”102

The law of innocence is unwritten. It will not be found in a leather-bound codebook. It will never be argued in a courtroom. It cannot be written into law by the elected. It is an abstract idea and yet it closely aligns with the hard laws of nature and science. In the law of physics, for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. In the law of innocence, for every man not guilty of a crime, there is a man out there who is. And to prove true innocence, the guilty man must be found and exposed to the world.

On the subject of “personal beauty,” for example, Lincoln merrily confided he felt fortunate that “‘the women couldn’t vote,’ otherwise the monstrous portraits of him which had been circulated during the canvas by friends as well as by foes would surely defeat him.

Historian David M. Potter pointed out in 1942 that as president-elect, Lincoln was no more than “simply a lawyer from Springfield, Illinois—a man of great undeveloped capacities and narrowly limited background. He was more fit to become President than to be President.

Southern newspapers hungry for fodder to roil the secession debate fed their subscribers the most inciteful material they could unearth in the Northern press. Northern journals scoured Southern papers for similarly provocative reports designed to confirm hotheaded Southern disloyalty.

Indeed, in 1794, George Washington had not only authorized sending national troops into battle against Pennsylvanians resisting the whiskey tax, he had taken to the field to lead the forces himself. Later, Andrew Jackson had acted boldly to crush South Carolina’s attempt to nullify the 1832 tariff.

Then it was on toward Manhattan, with the train slowing down at intervening suburban stops like Dobbs Ferry and Manhattanville so Lincoln could offer his ritualistic bowing from the rear car—doing so even alongside Sing Sing, whose prisoners, wearing striped uniforms, saluted as the train passed by.113

Lincoln’s “campaign” for president ended how and where it began: in adamant silence, and in the same Illinois city to which he had so tenaciously clung since the national convention. Like the solar eclipse that had obscured the Illinois sun in July, Lincoln remained in Springfield, hidden in full view.

Still, their affection for each other remained strong: while Baker was serving in Washington, the Lincolns honored him by naming their second-born son for the congressman. (Edward Baker Lincoln died tragically at age three in 1850.) When Baker finished his term, he dutifully handed off his House seat to Lincoln.

Scott paused. Lincoln slowly straightened up. “Well, I guess we’d better persuade Virginia and Maryland to stay in the Union a while longer.” Seward gave an audible sigh of relief. This was the Lincoln that he had been inventing for himself ever since the election: the cautious vacillator—a Western Jesuit, in fact.

Whether applauded or not, the New York Tribune maintained that Lincoln’s bearing remained “deliberate and impressive” at this solemn moment, though Henri Mercier, the elegant French minister, caustically likened this plain American’s appearance amid the “marble and gilt” of the Capital to inaugurating “a Quaker in a Basilica.

To Lincoln, words always mattered most. Newspaper stories lived but a single day, caricatures flamed into view and just as quickly faded, and even the most flattering photographs inevitably receded behind the thick covers of family albums. But words lived forever. Writing, Lincoln believed, was “the great invention of the world.

Soon thereafter, Lincoln glimpsed another “mysterious” and, he feared, “ominous” vision in his own bedroom mirror. While reclining on a lounge, he glanced up to notice a “double-image of himself in the looking-glass,” one clear, the other pallid. For a moment, it was vivid; then it vanished—at first, two Lincolns side by side, then none at all.

Foreign observers had marveled at the chaotic way in which Americans elected their presidents. The French writer, Alexis de Tocqueville, saw it as a quadrennial “crisis,” like a recurring fever in an otherwise healthy patient. “Artificial passions” could be easily stoked, he wrote, raising the temperature. A self-absorbed president, catering to the “worst caprices” of his supporters, could easily distract their attention from plodding matters of governance, and whip their enthusiasms into a frenzy, especially if he divided his supporters and his critics into “hostile camps.” With the cooperation of the press, all conversation would turn to the present rather than the future, until the

Irritably, Piatt replied that “in ninety days the land would be whitened by tents.” But Lincoln would not take the bait. He merely replied: “Well, we won’t jump that ditch until we come to it,” pausing before he added: “I must run the machine as I find it.” Piatt left dinner wondering why the “strange and strangely gifted” Lincoln remained “so blind.

It came as no surprise that another visitor to Springfield found Lincoln on November 14 “reading up anew” on the history of Andrew Jackson’s response to the 1832 Nullification Crisis. While he made no effort to conceal “the uneasiness which the contemplated treason gives him,” Lincoln assured his guest that, like Jackson, he would not “yield an inch.

