Free Republic

As the capital of the Confederate States of America, Richmond, Va. could hardly be described as a supporter of Abraham Lincoln; its grand Monument Avenue is chock-full of oversized statues of heroes of the Confederacy, including Robert E. Lee, Jefferson Davis and Jeb Stuart. But now, nearly 150 years after the Civil War ended, Lincoln – or at least the movie version of him – is Richmond’s new hero...To coincide with the movie’s recent release on DVD, Virginia Tourism Corporation has created several self-guided tours that follow Lincoln around the state...

Righteousness exalts a nation, but sin condemns any people. (Proverbs 14:34) The name “Abraham Lincoln” enjoys a boundless shelf life. The 16th president of the United States is more popular today than ever. The blockbuster movie “Lincoln” recently took home two Oscars, with Daniel Day-Lewis earning the “Best Actor” nod for his masterful portrayal of the Civil War president. In his outstanding biography, “Abraham Lincoln, a Man of Faith and Courage,” author Joe Wheeler observed that “Lincoln has had more books written about him than all our nation’s presidents put together.” Love him or hate him, Abraham Lincoln remains,...

Ten Neo-Confederate Myths (+one) "Secession was not all about slavery." In fact, a study of the earliest secessionists documents shows, when they bother to give reasons at all, their only major concern was to protect the institution of slavery. For example, four seceding states issued "Declarations of the Immediate Causes Which Induce and Justify Secession from the Federal Union". These documents use words like "slavery" and "institution" over 100 times, words like "tax" and "tariff" only once (re: a tax on slaves), "usurpation" once (re: slavery in territories), "oppression" once (re: potential future restrictions on slavery). So secession wasn't just...

Turns out today is the 159th anniversary of the founding of the Republican party. So who did Al Sharpton have on his MSNBC this evening to discuss it supposedly from the GOP point of view? "Republican" Abby Huntsman, daughter of Jon. After somehow divining that if Abe Lincoln were around today he would want a "conversation" on immigration and gay marriage, Abby described today's Republican party as populated by people who want "absolutely no government." View the video here.

It's always a tricky thing to try and pinpoint the first of anything. The first working automobile, the first powered flight, the first beer of the night — all these things are usually surrounded by an impenetrable haze of uncertainty and occasionally, vomit. Often we can make some pretty decent guesses, but this time I feel pretty confident in making an out-and-out statement of what I think is fact: The first vehicles with on-board electrical communication systems were Civil War Telegraph Wagons. That means those battery-crammed wooden wagons are the direct ancestor of cars with radios, radiophones, car phones, all...

...Did he exert features of moral grandeur and heroism necessary to steer the country through its deepest political crisis? Or was he an aspiring tyrant, especially in his use of executive power? A recent example of how not to think about Lincoln’s leadership comes from the historian and television commentator Doris Goodwin. Goodwin wrote a book called “Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln,” showing how Lincoln drew his cabinet from his personal and political competitors. In a subsequent discussion of Lincoln’s leadership titled “The 10 Qualities That Made Lincoln Great... If all of these sound a little...

The United States, from day one, was a project about principles and ideals. The super power that emerged and grew from the handful of colonists that began settling here was not the product of where those colonists happened to land, but the ideals and principles in their head and heart – applied in how they lived their lives. The Republican Party was founded in 1854 to address one great blot on the nation’s founding legacy – the existence of slavery in a nation founded under the ideal of freedom under God. Runaway slave and self-educated abolitionist leader Frederick Douglass said...

It's a perilous proposition to insist that a long-dead historical figure would share your politics. It's doubly so when your documentary evidence is thin and you are twisting the proper meaning of the words in that supposed evidence. Take the case of MSNBC.com's Nick Ramsey, who insists that Abraham Lincoln would strongly disagreed with Justice Antonin Scalia that the U.S. Constitution is a dead document rather than a living constitution that can evolve outside the constitutionally-provided mechanism for such evolution: the amendment processes described in Article VII. "This is an issue that constitutional experts have debated for years and years,...

"Second Term Begins With a Sweeping Agenda for Equality," ran the eight-column banner in which The Washington Post captured the essence of Obama's second inaugural. There he declared: "What binds this nation together ... what makes us exceptional -- what makes us American -- is our allegiance to an idea, articulated in a declaration made more than two centuries ago." Obama then quoted our Declaration of Independence: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit...

