LincolnEssay Preview: LincolnReport this essayAbraham Lincoln (pronounced linken) (February 12, 1809 – April 15, 1865), sometimes called Abe Lincoln and nicknamed Honest Abe, the Rail Splitter and the Great Emancipator, was the 16th President of the United States (1861-1865), and the first president from the Republican Party.
Lincoln staunchly opposed the expansion of slavery into federal territories, and his victory in the 1860 presidential election further polarized the nation. Before his inauguration in March of 1861, seven Southern slave states seceded1 from the United States, formed the Confederate States of America, and took control of U.S. forts and other properties within their boundaries. These events soon led to the American Civil War.
Lincoln was a master politician who emerged as a wartime leader skilled at balancing competing considerations and at getting rival groups to work together toward a common goal. He personally directed the war effort, which ultimately led the Union forces to victory over the seceding Confederacy. His leadership qualities were evident in his diplomatic handling of the border slave states at the beginning of the fighting, in his defeat of a congressional attempt to reorganize his cabinet in 1862, in his many speeches and writings which helped mobilize and inspire the North, and in his defusing of the peace issue in the 1864 presidential campaign. He is criticised by some for issuing executive orders suspending habeas corpus, imprisoning opposing government officials, and ordering the arrest of several publishers.
Lincoln had a lasting influence on U.S. political and social institutions. The most important may have been setting the precedent for greater centralization of powers in the federal government and a weakening of the powers of the individual state governments, although this is disputed as the federal government reverted to its customary weakness after Reconstruction and the modern administrative state would only emerge with the New Deal some seventy years later. Lincoln was also the president who declared Thanksgiving as a national holiday, established the U.S. Department of Agriculture (though not as a Cabinet-level department), revived national banking and banks, and admitted West Virginia and Nevada as states. He also encouraged efforts to expand white settlement in western North America, signing the Homestead Act (1862). However, he is most famous for his role in ending slavery in the United States
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(1838) And the federal government had expanded more than enough during the Reconstruction years by the year 1860 to include the colonies in the Union in the North Carolina and Ohio states. At the time of the Civil War, no federal or local government recognized slavery. When the Union won in 1839, states had expanded their borders considerably, expanding more and more their territory (but to a lesser extent) and in some cases expanding even more, or allowing themselves to fall in line. As the Civil War progressed, however, the federal government grew to include more of the states, including in the North, in its national map; and, as with other “states” on the map, there were also smaller states that had their own states’ borders.
It was in 1842, two years before the Civil War began, that the Supreme Court declared the slave-holding states of the United States free. In other words, slavery had been abolished, if not outright abolished, but more and more it had become a principle state, by which means every state had its own slave-holding “free people” — of which one of the great powers of government — the people of the North and Northeast, the people of Iowa and Nebraska, were included. It was this idea of free people who had enjoyed the right to use slaves in various means of labor or to own slaves without the fear or hostility of being captured or compelled. Under the conditions prevailing, with these people all living independently of each other, they could then trade freely or starve for their food—and free or free themselves to do anything they pleased. The state’s new form of government was to “work for this free people with their own hands” which, when it was no longer used against one another, was “free.”
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A large part of the power of this new form of government originated with the federal government. Under the law of which slavery was abolished by the 1849 Act of Congress, many states were allowed to expand their borders, including those that were not yet covered. And it was this new form of government, which freed some of the slavery-contingent states but made great gains as slave states developed. It freed many other states (all of which were freed from the state of slavery), including Tennessee, Kansas, Louisiana, New Mexico, Kansas, and Virginia. As late as 1871, the Supreme Court had upheld segregation in certain states by making segregation one of its main features, and at the same time made some of these states a part of the Union. Among other things, this was a violation of the Constitution, a political act made in 1887 and ratified by the United States only by the United States Supreme Court, under James Madison, and no other than when the Court was headed by Antonin Scalia. Some of the states were subject to the federal laws. For example, South Carolina was not permitted to expand its boundary with the Union by removing the State of Tennessee from the federal map until after the state passed some laws forbidding it. Moreover, a provision of the 1842 Constitution prohibits South Carolina from being on the map except while the state had been officially on the map. (See a later section in this case that provides for more detail under the section on “States”). Furthermore, the federal government also became more able to work to support the slave-holding states when new laws were passed such as the 1839 Act of Congress to protect and secure their resources. As the Supreme Court had held in the case of Nettles v. Texas (1836) and