In the week between the death of George Floyd and the assault on the White House, at least twelve statues and memorials were defaced by vandals, including the World War II Memorial and Lincoln Memorial on the National Mall.61 Even a statue of the nonviolent revolutionary Mahatma Gandhi in front of the Indian Embassy was vandalized by BLM protesters.62

To drive the point home, here’s one more story. And, as a matter of fact, this person’s story is legendary. He wanted a job, and that job was to become president of the United States. His business failed in 1831. He was defeated in his run for the Illinois State Legislature in 1832. His second business failed in 1833. He suffered a nervous breakdown in 1836. He was defeated in his run for Illinois House Speaker in 1838, and for his run for Congress in 1843. He was elected to Congress in 1846, but lost renomination in 1848. He lost his bid to the U.S. Senate in 1854, for vice president in 1856, and again for the U.S. Senate in 1858. Finally, in 1860, Abraham Lincoln was elected president of the United States.

Lincoln likely concluded—was, as Jackson had put it, “fallacious” in its justifications and, “in direct violation of their duty as citizens of the United States, contrary to the laws of their country, subversive of its Constitution, and having for its object the destruction of the Union.” As Jackson had bluntly concluded: “Disunion by armed force is treason.

But no opposition grumbling could spoil the moment for the new president-elect. He donned his overcoat, thanked the telegraph operators for their hard work and hospitality, and stuffed the final dispatch from New York into his pocket as a souvenir. It was about time, he announced to one and all, that he “went home and told the news to a tired woman who was sitting up for him.

Almost from the moment votes are counted, lame-duck chief executives invariably recede into superfluity, but Lincoln’s hapless predecessor, James Buchanan, made procrastination into an art form. He could not have excused himself from responsibility at a more portentous moment, or left his successor with graver problems to address once he was constitutionally entitled to do so.

After he “urged his way” to the voting table, Lincoln followed ritual by formally identifying himself in a subdued tone: “Abraham Lincoln.”91 Then he “deposited the straight Republican ticket” after first cutting his own name, and those of the electors pledged to him, from the top of his preprinted ballot so he could vote for other Republicans without immodestly voting for himself.

The revelers in the State House, however, had no intention of retiring for the night. Instead they emptied into the streets and massed outside the telegraph office, shouting “New York 50,000 majority for Lincoln—whoop, whoop hurrah!” The entire city “went off like one immense cannon report, with shouting from houses, shouting from stores, shouting from house tops, and shouting everywhere.

The very day after Lincoln’s election, an obscure Springfield neighbor named Henry Fawcett dispatched a note begging the president-elect to let him “go with you to the White House as your Body Servant.” Fawcett, who listed among his qualifications his experience ringing a local church bell when Lincoln won the nomination, offered “to carry your Messages and so forth…even Shaving you as well.

Lincoln may have shown how relieved he was that there had been none of the “outrage and violence” some had predicted in New York when a giant of a man neared him, and someone in the crowd cried out, “That’s Tom Hyer,” the retired prizefighter who had won fame with a 101-round victory years before. To which the president-elect replied, to much laughter: “I don’t care, so long as he don’t hit me.

Never in America’s history, though—however many sideburns Bowery barbers shaved or immigrants came ashore—had a losing presidential candidate argued that the whole nation had been swindled. When Abraham Lincoln won the presidency in 1860, his victory so outraged his opposition that an entire region of the country broke away. But in loss Stephen A. Douglas never claimed the election was “rigged.

His secretary heard Lincoln authoritatively remind a caller on November 15 that “this government possesses both the authority and the power to maintain its own integrity.” Here was Jacksonian firmness to spare. “That, however, is not the ugly point of this matter,” Lincoln added grimly. “The ugly point is the necessity of keeping the government by force, as ours ought to be a government of fraternity.

He had seen a scribbled copy of a letter Lincoln had written to Justice of the Peace John King, who had been elected only a year earlier and had turned to him for advice on the administration of justice. The letter had been circulated by friends eager to push Lincoln’s political prospects, and Hitt had been so taken with it he’d made a copy for himself. He’d figured it was pretty good advice: “Listen well to all the evidence,” Lincoln had written, “stripping yourself of all prejudice, if any you have, and throwing away if you can all technical law knowledge, hear the lawyers make their arguments as patiently as you can, and after the evidence and the lawyers’ arguments are through, then stop one moment and ask yourself: What is the justice in this case? And let that sense of justice be your decision.

General Grant, John Hay recalled, was “deeply impressed with…the late Presidential election. The point which impressed him most powerfully was that which I regarded as the critical one—the pivotal centre of our history—the quiet and orderly character of the whole affair. No bloodshed or riot….It proves our worthiness of free institutions, and our capability of preserving them without running into anarchy or despotism.