Abraham Lincoln, deeply troubled by four years of Civil War bloodletting, gave a great second inaugural address in 1865. By then Lincoln saw slavery as a terrible stench in God’s nostrils, so he mused about why God was taking so long to blow it away with His mighty breath. Lincoln’s words: “If God wills that [the war] continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman’s 250 years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago,...

He swore his oath of office on Abraham Lincoln's Bible. He has asked to give the State of the Union address on Lincoln's birthday. He rode to Washington in 2009 on a train route similar to Lincoln's in 1861. He has compared his critics to Lincoln's critics. He confides to admirers that he likes to read the handwritten Gettysburg Address that hangs in the Lincoln Bedroom. Barack Obama is inviting the world to compare him not just to good presidents but to the greatest in American history. There can be majesty in invoking past presidents and the Founding Fathers....

We've all heard the story of the "40 acres and a mule" promise to former slaves. It's a staple of black history lessons, and it's the name of Spike Lee's film company. The promise was the first systematic attempt to provide a form of reparations to newly freed slaves, and it was astonishingly radical for its time, proto-socialist in its implications. In fact, such a policy would be radical in any country today: the federal government's massive confiscation of private property -- some 400,000 acres -- formerly owned by Confederate land owners, and its methodical redistribution to former black slaves....

Editor's Note: This column was coauthored by Bob Morrison. President Abraham Lincoln had been warned by Gen. George B. McClellan not to interfere with the institution of slavery. McClellan was a “War Democrat,” willing to fight to preserve the Union, but unwilling to do anything about the root cause of the rebellion that threatened the life of the nation. Ironically, it was McClellan’s victory at the Battle of Antietam on September 17, 1862, that had given Lincoln the opportunity he needed to issue his Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation. In that document, the President warned rebellious states in the South that they...

Georgetown University constitutional law professor Louis Michael Seidman has just about had it with the focus of his 40 years of academic study. As he writes in the New York Times on Monday, it is the Constitution itself which has allowed for the series of legislative follies that finally resulted in the “fiscal cliff.” Seidman says that it is time for Americans to realize what lawmakers have known since the constitution’s inception – it is okay to ignore it. “As the nation teeters at the edge of fiscal chaos, observers are reaching the conclusion that the American system of government...

Statesmanship at its finest: during fiscal cliff talks, President Obama reportedly told Speaker Boehner that he would use his two major speeches in January to blame Republicans for the stalled deal. According to the Wall Street Journal, the president wasn't too happy with the options House Republicans were willing to present, and made it clear he was willing to throw the GOP under the bus for the nation's financial woes. Mr. Obama repeatedly lost patience with the speaker as negotiations faltered. In an Oval Office meeting last week, he told Mr. Boehner that if the sides didn't reach agreement, he...

Newtown and The Real War on Children Our news outlets are rightly dominated by the news of yesterday’s horrific crime, in which 20 children were gunned down, in a nation that chooses to make lethal weaponry available to virtually any person – whether sane or not. Totally unreported, however, is the statistical fact that approximately 3300 younger children were killed yesterday by a legalized “medical” procedure. The vast majority of these children (a daily average of more than 3200) were conceived through consensual sex, and were killed for the “crime” of being inconvenient to the two would-be parents. For those...

What is it about Abraham Lincoln that has captured the hearts and minds of the American public since his assassination nearly 150 years ago? After all, one could argue -- rather persuasively -- that our 16th president was the least qualified candidate ever elected to high national office; in fact, his public service record included just four terms in the Illinois state legislative, one unremarkable term in the House of Representatives, and two unsuccessful bids for the US Senate. In addition, he had virtually no executive experience and, as his contemporaries invariably pointed out, Lincoln seemed wholly unfit to lead...

Every schoolchild with enough smarts and curiosity to get beyond the latest video game of "Call of Duty" ought to go see "Lincoln," the movie, and check out the references and his own attention span. It requires patience, but it shows through dramatic action how a self-taught rustic from the deep backwoods had the emotional and intellectual discipline to overcome poverty and grow up to be a president to rank among the greatest. This is not about the American Dream or a Horatio Alger story. (Does anybody remember him?) Nor is it mythmaking. It's made of sterner stuff than that....

"When in the course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another ..." So begins the Declaration of Independence of the 13 colonies from the king and country to which they had given allegiance since the settlers first came to Jamestown and Plymouth Rock. The declaration was signed by 56 angry old white guys who had had enough of what the Cousins were doing to them. In seceding from the mother country, these patriots put their lives, fortunes and honor on the line. Four score and five years...

