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American President
Biography
Generally considered to be the greatest president of the United States, who freed four million slaves and saved the nation after leading the Union to victory in the Civil War of 1861-65, Abraham Lincoln was born in Kentucky in 1809 to a pioneer family on what was then the western frontier of the United States. His family then moved to southern Indiana in 1816 and southern Illinois three years later, although Lincoln by all accounts never intended to follow the same social and economic path as these poor white farmers. Even as a young man, though, he picked up their strongly antislavery views and the common belief that poor whites had little opportunity to better their social and economic circumstances in the slave states. Given the lack of schools and universities on the frontier, almost all of Lincoln's education was really self-education, and he learned his writing and rhetorical skills from reading Shakespeare's plays and the King James Version of the Bible (McPherson 3). His literary genius enabled him to use the language from these sources to produce true masterpieces like the Gettysburg Address of 1863 and Second Inaugural Address on 1865 that stood the test of time. His early ventures such as founding a general store were not successful, although he did find...
From the start, he was a member of the Whig Party, which favored the urban commercial and industrial regions over those of the agrarian and Southern-oriented Democratic Party. With his marriage to Mary Todd, a member of a prominent Whig family, Lincoln was also able to move in the highest social circles in Springfield, Illinois (McPherson 9).
When he was in the Illinois legislature, Lincoln supported a state bank and government funding for the Illinois Central Railroad, while in his private practice as an attorney he also represented railroads. Prior to being elected president in 1860, he had served only one term in Congress in 1846-48, where he came to public notice by opposing the Mexican War. Indeed, like many Northern Whigs he regarded this as a war of aggression in order to expand the territory open to slavery, and he voted repeatedly for the Wilmot Proviso that would have excluded this from these regions annexed from Mexico (Thomas 111). Lincoln never changed any of these views in his later political life, and when he was one of the early members of the new Republican Party, which formed to resist the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 (McPherson 24). He also ran (unsuccessfully) as a Free Soiler against Senator Stephen Douglass in 1858, although his debates…
From that point onward, the abolition of slavery depended on the success of the Northern armies, and by the end of the war freed slaves made up 10% of these. Lincoln finally found two generals who had achieved great success against the Confederates in the West -- William Tecumseh Sherman and Ulysses S. Grant -- and formulated a successful strategy with them for winning the war (Thomas 306). Grant was sent to capture the Confederate capital at Richmond and defeat Robert E. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia while Sherman was sent through Georgia and the Carolinas to destroy Confederate railroads, industry and agriculture there. In 1864, Lincoln feared that he would be defeated for reelection by General George McClellan, a conservative Democrat who had opposed the Emancipation Proclamation and intended to offer peace terms to the Confederacy that would permit slavery to continue (Thomas 409). Sherman's capture of Atlanta, Georgia in 1864 ensured Lincoln's reelection, while Grant captured Richmond in April 1865 and accepted the surrender of Lee's forces at Appomattox Courthouse. Lincoln was assassinated on April 14, 1865, before he had really begun to deal with the problems of postwar Reconstruction, but at the end of his life he was moving toward the position of granting citizenship and voting rights to blacks for the first time in U.S. history (McPherson 63).
International Issues
Compared to
It was during the same period that hostilities with the communist leadership culminated into the bombing of Libya, loggerheads with the Soviet Union and a stiff arms race with the U.S.S.R. It is also significant to note that it was during the same time that he successfully engaged Mikhail Gorbachev who was then the Soviet General secretary and culminated into the signing of Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) treaty that signaled
Kennedy and the Civil Rights Movement John Fitzgerald Kennedy, or JFK, served the President of the United States for less than a single full term in the early 1960s after serving in Congress for several terms before this. He was elected in 1960 and took office the following January, promising to explore new frontiers and bring the country to new heights. In late November of 1963, he was assassinated in Dallas,
Thomas Jefferson Personal Profile contirbutions to the founding of the nation Religious Freedom Declaration of Independence OPINION OF SLAVERY AND RACE RELTIONS Thomas Jefferson has undoubtedly made significant contributions to the founding of the United States. Regarded as one of America's most predominant political figures, Jefferson has been lauded for several milestones during his career. Jefferson is perhaps most well-known as the author of the Declaration of Independence and as the staunchest supporter of the
Under Reno's direction, on April 22, 2000, under the scrutiny of national and international media and news cameras: "Armed INS officers entered the home (where the child had been living with close relatives) before dawn and within three minutes carried Elian out to a waiting government van. Hours later, the boy was reunited with his father at Andrews Air Force Base near Washington, D.C., and eventually they returned to Cuba
Partisan differences of support and disapproval of our two most recent presidents are quite clear, with the personal popularity of President Bush among Democrats lower than was President Clinton's among Republicans while his impeachment proceedings were under way. The ongoing Iraqi war is especially indicative, with diametrically opposite opinions on whether the conflict is going well or has improved national security. In a purely logical sense it would seem that Jimmy
Princess Diana and President Clinton When taking some time to think about it, is easy to both compare and contrast Princess Diana and President Clinton. Both are (or indeed were) prominent political figures, hounded by the press. Both attempted at some point to promote an image of marital bliss when in fact the opposite was the case. In each case sexual indiscretion on the part of one or both of the