150 years ago...

Time mag ig

 On April 14, 1865 Abraham Lincoln - 16th President of the United States - had been assassinated by actor John Wilkes Booth. Not long before that General Robert E. Lee surrendered to Union military leaders signaling the end of the American Civil War.

Rich Miller posted a link to an AP story regarding the assassination of President Lincoln. I can't believe they existed even that long.

And amazing just last year we acknowledged the start of the first World War and today we acknowledge the end of another way. So the world was at war at least 60 years after America fought a war against itself. A house divided...

Both wars involved long lasting changes. The world map changed after the first World War. As for the Civil War, the slaves were freed although it was over a century before the descendents of these slaves were truly seen as American citizens. Some might say we're still not treated as citizens.

BTW, it was interesting that Time magazine presented colorized photos from the Civil War era on their instagram feed recently. They were a cool look at a period of time I only thought of as presented in black & white. Alas I can't get to a link on Time's website so you have one example up top.

I also forgot to add that the Civil War ultimately resulted in the loss of more Americans than any other conflict fought by Americans in the history of the nation. Certainly it doesn't help that Americans for the most part had been fighting Americans. Again a house divided...

State Journal-Register: Visit impresses British relative of Lincoln

Springfield, Illinois is the state capital and unfortunately it takes a back seat to it's much larger sister city of Chicago. As far as state government goes all the action is in Springfield especially during a session of the Illinois General Assembly. This is true in spite of the fact that most of this state's constitutional officers well all but one of six in fact resides in the Chicago area.

Springfield is known for it's association with America's 16th President who just so happens to be Abraham Lincoln who is known for leading this nation through a Civil War and during the course of that war freed the slaves. It's interesting that in this article we see that genealogists found President Lincoln's closest living British relative and they brought him to his cousin's adopted hometown.

It was such an enjoyable visit for him that he wants to tell others to visit Springfield. It just let's everyone know that Lincoln buffs are everywhere and they're willing to visit the sites where Lincoln lived or worked. And at that the sites such as Lincoln's Presidential Library that shows his place in history.

Welcome to Illinois Mr. & Mrs. Gilchrist hopefully the people you meet wherever you go in this state will show you nothing but great hospitality. And as a person who is an Illinoisian, Springfield is probably the one place that I need to visit in the future. All I've done in the past is pass through and that needs to change!

Ward Room: Illinois's Most Racist Senate Campaign

This sets up a fascinating historical posting by Edward McClelland over at the Ward Room. I recognize that the politics of the 19th Century is vastly different than those of the 21st. Hard to find such a campaign today.

The 1858 election, which was the most famous Senate race in American history and propelled Abraham Lincoln to the presidency, featured both candidates competing over who would do the best job of keeping blacks out of Illinois, and preventing intermarriage between the races.

The incumbent, Democrat Stephen A. Douglas of Chicago, was in a bind over the issue of slavery. Douglas was running for re-election in a free state, but he also was seeking the goodwill of Southern Democrats who could deliver him the party’s presidential nomination in 1860. He had authored the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which allowed residents of a territory to vote on whether to allow slavery, insisting the issue should be determined by popular sovereignty.

The challenger, Republican Abraham Lincoln of Springfield, believed that the Kansas-Nebraska Act and the Supreme Court’s Dred Scott decision, which prohibited territories from banning slavery, would inevitably allow slave owners to bring their property into free states, including Illinois. He had sewn up the votes of abolitionists in northern Illinois. Douglas had the votes of slavery proponents in southern Illinois. The election would be decided by moderate ex-Whigs in the middle of the state. They hated slavery, but they hated blacks, too, and for the same reason: because both plantation owners and free blacks would undercut the prices for white labor. Just five years before, Illinois had passed a set of Black Laws forbidding African-Americans from settling in the state.

So Douglas ran an all-out racist campaign. He accused Lincoln of plotting to free slaves all over the United States, and allowing them to settle in Illinois.

I suggest you read the whole thing. It seems history is a lot more complicated than the legend. Lincoln may have arrived at the beliefs of freeing the slaves later than he did in 1858. That is assuming you believe that and still he was part of a racially charged campaign.

He said a lot of things wanting votes. Also let's not forget up until at least 1912 US Senators were still elected by state legislatures. Lincoln and Douglas may have held debates for the citizens of Illinois, but they needed the legislatures to appoint them to the US Senate.