For decades, it has been obvious that there are irreconcilable differences between Americans who want to control the lives of others and those who wish to be left alone. Which is the more peaceful solution: Americans using the brute force of government to beat liberty-minded people into submission or simply parting company? In a marriage, where vows are ignored and broken, divorce is the most peaceful solution. Similarly, our constitutional and human rights have been increasingly violated by a government instituted to protect them. Americans who support constitutional abrogation have no intention of mending their ways. Since Barack Obama's re-election,...

It never ceases to amuse – if not infuriate – how often atheists claim as one of their own much-revered historic figures who happen to make the news for some reason or another. So it was when Neil Armstrong went to be with the Lord this past August. So it was when Albert Einstein’s so-called “God Letter” went on auction last month. And so it is now with Abraham Lincoln. The nation’s 16th president is the subject of a new motion picture, helmed by Stephen Spielberg, the Oscar-winning director, with the screenplay penned by Tony Kushner, the Tony Award and...

Henry Clay Cochrane traveled thousands of miles around the world as a Marine in the mid- to late 1800s. But it was probably one of his shortest military journeys early in his career that made him famous. The Chester native earned the title of brigadier general after his Marine career ended. But his big moment in history came just as that career was starting. Cochrane was just 21 when he was one of 13 men selected to ride on a train from Washington, D.C., to Gettysburg with President Abraham Lincoln in November 1863. Cochrane was on hand when Lincoln delivered...

Steven Spielberg’s “Lincoln” is a different film than one would expect from the brilliant filmmaker responsible for unforgettable films like “Schindler’s List” and “Saving Private Ryan.” Unlike those two features, “Lincoln” takes place on a much smaller scale. When its trailer arrived in theaters several months ago, many viewers undoubtedly believed that the film would attempt to tell Abraham Lincoln’s complete story, focusing on a young Illinois lawyer who became president and saved the Union from self-destruction. But this movie isn’t about that, nor is it simply a noble and simplistic tribute to the 16th President. The film is, instead,...

Late on the evening of Nov. 6, 1862, Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton dispatched Brig. Gen. Catharinus P. Buckingham, a West Point classmate and friend of Robert E. Lee’s, to the headquarters of the Army of the Potomac, then located in Northern Virginia. Buckingham had two messages, good news for one general and very bad news for another. Arriving the next evening in the midst of one of the worst snowstorms on record, Buckingham decided to give the good news first and sought out Gen. Ambrose Burnside to deliver a presidential order naming him as the new commander of...

The Abraham Lincoln of popular perception is a mythological figure. He has little to do with the actual 16th president.

TV Game Show Appearance Of Last Surviving Man To Witness Abraham Lincoln's Assassination Appears On YouTube After Nearly 60 YEARS I've Got a Secret featured Samuel Seymour, a Maryland man who was the last surviving person to witness Abraham Lincoln's death Mr Seymour died about two months after his appearance on the show, at 96 years old By Daily Mail ReporterOctober 20, 2012 A rare TV appearance of the last surviving person to witness the assassination of Abraham Lincoln's assassination has turned up on YouTube. The video is from a February 1956 episode of the TV game show I've Got...

SEWANEE, Tenn. — A signature in the Franklin County Courthouse and a mummy last seen in 1975 convinced two Tennessee men that John Wilkes Booth, the killer of Abraham Lincoln, escaped capture, traveled South and lived into the 20th century. Now one of those men is hoping to use DNA evidence to prove it. The other man, Arthur Ben Chitty, a historiographer at the University of the South who died in 2002, spent 40 years amassing anecdotal evidence that Mr. Booth married a Sewanee woman and lived there for a time, said his daughter Em Turner Chitty. And there was...

Lincoln Assassination Eyewitness appears on television's "I've Got a Secret" on February 9, 1956. On a 1956 game show, a man appeared who had been present at Ford's Theatre on the night of April 14, 1865. (Note: Link over to the YouTube site provided to watch this amazing historical video.)

Gov. John Hickenlooper (D) said Monday that Abraham Lincoln “wasn’t a great debater” during a visit to the Obama campaign field office in Denver, Colo., according to Denver West Word reporter Sam Levin.