He not only fumbled badly in his attempts at impromptu oratory en route to the capital, but worst of all, ended his journey in the dead of night, embarrassingly fearful for his safety, after encouraging unseemly partisan demonstrations in friendly Northern cities. He was too conspicuous. He was too sequestered. He was too careless. He was too calculating. He was too conciliatory. He was too coercive. He was too sloppy.

So great was the quest for patronage that Lincoln came to hope that Southerners would never leave the Union and abandon the plum government jobs they might retain if they remained loyal. As he joked rather cynically to the Ohio editor and politician Donn Piatt over a chicken dinner at the Lincoln home: “Were it believed that vacant places could be had at the North Pole, the road there would be lined with dead Virginians.

Not everyone was laughing. Ascribing “incapacity, stupidity, imbecility, gross ignorance and habitual venality” to the stalemated Congress, the New York Herald angrily concluded that “no remedy whatever is to be looked for from their representatives.” Sounding eerily like President Buchanan in his December annual message, it blamed not Southern extremism but “republican fanaticism” for the current “avalanche of destruction.

This was Lincoln’s final version of his Farewell Address: My friends—No one, not in my situation, can appreciate my feeling of sadness at this parting. To this place, and the kindness of these people, I owe every thing. Here I have lived a quarter of a century, and have passed from a young to an old man. Here my children have been born, and one is buried. I now leave, not knowing when, or whether ever, I may return, with a task before me greater than that which rested upon Washington. Without the assistance of that Divine Being, who ever attended him, I cannot succeed. With that assistance I cannot fail. Trusting in Him, who can go with me, and remain with you and be every where for good, let us confidently hope that all will yet be well. To His care commending you, as I hope in your prayers you will commend me, I bid you an affectionate farewell.

Around the same time, the president-elect opened an equally chilling letter from yet another anonymous enemy in Washington: “Caesar had his Brutus. Charles the First his Cromwell. And the President may profit by their example.” The letter was signed “Vindex”—the name of the first Roman governor to rebel against Nero—“one of a sworn band of 10, who have resolved to shoot you in the inaugural procession on the 4th of March, 1861.

As of Election Day, Lincoln had successfully avoided not only his three opponents, but also his own running mate, Hannibal Hamlin. Republicans had nominated the Maine senator for vice president without Lincoln’s knowledge, much less his consent—true to another prevailing political custom that left such choices exclusively to the delegates—in an attempt to balance the Chicago convention’s choice of a Westerner for the presidency.

And Indiana’s John Defrees expressed his belief that the inclusion of Winfield Scott of Virginia, Alexander Stephens of Georgia, and Edward Bates of Missouri “would do much to bring about a re-action among the people of all the Southern States except S. Carolina, which is insane beyond hope of cure.”134 (Stephens himself later branded as “totally groundless” the “rumor” that he had ever discussed a cabinet appointment with the president-elect.

Political parties were new and still slightly suspect, and some people disliked their constant conflict. One of the Auburn papers lamented, after the close of a campaign, that “politics are the only species of warfare that admits of no cessation of hostilities. There is reason to fear that the frequency of elections in this country, connected with the bitterness and asperity with which they are conducted, have produced a belligerent state of feeling.

John J. Hendee of Blackman, Michigan, argued that he was entitled to a job simply because he was “governed by the principles” outlined on an enclosed card. Labeled, “God’s Commands,” the manifesto called on its bearers to worship God, tell the truth, abstain from “intoxicating drinks,” and avoid marrying “blood relation[s].” The list of commandments ended with the warning: “Waste not your strength in any unnatural manner”—in other words, do not masturbate.

When a grizzled yeoman worker appeared one morning to complain that as a state legislator many years earlier, in hard times, young Lincoln had inexcusably voted to raise his government salary from two to all of four dollars a day,” Lincoln listened to the reproach calmly. “Now, Abe, I want to know what in the world made you do it?” demanded the old Democrat. With deadpan seriousness, Lincoln explained: “I reckon the only reason was that we wanted the money.

A self-proclaimed “Jackson Democrat” wrote to warn Lincoln directly: “Beware the Ides of March…the Suthron people will not Stand your administration,” while a Virginian demanded he resign outright, darkly adding, “for your wife and children sake don’t take the Chair” or risk being “murdered.” Fearing a “servile rebellion,” yet another anonymous correspondent predicted that if Lincoln did not relinquish the presidency, the South would surely “take your life.

