Presidents' Day is intended to honor all the American presidents, but most significantly George Washington,the first President of the United States of America who presided over the writing of the Constitution in 1787 and Abraham Lincoln.
Lincoln grew up in a very poor rural family and was self-educated. He did not have powerful friends nor was he wealthy yet he successfully led the country through a great constitutional,moral and military crisis during the American Civil War, 1861-1865.
His leadership preserved the Union, while ending slavery, and his policies promoted economic and financial reform. Lincoln served as a captain in the Illinois Militia during the Black Hawk War in 1832 and was a country lawyer, an Illinois state legislator, and a one-term member of the United States House of Representatives.
Prior to the presidential election campaign of 1860, slavery was the major issue.There was a complete split in the Democratic party which existed between northern and southern supporters. Republicans drew their strength from the North and West, representing the greater part of the nation in an antislavery stance. There were 33 states in the union, 15 slave and 18 free . The split in the Democractic party allowed Lincoln to carry all the free states.
As the leader of the moderate faction of the Republican party, Lincoln found his policies and personality were despised by radical Republicans who demanded harsher treatment of the South and Democrats who wanted more compromise. Copperheads who were also called Peace Democrats during the American Civil War were citizens in the North who opposed the war policy and advocated restoration of the Union through negotiations and settlements with the South .
The Emancipation Proclamation is an executive order issued by United States President Abraham Lincoln on January 1, 1863, and promoted the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution which abolished slavery. It proclaimed the freedom of slaves in the ten states in rebellion. The Proclamation immediately freed 50,000 slaves, with nearly all the rest of the 3.1 million set free as Union armies advanced.
All persons held as slaves within any State or designated part of a State, the people whereof shall then be in rebellion against the United States, shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free; and the Executive Government of the United States, including the military and naval authority thereof, will recognize and maintain the freedom of such persons, and will do no act or acts to repress such persons, or any of them, in any efforts they may make for their actual freedom.
Lincoln's Gettysburg Pennsylvania Address on November 19, 1863 became the most quoted speech in American history with his sincere dedication to the principles of equal rights, liberty, and democracy.
Lincoln was assassinated on April 14, 1865 by Confederate sympathizer John Wilkes Booth at Ford's Theatre. His death was the first assassination of a U.S. president . Abraham Lincoln has been consistently ranked by scholars and the general public as one of the three greatest U.S. presidents in the history of the United States. The 16th President was noted for his complete honesty, a very rare trait in politics in the past or the present.
More Civil War battles or engagements were fought in Missouri than in any other state other than Virginia and Tennessee.
In 1861, the year the war started, 45 percent of all battles and total casualties were in Missouri and more Civil War generals were buried at St. Louis than at Arlington national cemetary or West Point. Wilson's Creek near Springfield, Missouri was the first major Civil War battle fought west of the Mississippi River, and the scene of the death of Nathaniel Lyon, the first Union general killed in combat.
The casualties were nearly equal on both sides with 1,317 Union and 1,230 Confederate troops. The Confederate allied force won the battle but they were unable to pursue the retreating Union forces.
Five slave-holding border states that included Missouri, Kentucky, Maryland, West Virginia and Delaware belonged to the Union, but their citizens were divided in allegiance. Missouri was a friend to both sides, sending men and supplies to both the Confederate and Union forces.
The civil war era found brother against brother and fathers against sons in many deadly battles which was a sad time in history.
America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves.
~ Abraham Lincoln
Sources: A Chronology of Life and Events in America, paper back 1989 by Gorton Carruth, facts and dates from 986-1988
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