Stanice anderson biography of abraham lincoln

We are busy. Will tell you as soon as I can, and have it satisfactory. On May 1, the Union and Confederate forces collided in a region known as the Wilderness. Over the next three days, a tremendous battle would be fought near a crossroads known as Chancellorsville. Loss heavy on both sides. General Hooker slightly, but not severely, wounded.

Finally, on May 5, Butterfield sent a telegram to Lincoln that was not received until the next day explaining the dire situation that Hooker and the Army of the Potomac faced. Butterfield advised that the army was still south of the Rappahannock in a strong position, but that Hooker believed it was possible the enemy might have crossed the river and turned his right flank.

My God! What will the country say! By May 7, Lincoln was back to trying to actively manage the army and salvage something from a bad situation. He wrote Hooker to ask if the general had another plan to rebound from this most recent Union defeat.

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If you have not, please inform me, so that I, incompetent as I may be, can try and assist in the formation of some plan for the army. While Grant and Hooker were moving—with variable results—Rosecrans continued to tarry in Tennessee. It seemed that no one in the government, including Lincoln, could get him to engage the enemy. Not only did Lincoln want Tennessee cleared of the enemy, he also wanted to ensure that the Confederates were prevented from reinforcing their army facing Grant at Vicksburg.

I will attend to it. The next day, Halleck telegraphed Rosecrans that intelligence indicated that enemy troops in his front were leaving to oppose Grant. Still he failed to move. On the same day, Rosecrans responded to Halleck that he had held a council of war with his corps and division commanders, and they had a much different view of events than did Washington.

They believed that it was not advisable to move until the fate of Vicksburg had been decided. Rosecrans offered a military maxim that an army should not attempt to fight two decisive battles at the same time. Halleck shot back with a maxim of his own: Councils of war do not fight. Finally, on June 23, after much prodding by Lincoln and Halleck, Rosecrans finally began his much-awaited advance southward.

During the next two weeks, through efficient movement but little actual combat, Rosecrans managed to maneuver the Confederate forces completely out of middle Tennessee. That failure would come back to haunt him. In the East, Hooker had intended to launch another campaign against Lee after Chancellorsville. On May 13, Lincoln met with Hooker in Washington.

Lincoln now expected Hooker to do no more than keep the Confederates at bay with occasional harassing cavalry raids while he put the Army of the Potomac back in good condition. Over the course of the next few weeks, General Robert E. Lee launched his second invasion of the North in less than a year.

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Realizing that the president had no faith in him, Hooker offered his resignation, and perhaps to his surprise, Lincoln immediately accepted it. The president promoted Maj. George G. Meade, a corps commander in the Army of the Potomac, to command the army. The Army of the Potomac met the enemy near the town of Gettysburg, Pa. Once the battle was joined, Lincoln kept up with the action via telegrams sent to the War Department.

Victory had been achieved. His main problem was that he faced two separate Confederate armies in Mississippi. One occupied Vicksburg, while the other stanice anderson biography of abraham lincoln assembling at Jackson. Not wanting these two forces to unite, Grant stanice anderson biography of abraham lincoln his army between them.

Grant quickly attempted to take the city by assault, but failed and then turned to a siege to starve out the defenders. Finally, on July 4, the waiting ended for Grant, Lincoln and the country. The president was in the War Department when the announcement came over the wire on July 7. I write this now as a grateful acknowledgement for the almost inestimable service you have done the country.

I wish to say a word further. When you first reached the vicinity of Vicksburg, I thought you should do what you finally did…. When you got below and took Port Gibson, Grand Gulf, and vicinity, I thought you should go down the river and join Gen. I now wish to make the personal acknowledgement that you were right and I was wrong. Lincoln became convinced that Meade would allow the enemy to escape unless he was pressured to attack.

Finally, on July 12, Meade notified Washington that he would attack the next day. Lincoln was in the telegraph office when the message was received. The president proved to be right. As it is, the war will be prolonged indefinitely. Lincoln, however, was not ready to give up on Meade as commander of the Army of the Potomac. He had, after all, won a major, if incomplete, victory against Lee.

Very few others could boast of that. Several thousand men had been discharged when their enlistments expired. A division was sent to South Carolina for siege operations, and more than 1, men were sent to New York City to quell draft riots. Lee actually mounted a minor offensive against Meade, forcing the Union general to fall back from the Rappahannock River toward Washington.