James M. McPherson spoke for a later generation of scholars when he asserted in 1988 that Lincoln’s entire, public inaugural journey might have been a “mistake,” because in his effort to avoid “a careless remark or slip of the tongue” that might “inflame the crisis further,” the president-elect “indulged in platitudes and trivia,” producing “an unfavorable impression on those who were already disposed to regard the ungainly president-elect as a commonplace prairie lawyer.

There is frequently another way to look at things and we are encouraged to do exactly that if we want to grow as a nation, however when we mess with the principles of what made our country great we are in danger of upsetting the apple cart. Many civilized countries that did, lost their freedom in a rapid downhill spiral. Nero fiddled as Rome burned. Cubans lost out by electing Fidel Castro and the Germans and Italians, wanting a better life, voted for Mussolini and Hitler.

The markets fluctuated alarmingly for the rest of the month, falling one day, recovering the next, then plummeting another, leaving speculators alternating between relief and hysteria. By the end of November, with many nervous New Yorkers clamoring for reassurances, Strong confided he was as fearful about Northern capitulation as he was about Southern belligerence. “Our national mottoes must be changed to ‘e pluribus duo’ (at least) and ‘United we stand, divided we stand easier.

Reflecting this view—and worse—a small-town Georgia newspaper warned: “Can we suppose, for a moment, that the South will submit to a Black Ruler of our Government?” Vowing never to recognize a so-called “negro President,” the journal labeled Lincoln “a notorious nigger thief” and posted a $10,000 reward for “Hannibal’s and ABE’S heads without their bodies,” hinting that Vice President–elect Hannibal Hamlin was himself of African descent. Lincoln kept the vile clipping in his files.

Just a week earlier, coincidentally, he had quietly terminated a little known year-and-a-half-long stint as silent co-owner of Springfield’s German language newspaper. Lincoln had invested $400 in the publication in 1859 to ensure its total loyalty to the Republican party. Mission accomplished, he now turned over full ownership of the Illinois Staats-Anzeiger, presses, type, and all, to his neighbor, editor Theodore Canisius. (Later, Lincoln further rewarded Canisius with a more valuable commodity: the consulate in Vienna.)

As a host, Lincoln was “never at a loss as to the subjects that please the different classes of visitors and there is a certain quaintness and originality about all he has to say, so that one cannot help feeling interested. His ‘talk’ is not brilliant,” Villard observed. “His phrases are not ceremoniously set, but pervaded with a humorousness and, at times, with a grotesque joviality, that will always please. I think it would be hard to find one who tells better jokes, enjoys them better and laughs oftener than Abraham Lincoln.

Cabinet-making was a vexingly complicated matter, and the Chicago discussions understandably proceeded slowly. Politicians so frequently “annoyed” Lincoln with diversionary “invitations to dinner and tea,” or pressed minor patronage claims for themselves or their friends, that he found himself “unable to transact the private business for which he came.” The party faithful—prominent leaders and “lesser lights” alike—had flocked into town, some thirsting after cabinet posts, others “looking to take any office that pays well…anything they can get.

I fear nothing, care for nothing, but another disgraceful back-down of the Free States,” he told Lincoln. “That is the only real danger. Let the Union slide—it may be reconstructed; let Presidents be assassinated—we can elect more; let the Republicans be defeated and crushed—we shall rise again; but another nasty compromise, whereby everything is conceded and nothing secured will so thoroughly disgrace and humiliate us that we can never again raise our heads, and this nation becomes a second edition of the Barbary States as they were sixty years ago.

I believe this government cannot endure permanently half slave and half free. I do not expect the Union to be dissolved. I do not expect the house to fall; but I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing or all the other. Either the opponents of slavery will arrest the further spread of it, and place it where the public mind shall rest in the belief that it is in the course of ultimate extinction; or its advocates will push it forward till it will become alike lawful in all the States old as well as new—North as well as South.112

In state after state, one portentous incident after another, breathlessly reported in newspapers throughout the country in the days following the election, alarmed even confident Republicans who had insisted that a Lincoln victory could never loosen the bonds that held the Union together. As early as November 9, pro-secession placards appeared on the streets of New Orleans, calling for the formation of a defense corps of Minutemen. Dissidents unfurled palmetto flags in Charleston, where artillery saluted their appearance by opening fire with a defiant fifteen-gun cannonade.

