Tag Archives: abraham-lincoln

Grant’s Jewish Order

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More favourite figures behaving in regrettable ways! It’s like a deeply unpleasant theme week…

There’s little to glean here for anyone who knows the story already, but due to the quick cancellation of the order, the fact that Grant once tried to expel the entire Jewish population of Kentucky, Tennessee, and Mississippi. In truth, the article leaves out almost all the details of the story, while presenting others that go unexplained or unexplored, including this tidbit:

When asked what first sparked his interest in Grant’s orders, Sarna recalls the story that makes up the book’s introduction. As a young professor, he was asked to deliver a talk at Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati. As the talk coincided with the 120th anniversary of General Orders No. 11, Sarna thought it was fitting to speak on the man who later became the 18th U.S. president.

While delivering the lecture, Sarna made what he thought was a grave factual error—that is, until a member of the audience who was a descendant of the very man about whom Sarna was speaking rose to his feet and confirmed Sarna’s suggestion.

“It was deeply memorable,” Sarna recalls, “having a descendent of this family essentially confirm that their ancestor had been involved in a kind of secret deal with Grant’s father Jesse. Certainly that was memorable and stuck in my mind as a subject that deserved further research.”

It does, however, seem to be in support of a book, to be released on March 13th, that promises a more thorough investigation.

I’ve always found the order a tarnish on Grant’s reputation. Disappointing, especially when one considers that he was very open-minded and supportive of the black troops in his army.

http://www.algemeiner.com/2012/02/07/ulysses-s-grant-smugglers-and-the-fate-of-american-jews/

Necessary Sacrifices

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A play about Lincoln is currently playing at Ford’s Theater, and it sounds pretty good. I was supposed to visit a friend in DC last weekend, and I’m kind of kicking myself now at missing this. If you’re in the area, it might be worth checking out!

(I’m ashamed to say my first thought on reading the review was “what if another actor shoots Lincoln?” The world would surely fold in upon itself.)

Selby’s sly, earthy Lincoln and Wallace’s dignified, fiercely determined Douglass spar about war, peace, politics, and moral courage. Douglass confronts Lincoln about the discriminatory treatment of black recruits in the Union army and their worse fate when captured by Confederate forces. He decries what he views as Lincoln’s tardiness in signing the Emancipation Proclamation and urges the president to think seriously about the citizenship status of freed slaves after the war. (The play notes that Douglass also supported women’s suffrage but argued, first things first.) Lincoln, who fears he’ll lose the next election, warns Douglass of the danger of moving too fast for the electorate or even the Union military. In another telling moment, Selby’s Lincoln admits with embarrassment verging on physical pain how much he craves the power of the presidency, and fears it is the sin of pride. In some of the play’s best, most human moments, Hellesen imagines the two men finding common ground and a commmon bond in the pain of losing a child, the memory of a brutally hard upbringing, the loneliness of becoming a self-made man, and the sacrifice of devoting one’s life to a cause.

http://www.washingtonian.com/blogarticles/artsfun/afterhours/22719.html#

Lincoln Telegraphs

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“Private sale”: Some lucky bastard had possession of Lincoln missives! They’re library-owned now, though, and historians and buffs alike look forward to reading transcriptions.

A long-unknown, 150-year-old trove of handwritten ledgers and calfskin-covered code books that give a potentially revelatory glimpse into both the dawn of electronic battlefield communications and the day-to-day exchanges between Abraham Lincoln and his generals as they fought the Civil War now belongs to the Huntington Library, Art Collections and Botanical Gardens.

The collection, acquired in a private sale on Saturday and disclosed Wednesday, includes 40 cardboard-covered albums of messages that telegraph operators wrote down either before sending them in Morse code, or transcribed from telegraphic dots and dashes at the receiving end. There are also small, wallet-like booklets containing the key to code words Union commanders used to make sure their messages would remain unfathomable if intercepted by the Confederates.

The Reaper Trial

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I mentioned the Reaper Trial briefly yesterday, and this paper (from the small town where the trial took place) featured a summary on it. It featured Lincoln’s first (deeply unpleasant) meeting with Edwin Stanton, and Stanton developing a (deeply unpleasant) opinion of Lincoln which he would, happily, change once he was in the cabinet.

Abraham Lincoln came to Rockford in July of 1855 to prepare for what has come to be called the Great Reaper Trial — perhaps the most significant commercial lawsuit in the city’s history.