The Time Abraham Lincoln and a Political Rival Almost Dueled on an Island Exactly 170 years ago today, the Mississippi River levee in Alton, Illinois, was crammed full of spectators awaiting the results of a highly anticipated duel — a smackdown between Abraham Lincoln and political rival James Shields. Only one man could emerge victorious. Onlookers held their breath in suspense as they spotted a boat approaching with a blood-soaked body draped over the bow. It had all started where so many skirmishes do: the Illinois state legislature. Though at the time Lincoln was a Whig and Shields was a...

<p>As the 150th anniversary of the Civil War continues to be commemorated, progenies of those who fought in the bitter battles between the North and South have converged to remember the sacrifices on both sides.</p> <p>But tucked inside an exhibit in Frederick, Maryland is a two-page document from Robert E. Lee – found wrapped around a case of cigars – that could have changed the course of the entire war, and led to victory for the Union.</p>

DreamWorks and 20th Century Fox this afternoon premiered the trailer for Lincoln, which opens November 9:

Looking back all the way to America's Civil War, there have been three dominant presidential coalitions. The first was Abraham Lincoln's. With his war to restore the Union and his martyrdom, Lincoln inaugurated an era of Republican dominance that lasted more than seven decades and saw only two Democratic presidents: Grover Cleveland and Woodrow Wilson. The second coalition was FDR's, where he and his vice president Harry Truman won five consecutive presidential elections. Only Gen. Eisenhower could break that streak. The third was Richard Nixon's New Majority, cobbled together after his narrow 1968 victory, where he annexed the Northern Catholic...

Ben is a young friend of ours who was an intern in our Washington office. This summer, Ben is working on yard crews and in restaurants prior to going into the military. This recent college grad is getting quite an education working with the working poor. Ben challenges us: What can you say to young men and women who are working at minimum wage, who are not concerned about social issues like abortion and marriage, who are unchurched and uninterested in the threats we see to religious liberty? These young Americans are just trying to keep their heads above water....

On this day in 1861, Lincoln imposes the first federal income tax by signing the Revenue Act. Strapped for cash with which to pursue the Civil War, Lincoln and Congress agreed to impose a 3 percent tax on annual incomes over $800.

Secret Message in Lincoln’s Pocketwatch, 1861 ‘In 2009 the Smithsonian found a “secret” message engraved in Abraham Lincoln’s watch by a watchmaker who was repairing it in 1861 when news of the attack on Fort Sumter reached Washington, D.C. ‘In an interview with The New York Times April 30, 1906, 84-year-old Jonathan Dillon recalled he was working for M.W. Galt and Co. on Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, where he was repairing Lincoln’s watch. The owner of the shop announced that the first shot of the Civil War had been fired. Dillon reported that he unscrewed the dial of the watch,...

David Bahnsen of Newport Beach, California is a Senior Vice President of Morgan Stanley, and also serves on the Board of Advisers of the California Recovery Project with Dr. Arthur Laffer. Bahnsen has abandoned his earlier support of the Ron Paul crusade, and now describes himself as an "economically literate Republican." He is the author of "The Undiscerning and Dangerous Appreciation of Ron Paul." Bahnsen says "It is the ironic that Ron Paul's alleged praiseworthiness comes from his devotion to the Constitution, when in fact, he has emphatically rejected it." Bahnsen has many family and business connections with libertarians. His...

The title, "Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter," guarantees about 15 good minutes. Just on the strength and novelty of the gimmick - combining the real details of Lincoln's life with a secret antivampire history - the movie was bound to command a certain absurd appeal. The trick was in getting audiences past those 15 minutes, and that's what the movie does. Based on the novel by Seth Grahame-Smith, "Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter" is a money-making stunt that its author - who also wrote the screenplay - wisely decided to treat with seriousness, or at least an attitude of seriousness. Instead of...

They were filed away and for nearly 150 years, but now researchers have found the report of the young army surgeon who was first to reach Abraham Lincoln after he was shot in the head in Ford Theatre. The 21-page report, written by Dr Charles Leale, a 23-year-old doctor just six weeks into his medical practice who happened to be 40 feet from Lincoln, details his original perceptions of the president’s fatal injuries. The historians who discovered the report in the National Archives in Washington believe it was filed, packed in a box, stored at the archives and not seen...