ELECTION DAY, NOVEMBER, 1884. If I should need to name, O Western World, your powerfulest scene and show, 'Twould not be you, Niagara—nor you, ye limitless prairies—nor your huge rifts of canyons, Colorado, Nor you, Yosemite—nor Yellowstone, with all its spasmic geyser- loops ascending to the skies, appearing and disappearing, Nor Oregon's white cones—nor Huron's belt of mighty lakes— nor Mississippi's stream: —This seething hemisphere's humanity, as now, I'd name—the still small voice vibrating—America's choosing day, (The heart of it not in the chosen—the act itself the main, the quadriennial choosing,) The stretch of North and South arous'd—sea-board and inland —Texas to Maine—the Prairie States—Vermont, Virginia, California, The final ballot-shower from East to West—the paradox and con- flict, The countless snow-flakes falling—(a swordless conflict, Yet more than all Rome's wars of old, or modern Napoleon's:) the peaceful choice of all, Or good or ill humanity—welcoming the darker odds, the dross: —Foams and ferments the wine? it serves to purify—while the heart pants, life glows: These stormy gusts and winds waft precious ships, Swell'd Washington's, Jefferson's, Lincoln's sails.

Robert T. Lincoln, the president’s eldest son, who won fame as the “Prince of Rails” during the secession winter, was the only one of his children to live to maturity. He became U.S. secretary of war, minister to Great Britain, and president of the Pullman Company following brief service on General Grant’s staff at the end of the Civil War. Though frequently mentioned as a Republican candidate for president, Robert shunned electoral politics. He later brought his mother to trial in a successful effort to have her committed for insanity. Robert died an extremely wealthy man at age eighty-four in 1926.

Yet as the ominously divided vote confirmed, just as Southern foes had warned, Lincoln’s victory proved entirely sectional—an outcome all but guaranteed when most Southern states refused to list Lincoln’s name on ballots. Analyzed geographically, the total result gave Lincoln a decisive 54 percent in the North and West, but only 2 percent in the South—the most lopsided vote in American history. Moreover, most of the 26,000 votes Lincoln earned in all five slaveholding states where he was allowed to compete came from a single state—Missouri, whose biggest city, St. Louis, included many German-born Republicans.

Even after slavery ended in New York, the South’s peculiar institution remained central to the city’s economic prosperity. New York’s dominant Democratic party maintained close ties to the South, and some local officials were more than happy to cooperate in apprehending and returning fugitive slaves. Abraham Lincoln carried New York State in the election of 1860 thanks to a resounding majority in rural areas, but he received only a little over one-third of the vote in New York City. More than once, proslavery mobs ran amok, targeting abolitionist homes and gatherings and the residences and organizations of free blacks.12

The harried Lincoln made clear to Sumner that he believed compromise would simply open the door for further demands and more concessions: “Give them personal liberty bills, and they will pull in the slack, hold on, and insist on the border-state compromises. Give them that, they’ll again pull in the slack and demand Crittenden’s compromise. That pulled in, they will want all that South Carolina asks.” He “would sooner go out into his backyard and hang himself.” Then Lincoln punctuated his resolve with a down-home pledge: “By no act or complicity of mine shall the Republican party become a mere sucked egg, all shell and no principle in it.

Lincoln received one more painful reminder that he was still a target for criticism. Walking between his home and office, he noticed a group of young boys teasing an agitated stray goat. When the animal hungrily spied the taller target, it turned from the children and tried butting Lincoln instead, until he was forced to seize it by the horns in self-defense. As the youngsters watched in delight, the president-elect of the United States gave his first post-election speech—to an angry goat. He might as well have been speaking to the South when he shouted: “I didn’t bother you. It was the boys. Why don’t you go and butt the boys. I wouldn’t trouble you.

It has been widely pointed out that the two men had much in common. In fact, the parallels are amazing: Lincoln was first elected in 1860, Kennedy in 1960. Both were assassinated on a Friday, in the presence of their wives. Their successors were both southerners named Johnson who had served in the Senate. Andrew Johnson was born in 1808, Lyndon Johnson in 1908. Lincoln was elected to Congress in 1846, while Kennedy was elected to the House in 1946. Both men suffered the death of children while in office. The assassin Booth shot inside a theater and fled into a storage facility, while the assassin Oswald shot from a storage facility and fled into a theater.

How could Lincoln reply to such comments, without offending abolitionists or frightening slave-owning Unionists from the Upper South? Placating words were likewise out of the question. A plea from Virginia suggesting Lincoln need do no more than assure Southerners they had the right to bring their property into all American territories reminded the dubious president-elect of an apt story. It concerned a little girl who begged her mother to let her play outside. The mother repeatedly said no, the child persisted, and the mother finally lost patience and gave her a whipping, “upon which,” Lincoln chortled, “the girl exclaimed: ‘Now, Ma. I can certainly run out.