It was a David and Goliath battle that pitted a nearly penniless Rockford inventor, John H. Manny, and his local partners, against the industrialist, Cyrus H. McCormick, Chicago’s largest employer. Both men manufactured agricultural reapers, and both held several federal patents, although the basic patent on the McCormick Reaper had expired.

http://www.rrstar.com/opinions/columnists/x1307072564/Lincoln-and-the-Great-Reaper-Trial

Lincoln the Divorce Lawyer

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The Wall Street Journal has a brief blog post on Lincoln’s legal work, not much of which – outside the Reaper Trial – gets a lot of play in his biographies.

There is some work out there on Lincoln’s divorce practice. In 1998, Stacy Pratt McDermott cobbled together this brief based on her research of Lincoln’s papers. She found that between 1837 and 1861, Lincoln and his law partners handled 131 divorce cases in 17 Illinois county circuit courts across the state.

Women brought 82 of the those cases, and the courts granted divorces to women plaintiffs in those cases 79% of the time. Male plaintiffs obtained divorces only 69% of the time, according to McDermott.

http://blogs.wsj.com/law/2012/01/24/abraham-lincoln-divorce-lawyer/

Lincoln Speech Rediscovered

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I love reading stories of long-lost historical items being unearthed, and doubly so when they involve such finds as this. While it’s incredible to think that Congressional records are really this messy, imagine how it would feel to be the one shuffling through handwritten pages and seeing the signature A. Lincoln between your hands?

Lighty has been searching the records of the United States Senate at the National Archives for several months. As he examined records from the Thirty-seventh Congress, Lighty found a cross-reference sheet that gave locations for reports from the War, Navy and Interior Departments in a set of volumes. Although not part of his originally intended search, Lighty decided to request those volumes anyway. Archivist Rodney Ross retrieved them from the stacks, and within them, Lighty found the first page of one official copy and an entire second copy of Lincoln’s Second Annual Message, both of which were signed by Lincoln.

One copy of the 86-page message is signed on the last page by Abraham Lincoln and safely resides in the vault at the National Archives, but the first two pages had long been misfiled, until now. The first page contains the observation, “And while it has not pleased the Almighty to bless us with a return of peace, we can but press on, guided by the best light He gives us, trusting that in His own good time, and wise way, all will yet be well.” The second copy signed by Lincoln was not known to exist.

Stragedy

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(The title for this post is an in-joke with my board-game playing friends: Whenever my best laid plans gang aft agley, I turn into a trickster whose sole purpose is to ruin their plans and frustrate them.)

This Disunion article turns into an explanation of how Dennis Mahan’s teachings of Jomini’s Napoleonic tactics made for a standard generalship of the West Pointers in the war, but it starts with this:

The Civil War’s first year was one marked by inactivity and battlefield frustration. There was just one major battle, at Bull Run, and only a handful of minor engagements, most of them semi-guerrilla fighting in and around Missouri.

Yet as the leading Union generals in the field refused to directly engage Confederate troops, President Lincoln began to display an almost intuitive understanding of the aggressive military strategy that would win the war, a wisdom that would lead him to bring in new generals and push for more aggressive engagements in 1862. How did Lincoln, a lawyer by training with no military background to speak of — get the nature of the conflict so right, and his seasoned generals get it so wrong?

While I agree that Lincoln “understood the aggressive military strategy that would win the war” – that sheer force of numbers meant the North would prevail – I take issue with some of his early pushing attempts. Lincoln famously ordered movements of McClellan and Burnside, with these orders published and circulated, of more use to the Confederate planners than the Union leaders. He eventually speed-dated his way to Grant, but his learning curve through military strategy helped rein him in enough to let Grant go about his business unmolested.

Civil War Humor

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Disunion discusses how the war was filtered through comedy (mainly of the sarcastic bent) at the time.

Abraham Lincoln became the war’s most notorious jester, known for his backcountry yarns and goofy, self-deprecating style. Washington socialites complained that he simply would not stop telling jokes at their dinner parties. His cabinet – stiff, bearded, capable men, whom Navy Secretary Gideon Welles called “destitute of wit” – met his enthusiastic joking with blank stares and awkward sneezes; William P. Fessenden, the secretary of the Treasury, objected that comedy was “hardly a proper subject.” Lincoln ignored them, introducing his plan for emancipation by reading aloud a routine by his favorite humorist. He often joked with citizens who sought his aid: when a businessman requested a pass through Union lines to Richmond, Lincoln chuckled that he had already sent 250,000 men in that direction, but “not one has got there yet.”