IN DECEMBER 1862, from his military headquarters in Mississippi, Major General Ulysses S. Grant issued a directive expelling "Jews as a class" from the immense war zone known as the Department of the Tennessee. General Orders No. 11 was the most notorious anti-Jewish edict ever issued by an official of the US government, and it was overruled by the commander-in-chief -- President Abraham Lincoln -- as soon as he learned of it in Washington. Notwithstanding its sweeping terms, the order turned out to have little immediate impact on the thousands of Jews living in the area under Grant's command. Only...

Stress, family medical history or possibly even poison led to the death of Vladimir Lenin, contradicting a popular theory that a sexually transmitted disease debilitated the Soviet Union’s founder, a UCLA neurologist said. Dr. Harry Vinters and Russian historian Lev Lurie reviewed Lenin’s records Friday for an annual University of Maryland School of Medicine conference that examines the deaths of famous figures. The conference is held yearly at the school, where researchers in the past have re-examined the diagnoses of figures including King Tut, Christopher Columbus, Simon Bolivar and Abraham Lincoln.

Death never dies here. It just keeps getting more interesting, more beguiling. More, well, alive. Alive in every cringe-worthy detail, in every clue about its causes, in every shard of evidence waiting to be spliced to another shard . . . and another shard until a picture starts to form, an image assembled from nuggets of information collected decades or centuries ago. Death, at least for the doctors and history buffs who gather each year at the University of Maryland School of Medicine, is the coolest of puzzles, leading them to the coolest of theories. Could Abraham Lincoln have been saved? (Yes.)...

Progressivism is the belief that America needs to move or “progress” beyond the principles of the American Founding. Organized politically more than a hundred years ago, Progressivism insists upon flexibility in political forms unbound by fixed and universal principles. Progressives hold that human nature is malleable and that society is perfectible. Affirming the inexorable, positive march of history, Progressives see the need for unelected experts who would supervise a vast administration of government. Progressivism is rooted in the philosophy of European thinkers, most notably the German philosopher G.W.F. Hegel. Progressivism takes its name from a faith in “historical progress.” According...

Abraham Lincoln’s fidelity to the Declaration of Independence is equally a fidelity to the Constitution. The Constitution takes its moral life from the principles of liberty and equality, and was created to serve those principles. We are divided as a nation today, as in Lincoln’s time, because we have severed the connection between these two documents. Lincoln’s “Fragment on the Constitution and the Union” contains the central theme of Lincoln’s life and work. Drawing upon biblical language, Lincoln describes the Declaration of Independence as an “apple of gold,” and the Constitution as the “frame of silver” around it. We cannot...

GETTYSBURG, Pa. (AP) -- Bobblehead dolls of the man who assassinated President Abraham Lincoln have been pulled from sale in Gettysburg National Military Park's visitors' center. Dolls of John Wilkes Booth with a handgun were taken off bookstore shelves Saturday, a day after a reporter from Hanover's The Evening Sun newspaper asked about them.

In an era that lives by self-promotion- an era that takes someone like Donald Trump seriously as a presidential candidate- Presidents' Day is a day to remember that greatness still resides in what one does, not what one claims to be. That is why Abraham Lincoln will always belong to every age. Because Lincoln was not just a great president; he may have been one of the greatest men that this country has yet produced. His rare combination of self-confidence and humility produced the archetype of "the American, this new man," who is still universally admired. While many of our...

On front page of website, no registration required.Shockingly, neither Carter nor the present occupant of the White House are choices...

February 22 is the birthday of George Washington -- the man who, more than any other, made possible our republican form of government. The third Monday in February has come to be known, wrongly, as President's Day. America's political leaders should take this occasion to remember Washington's deeds, recollect his advice, and again call the holiday celebrating him by its legal name: Washington's Birthday. Washington biographer James Flexner called him the "indispensable man" of the American Founding. Without Washington, America would never have won our War of Independence. He played the central role in the Constitutional Convention and set the...

This looks absurd....which means it will be either awesome or dreadful.

ANAHEIM – They adjusted their black-cotton beards and their Lincoln-stovepipe hats that stood almost as tall as them. Then, in unison, the 19 kindergarteners began: "Four score and seven years ago, our fathers brought forth on this continent ..." From beginning to end, Room 4 at Fairmont Private School recited from memory the entire Gettysburg Address – President Lincoln's 1863 speech, widely regarded as among the best speeches in American history. With words such as "endure," "dedicate" and "consecrate." The 5- and 6-year-olds got through them all. Their teacher, Patsy Bauman, began teaching her students the address in December, in...