Even more secretively, Lincoln took up his pen around this same time to write a deeply felt manifesto of principle that he shared with absolutely no one, certainly not sculptor Thomas Jones, in whose presence he likely composed it. Secret or not, it bracingly confirms Lincoln’s steadfast determination to preserve—and ultimately, extend—not only the permanence of the Union, but also its guarantee of liberty. He had thought much about these questions in recent days, pondering concepts that went well beyond the planks of the Republican platform he so often cited. The result was an appeal not just to reason but also to emotion, a heartfelt justification for resisting any compromise that reneged on the original promise of American freedom.

Julian said he had read about a march to Washington, D.C., to be led by Martin Luther King, Jr.... "King leading a march. Who is he going to pray to this time, the statue of Abe Lincoln?" "Give us our freedom again, please suh." "King has been in jail so much he's got a liking for those iron bars and jailhouse food." The ridicule fitted our consciousness. We were brave revolutionaries, not pussyfooting nonviolent cowards. We scorned the idea of being spat upon, kicked, and then turning our cheeks for more abuse. Of course, none of us, save Julian, had even been close to bloody violence, and not one of us had spent an hour in jail for our political beliefs. My policy was to keep quiet when Reverend King's name was mentioned. I didn't want to remind my radical friends of my association with the peacemaker. It was difficult, but I managed to dispose of the idea that my silence was a betrayal. After all, when I worked for him, I had been deluded into agreeing with Reverend King that love would cure America of its pathological illnesses, that indeed our struggle for equal rights would redeem the country's baleful history. But all the prayers, sit-ins, sacrifices, jail sentences, humiliation, insults and jibes had not borne out Reverend King's vision. When maddened White citizens and elected political leaders vowed to die before they would see segregation come to an end, I became more resolute in rejecting nonviolence and more adamant in denying Martin Luther King.

But Jones knew the day of reckoning in Springfield had to come. “Mr. Lincoln,” he finally asked one day, “will you have the kindness to tell me what you think of the result thus far?” Setting down his omnipresent pencil and paper, Lincoln walked over and “examined it very closely for some time,” and finally, to the artist’s delight, exclaimed, in quaint Western style: “I think it looks very much like the critter.”43 The local newspaper agreed, predicting that though the bust would “yet require a number of ‘sittings’ more to complete the work…the artist has already so well succeeded in impressing the clay with the life and noble characteristics of his subject, that we hesitate not to pronounce it the best likeness of the President elect we have seen.

It seemed a church committee needed an architect to build a bridge “over a very dangerous and rapid river.” Designer after designer failed, until one boasted—to the horror of his priggish benefactors—“I could build a bridge to the infernal regions, if necessary.” The chairman assured his shocked colleagues: “he is so honest a man and so good an architect that if he states soberly and positively that he can build a bridge to Hades—why, I believe it. But,” he admitted, “I have my doubts about the abutment on the infernal side!” Henry Villard could not help noticing “Lincoln’s facial contortions” as he reached the story’s moral: “So,” he concluded, when “politicians said they could harmonize the Northern and Southern wings of the democracy, why, I believed them. But I had my doubts about the abutment on the Southern side.

Hitler and Mussolini were indeed authoritarians, but it doesn’t follow that authoritarianism equals fascism or Nazism. Lenin and Stalin were authoritarian, but neither was a fascist. Many dictators—Franco in Spain, Pinochet in Chile, Perón in Argentina, Amin in Uganda—were authoritarian without being fascists or Nazis. Trump admittedly has a bossy style that he gets from, well, being a boss. He has been a corporate boss all his life, and he also played a boss on TV. Republicans elected Trump because they needed a tough guy to take on Hillary; previously they tried bland, harmless candidates like Romney, and look where that got them. That being said, Trump has done nothing to subvert the democratic process. While progressives continue to allege a plot between Trump and the Russians to rig the election, the only evidence for actual rigging comes from the Democratic National Committee’s attempt to rig the 2016 primary in favor of Hillary over Bernie. This rigging evoked virtually no dissent from Democratic officials or from the media, suggesting the support, or at least acquiescence, of the whole progressive movement and most of the party itself. Trump fired his FBI director, provoking dark ruminations in the Washington Post about Trump’s “respect for the rule of law,” yet Trump’s action was entirely lawful.18 He has criticized judges, sometimes in derisive terms, but contrary to Timothy Snyder there is nothing undemocratic about this. Lincoln blasted Justice Taney over the Dred Scott decision, and FDR was virtually apoplectic when the Supreme Court blocked his New Deal initiatives. Criticizing the media isn’t undemocratic either. The First Amendment isn’t just a press prerogative; the president too has the right to free speech.