Meade checked this movement with a clash at Bristoe Station and eventually pushed southward again. The Federals won a victory at Rappahannock Station in November, but their weak advance ground to a halt later that month along Mine Run. Aside for minor operations against the enemy, the Army of the Potomac would do nothing more until the spring of In Tullahoma, Tenn.

Lincoln wanted a quick advance by the Army of the Cumberland into the strategically important eastern part of the state. The army finally began advancing on August Believing that he had the enemy in full retreat and forgetting that Bragg still had an intact army, Rosecrans continued his advance into Georgia. After he belatedly realized that his own army was overextended, Rosecrans attempted to consolidate his force in defensive positions near Chickamauga Creek, 10 miles south of Chattanooga.

The Confederates struck the Union positions on September 19, and in a vicious two-day battle Rosecrans and his army were sent scurrying back to Chattanooga. A rattled Rosecrans wired Washington the same day, saying that he was uncertain whether his army could hold Chattanooga. Lincoln responded immediately that he still had confidence in the general and that the government would do all it could to assist him.

By September 22, concerned that he had not heard from Rosecrans in two days, Lincoln wired him and asked the condition of his forces in Chattanooga. Rosecrans responded that he held the town with 30, men but that their fate was in the hands of God—hardly a response to instill confidence. Lincoln continued to try to help Rosecrans restore his faith in himself and his army.

On September 23, the Confederate siege of Chattanooga began. The trapped Rosecrans needed help, and Lincoln attempted to find a way to send him reinforcements, debating the best way to do this with Halleck and Stanton. He said that 20, troops could be moved in a few weeks—Halleck said such an operation would more likely take a few months.

By mid-October, Lincoln had decided that a change in the command system in the West was in order. Grant was promoted to head a unified command that included most of the armies and departments from Tennessee westward. Lincoln gave Grant authority to retain or relieve Rosecrans. Grant chose the latter, replacing the lethargic general with Maj. George H.

Grant then proceeded to Chattanooga to take personal command of the efforts to break the siege. The siege of Chattanooga was broken on October 30 when a small supply line—dubbed the Cracker Line—was opened into the city. By the end ofit was clear to Lincoln that in Grant he had found the aggressive commander he had been seeking since the beginning of the war.

In MarchLincoln promoted Grant to lieutenant general, and appointed him general in chief of the Union armies. From this point until the end of the war, the president would no longer actively manage military matters. Having Grant at the helm saved the president time and energy. The course of events in had forced Lincoln to become an active commander in chief.

It is hard to imagine generals such as Rosecrans ever moving without pressure from above. Perhaps there might not have been the Union defeats at Chancellorsville and Chickamauga, but there might not have been the Union victories at Gettysburg, Vicksburg or Chattanooga, either. But in recent years powerful movements have gathered, both on the political right and the left, to condemn Lincoln as a flawed and even wicked man.

It was Lincoln who, over the years, carefully crafted the public image of himself as Log Cabin Lincoln, Honest Abe and the rest of it. But as founding father and future president James Madison noted in The Federalistthe American system was consciously designed to attract ambitious men. Such ambition was presumed natural to a politician and favorable to democracy as long as it sought personal distinction by promoting the public good through constitutional means.

What unites the right-wing and left-wing attacks on Lincoln, of course, is that they deny that Lincoln respected the law and that he was concerned with the welfare of all. The right-wing school—made up largely of Southerners and some libertarians—holds that Lincoln was a self-serving tyrant who rode roughshod over civil liberties, such as the right to habeas corpus.

Lincoln is also accused of greatly expanding the size of the federal government. Some libertarians even charge—and this is not intended as a compliment—that Lincoln was the true founder of the welfare state. His right-wing critics say that despite his show of humility, Lincoln was a megalomaniacal man who was willing to destroy half the country to serve his Caesarian ambitions.

In an influential essay, the late Melvin E. Although, Bradford viewed Lincoln as a kind of manic abolitionist, many in the right-wing camp deny that the slavery issue was central to the Civil War. Rather, they insist, the war was driven primarily by economic motives. Essentially, the industrial North wanted to destroy the economic base of the South.

Historian Charles Adams, in When in the Course of Human Events: Arguing the Case for Southern Secessionpublished incontends that the causes leading up to the Civil War had virtually nothing to do with slavery. This approach to rewriting history has been going on for more than a century. Alexander Stephens, former vice president of the Confederacy, published a two-volume history of the Civil War between and in which he hardly mentioned slavery, insisting that the war was an attempt to preserve constitutional government from the tyranny of the majority.