Since we were talking about Abraham Lincoln...

Especially since Steven Spielberg's Lincoln is currently in cinemas across the nation, we remember the Emancipation Proclamation. 150 years ago it was an executive order issued by President Lincoln that proclaimed that slaves that were held in the territory controlled by the Confederate States of America were freed. Now granted Confederate held territory not under the control of the Union this order didn't have any effect. It was on Confederate territory that were held by Union forces during the Civil War where this order took effect.

I'm only noting that because there are those out there who continue to argue that President Lincoln never freed any slaves. Surely there are others out there who are better able to argue that position that I'm able to at the moment.

In looking for materials on this subject I found this Forbes posting that asked one question, "150 Years After The Emancipation Proclamation, Are We Free?" It isn't so much an article that talks about equality amongst various "minority" groups in America as much as it is a philosophical argument about the freedom of the individual and its relationship with government. It notes the positives of the Proclamation even if while a segment of America's population were no longer enslaved they still had to fight for their freedom years after that fact.

Also you can read an article about the Proclamation courtesy of the Nation Archives.

Ward Room: The Party of Lincoln -- Again

In the wake of Mitt Romney's loss for the Presidency almost two weeks ago, we have heard or seen lots of analysis of why the Republican party didn't gain the White House. It involves the demographic changes this nation is seeing. In fact we can see evidence of this in the previous post as far as Illinois goes.

So here's the anaylsis (again) from Ed McClelland:

There’s an argument in the movie Lincoln about whether the Republican Party was intended to be a progressive or a conservative outfit. Francis Preston Blair, who boasts that he founded the party in his living room, insists that it’s conservative and anti-slavery, but shouldn’t be taken over by radical abolitionists. President Lincoln, who is trying to persuade Blair to support a constitutional amendment banning slavery, obviously wants it to be progressive.

For the first hundred years of the Republican Party’s existence, Lincoln’s vision was ascendant. Republicans were in the forefront of the great social issue of the 19th and 20th centuries: abolitionism, environmentalism, women’s suffrage, civil rights. The Democrats, a confederation of Southern whites and Northern Catholics, were the socially conservative party. William Jennings Bryan, who lost three presidential elections on the Democratic ticket, ended his career by defending creationism at the Scopes Monkey Trial. Even in the 1970s, most of the judges who signed on to Roe v. Wade were Republican appointees. And President Ford supported the Equal Rights Amendment.

By then, though, the Republican Party had begun to change, into a party of reaction, whose purpose was resisting the social movements of the 1960s: civil rights, feminism, pacifism, environmentalism. The Republicans basically switched bases with the Democrats, becoming the party of the South and Northern white ethnics -- a coalition assembled by Richard Nixon, whose “Southern Strategy” made the Republicans the dominant party of the 1970s and 1980s.

Mitt Romney’s defeat demonstrated that this iteration of the Republican Party has run its course. The changes that began in the 1960s have become ingrained in American life. Campaigning against them marks the Republicans as a party of memory, not a party of hope or progress. Even conservative commentator Wayne Allyn Root admitted, on the Fox News website, that the Republicans have lost the culture wars, and need to give up on a political solution to the abortion issue.

Seriously, the real answer is to run candidates who are fiscally conservative and principled, but socially moderate and modern. The GOP needs candidates that say “Roe v. Wade is the law of the land. I will uphold it, even though my personal views are pro-life. And I will ALWAYS support exceptions for rape, incest, and when a mother’s life is in danger. Period.” The issue is off the table -- forever. What's left? The economy and jobs -- winning issues for the GOP.

That explain why an image of the Lincoln movie poster is shown in this post. This analysis makes sense to me in fact.

I consider myself pro-life, but my position isn't exactly ban all abortions. Social issues don't matter to me at this point primarily because I have a different set of issues. Jobs being one of them. I may not be able to stake a solid claim on abortion primarily because I'm not going out of my way to have children and have never been in a situation where there had been an unwanted pregnancy. Though for abortion all I can say is that hey whether the child is unborn or not it's not THERE fault that they're in the situation their in. I try to remember that.

Another piece of analysis is that Republicans must find a way to attract people of other ethnicity into their party. It doesn't matter if they're Black, white, Mexican, Puerto Rican, Chinese or whatever. Also how do they attract more women to their party?

There is some soul searching to do there, where to start? Start with their history as the party of Abraham Lincoln, 16th President of the United States?