He opposed slavery, but could not see blacks as equals, so a constant theme in his approach was to free the slaves and to send them back to Africa. In his 1858 campaign in Illinois for the Senate against Stephen Douglas, Lincoln spoke differently depending on the views of his listeners (and also perhaps depending on how close it was to the election). Speaking in northern Illinois in July (in Chicago), he said: Let us discard all this quibbling about this man and the other man, this race and that race and the other race being inferior, and therefore they must be placed in an inferior position. Let us discard all these things, and unite as one people throughout this land, until we shall once more stand up declaring that all men are created equal. Two months later in Charleston, in southern Illinois, Lincoln told his audience: And inasmuch as they cannot so live, while they do remain together there must be the position of superior and inferior, and I as much as any other man am in favor of having the superior position assigned to the white race.

The president-elect did take the threats seriously. Either he or his friend, Illinois’s new governor, Richard Yates—likely operating with Lincoln’s consent—sent the state’s adjutant general, Thomas Mather, to Washington to discuss the troubling rumors with Winfield Scott. In the bargain, Lincoln hoped that Mather might also learn definitively whether the ancient, Southern-born general could himself be relied upon to remain loyal to the Union in the event the secession crisis widened to include his native state of Virginia. In the capital, the “old warrior, grizzly and wrinkled…breathing [with]…great labor,” wheezed in reply to Mather’s inquiries that Lincoln could confidently “come to Washington as soon as he is ready.” Scott promised to “plant cannon on both ends of Pennsylvania avenue, and if any of them [secessionists] show their faces or raise a finger I’ll blow them to hell.” Mather returned home to “assure Mr. Lincoln that, if Scott were alive on the day of the inauguration, there need be no alarm lest the performance be interrupted by any one.

RESPONSE TO POLITICAL SMEAR TO ROBERT ALLEN New Salem, June 21, 1836 DEAR COLONEL:—I am told that during my absence last week you passed through this place, and stated publicly that you were in possession of a fact or facts which, if known to the public, would entirely destroy the prospects of N. W. Edwards and myself at the ensuing election; but that, through favor to us, you should forbear to divulge them. No one has needed favors more than I, and, generally, few have been less unwilling to accept them; but in this case favor to me would be injustice to the public, and therefore I must beg your pardon for declining it. That I once had the confidence of the people of Sangamon, is sufficiently evident; and if I have since done anything, either by design or misadventure, which if known would subject me to a forfeiture of that confidence, he that knows of that thing, and conceals it, is a traitor to his country’s interest. I find myself wholly unable to form any conjecture of what fact or facts, real or supposed, you spoke; but my opinion of your veracity will not permit me for a moment to doubt that you at least believed what you said. I am flattered with the personal regard you manifested for me; but I do hope that, on more mature reflection, you will view the public interest as a paramount consideration, and therefore determine to let the worst come. I here assure you that the candid statement of facts on your part, however low it may sink me, shall never break the tie of personal friendship between us. I wish an answer to this, and you are at liberty to publish both, if you choose. Very respectfully, A. LINCOLN.