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But this is not what Stephens said in the great debates leading up to the war. Its foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests upon the great truth that the Negro is not equal to the white man. Slavery—subordination to the superior race—is his natural and normal condition. She was a strong and affectionate woman with whom Lincoln quickly bonded.

It was while growing into manhood that Lincoln received his formal education—an estimated total of 18 months—a few days or weeks at a time. Reading material was in short supply in the Indiana wilderness. Neighbors recalled how Lincoln would walk for miles to borrow a book. In Marchthe family again migrated, this time to Macon County, Illinois.

When his father moved the family again to Coles County, year-old Lincoln struck out on his own, making a living in manual labor. Lincoln was 6 feet 4 inches tall, rawboned and lanky yet muscular and physically strong. He spoke with a backwoods twang and walked with a long-striding gait. He was known for his skill in wielding an ax and early on made a living splitting wood for fire and rail fencing.

Young Lincoln eventually migrated to the small community of New Salem, Illinois, where over a period of years he worked as a shopkeeper, postmaster, and eventually general store owner. It was through working with the public that Lincoln acquired social skills and honed a storytelling talent that made him popular with the locals. Not surprising given his imposing frame, Lincoln was an excellent wrestler and had only one recorded loss—to Hank Thompson in —over a span of 12 years.

A shopkeeper who employed Lincoln in New Salem, Illinois, reportedly arranged bouts for him as a way to promote the business. Lincoln notably beat a local champion named Jack Armstrong and became somewhat of a hero. When the Black Hawk War broke out in between the United States and Native Americans, the volunteers in the area elected Lincoln to be their captain.

As he was starting his political career in the early s, Lincoln decided to become a lawyer. After being admitted to the bar inhe moved to Springfield, Illinois, and began to practice in the John T. Stuart law firm. InLincoln partnered with William Herndon in the practice of law. Although the two had different jurisprudent styles, they developed a close professional and personal relationship.

So to supplement his income, he followed the court as it made its rounds on the circuit to the various county seats in Illinois. On November 4,Lincoln wed Mary Todda high-spirited, well-educated woman from a distinguished Kentucky family. Mary and Lincoln met later at a social function and eventually did get married. Before marrying Todd, Lincoln was involved with other potential matches.

Aroundhe purportedly met and became romantically involved with Anne Rutledge. Before they had a chance to be engaged, a wave of typhoid fever came over New Salem, and Anne died at age Her death was said to have left Lincoln severely depressed. About a year after the death of Rutledge, Lincoln courted Mary Owens. The two saw each other for a few months, and marriage was considered.

But in time, Lincoln called off the match. InLincoln began his political career and was elected to the Illinois state legislature as a member of the Whig Party. More than a decade later, from tohe served a single term in the U. Four more joined later. Lincoln vowed to preserve the Union even if it meant war. Fighting broke out in April Lincoln always defined the Civil War as a struggle to save the Union, but in January he nonetheless issued the Emancipation Proclamation, which freed all slaves in areas still under Confederate control.

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This was an important symbolic gesture that identified the Union's struggle as a war to end slavery. In the effort to win the war, Lincoln assumed more power than any president before him, declaring martial law and suspending legal rights. He had difficulty finding effective generals to lead the Union armies until the appointment of Ulysses S Grant as overall commander in On 19 NovemberLincoln delivered his famous Gettysburg Address at the dedication of a cemetery at the site of the Battle of Gettysburg, a decisive Union victory that had taken place earlier in the year.

The following year, he moved to the newly named state capital of Springfield. For the next few years, he worked there as a lawyer and served clients ranging from individual residents of small towns to national railroad lines. Lincoln won election to the U. House of Representatives in and began serving his term the following year.

As a congressman, Lincoln was unpopular with many Illinois voters for his strong stance against the Mexican-American War. Promising not to seek reelection, he returned to Springfield in Events conspired to push him back into national politics, however: Douglas, a leading Democrat in Congress, had pushed through the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Actwhich declared that the voters of each territory, rather than the federal government, had the right to decide whether the territory should be slave or free.

On October 16,Lincoln went before a large crowd in Peoria to debate the merits of the Kansas-Nebraska Act with Douglas, denouncing slavery and its extension and calling the institution a violation of the most basic tenets of the Declaration of Independence. Rugged conditions. Heavy labor. Minimal schooling. And a mother gone too soon. The 16th U.