The DUCE diverted funds intended for the Fiume adventure, and used them for His own election campaign. He was arrested for the illegal possession of arms, sent parcel bombs to the Archbishop of Milan and its mayor, and after election was, as is well-known, responsible for the assassination of Di Vagno and Matteoti. Since then He has been responsible for the murders of Don Mizzoni Amendola, the Rosselli brothers, and the journalist Piero Gobetti, quite apart from the hundreds who have been the victims of His squadistri in Ferrara, Ravenna and Trieste, and the thousands who have perished in foreign places whose conquest was useless and pointless. We Italians remain eternally grateful for this, and consider that so much violence has made us a superior race, just as the introduction of revolvers into Parliament and the complete destruction of constitutional democracy have raised our institutions to the greatest possible heights of civilisation. Since the illegal seizure of power, Italy has known an average of five acts of political violence per diem, the DUCE has decreed that 1922 is the new Annus Domini, and He was pretended to be a Catholic in order to dupe the Holy Father into supporting Him against the Communists, even though He really is one Himself. He has completely suborned the press by wrecking the premises of dissident newspapers and journals. In 1923 he invaded Corfu for no apparent reason, and was forced to withdraw by the League of Nations. In 1924 He gerrymandered the elections, and He has oppressed minorities in the Tyrol and the North-East. He sent our soldiers to take part in the rape of Somalia and Libya, drenching their hands in the blood of innocents, He has doubled the number of the bureaucracy in order to tame the bourgeoisie, He has abolished local government, interfered with the judiciary, and purportedly has divinely stopped the flow of lava on Mt Etna by a mere act of will. He has struck Napoleonic attitudes whilst permitting Himself to be used to advertise Perugina chocolates, He has shaved his head because He is ashamed to be seen to be going bald, He has been obliged to hire a tutor to teach Him table manners, He has introduced the Roman salute as a more hygienic alternative to the handshake, He pretends not to need spectacles, He has a repertoire of only two facial expression, He stands on a concealed podium whilst making speeches because He is so short, He pretends to have studied economics with Pareto, and He has assumed infallibility and encouraged the people to carry His image in marches, as though He were a saint. He is a saint, of course. He has (and who are we to disagree?) declared Himself greater than Aristotle, Kant, Aquinas, Dante, Michelangelo, Washington, Lincoln, and Bonaparte, and He has appointed ministers to serve Him who are all sycophants, renegades, racketeers, placemen, and shorter than He is. He is afraid of the Evil Eye and has abolished the second person singular as a form of address. He has caused Toscanini to be beaten up for refusing to play 'Giovinezza', and He has appointed academicians to prove that all great inventions were originally Italian and that Shakespeare was the pseudonym of an Italian poet. He has built a road through the site of the forum, demolishing fifteen ancient churches, and has ordered a statue of Hercules, eighty metres high, which will have His own visage, and which so far consists of a part of the face and one gigantic foot, and which cannot be completed because it has already used up one hundred tons of metal.

ON THE MODUS OPERANDI OF OUR CURRENT PRESIDENT, DONALD J. TRUMP "According to a new ABC/Washington Post poll, President Trump’s disapproval rating has hit a new high." The President's response to this news was "“I don’t do it for the polls. Honestly — people won’t necessarily agree with this — I do nothing for the polls,” the president told reporters on Wednesday. “I do it to do what’s right. I’m here for an extended period of time. I’m here for a period that’s a very important period of time. And we are straightening out this country.” - Both Quotes Taken From Aol News - August 31, 2018 In The United States, as in other Republics, the two main categories of Presidential motivation for their assigned tasks are #1: Self Interest in seeking to attain and to hold on to political power for their own sakes, regarding the welfare of This Republic to be of secondary importance. #2: Seeking to attain and to hold on to the power of that same office for the selfless sake of this Republic's welfare, irregardless of their personal interest, and in the best of cases going against their personal interests to do what is best for this Republic even if it means making profound and extreme personal sacrifices. Abraham Lincoln understood this last mentioned motivation and gave his life for it. The primary information any political scientist needs to ascertain regarding the diagnosis of a particular President's modus operandi is to first take an insightful and detailed look at the individual's past. The litmus test always being what would he or she be willing to sacrifice for the Nation. In the case of our current President, Donald John Trump, he abandoned a life of liberal luxury linked to self imposed limited responsibilities for an intensely grueling, veritably non stop two year nightmare of criss crossing this immense Country's varied terrain, both literally and socially when he could have easily maintained his life of liberal leisure. While my assertion that his personal choice was, in my view, sacrificially done for the sake of a great power in a state of rapid decline can be contradicted by saying it was motivated by selfish reasons, all evidence points to the contrary. For knowing the human condition, fraught with a plentitude of weaknesses, for a man in the end portion of his lifetime to sacrifice an easy life for a hard working incessant schedule of thankless tasks it is entirely doubtful that this choice was made devoid of a special and even exalted inspiration to do so. And while the right motivations are pivotal to a President's success, what is also obviously needed are generic and specific political, military and ministerial skills which must be naturally endowed by Our Creator upon the particular President elected for the purposes of advancing a Nation's general well being for one and all. If one looks at the latest National statistics since President Trump took office, (such as our rising GNP, the booming market, the dramatically shrinking unemployment rate, and the overall positive emotive strains in regards to our Nation's future, on both the left and the right) one can make definitive objective conclusions pertaining to the exceptionally noble character and efficiency of the current resident at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. And if one can drown out the constant communicative assaults on our current Commander In Chief, and especially if one can honestly assess the remarkable lack of substantial mistakes made by the current President, all of these factors point to a leader who is impressively strong, morally and in other imperative ways. And at the most propitious time. For the main reason that so many people in our Republic palpably despise our current President is that his political and especially his social agenda directly threatens their licentious way of life. - John Lars Zwerenz