April 14, 1865 – Booth Conspiracy brings Night of Terror

As the American Civil War looked to be coming to an end, famed actor and Southerner John Wilkes Booth determined that he must do something to help the cause. He had sworn to his concerned mother that he would not join as a soldier, yet he wrote her, “I have begun to deem myself a coward and to despise my own existence.” While he would not go back on his word, he decided that the war could be fought with civilian hands in a more untraditional fashion. He began a conspiracy with fellow sympathizers to kidnap President Abraham Lincoln in March of 1865. The plans to kidnap Lincoln had all gone awry due to poor intelligence, and, upon hearing a speech by Lincoln encouraging the extension of the vote to freed slaves, Booth decided to go all out.

Booth wrote in his diary that “something decisive and great must be done.” Not only would he assassinate the president, but his coconspirators would kill the vice-president and secretary of state as well, decapitating the government. On Good Friday, picking up his mail from his box at Ford’s Theater, he happened to learn from the owner’s brother that the president and General Ulysses S Grant would be attending Our American Cousin that night.

Booth called his the band of assassins together and ordered Alabaman Lewis Powell, just days shy of his twenty-first birthday, to kill Secretary of State William Seward. Powell refused, saying he had only volunteered for kidnapping. Booth began a long and passionate speech, noting the horrors of war that the Union had performed upon the South and the duty of vengeance for them. Powell conceded, and the other conspirators were fired up by Booth’s rhetoric. George Atzerodt, a German immigrant who had settled in Maryland as a child, was to kill Vice-President Andrew Johnson. Fellow Marylander David Herold would act as guide for Powell and then manage the escape after the quartet reached the rendezvous outside of Washington, D.C.

The assassinations were performed with intensity and efficiency. Powell and Herold went to the Seward residence just after 10 PM, knocking as casually as a messenger. Powell talked his way past the butler, claiming to have medicine for Seward, who had recently been treated after a carriage crash. Seward’s son Frederick tried to stop him, and Powell leaped forward with his Bowie knife, stabbing Frederick deeply in the chest. Frederick’s sister Fanny opened the door to complain of the noise disturbing their father and found Powell in a sudden bloodlust. Powell shoved her aside and stormed into the room, drawing his revolver to shoot Seward as he lay in bed. He meticulously shot the other patrons in the room, Seward’s nurse Sergeant George F. Robinson and his other son Augustus. On the way out of the house, Powell found Herold scuffling with a legitimate late-night messenger. Powell killed the messenger, and the two escaped Washington with Herold at the lead.

Before the assassinations, Atzerodt had rented a room at the Kirkwood Hotel, Johnson’s residence while the vice-president was in Washington. Atzerodt was tempted to spend the evening in the bar but, as he lived precisely one floor above, determined to wait until 10:15, listening for the Johnson’s movement. When the prescribed time arrived, he walked calmly downstairs and knocked on the door. Johnson himself answered, and Atzerodt stabbed him with his knife. He then fled, leaving the knife where it had struck the vice-president.

Booth was the only hiccup in the evening as his intelligence once again had proved faulty. Due to Mrs. Grant’s dislike of the First Lady, the Lincolns had gone to the theater with Major Henry Rathbone and his fiancée Clara Harris. Nonetheless, Booth struck at 10:25, giving a card to the usher, who showed him to the presidential box. Booth barricaded the outer door to the box and waited for the cue “sockdologizing” to act: the roar of laughter from the crowd covered up the sound of his derringer’s shot. Major Rathbone jumped to stop Booth from escaping, but Booth planted his knife firmly into Rathbone’s arm before leaping from the box to the stage. One of his spurs became caught, making him land off-balance. Always the performer, Booth cried out “Sic semper tyrannus!” to the 1,700 people in the crowd and fought his way through the chaos to his horse.

The assassins met successfully at their rendezvous and fled into Maryland. Herold guided them in the night, going on even as Booth refused to stop for treatment to his leg after the fall. They crossed the river into Virginia and disappeared.

The Union was filled with despair over the lost leaders and anger that the assassins had escaped. Any connections to the conspirators were arrested and thoroughly interrogated, leading to the execution of Mary Surratt, the owner of the boarding house where many of the conspiracy meetings had taken place. Many called the execution unfair, but the North howled for blood. The new government, largely Radical Republicans under Lafayette Foster, treated the South as an area of military occupation rather than states in reconstruction. Freedman laws and punishments for former Confederates were enforced by Federal troops, who themselves turned corrupt with power.

While many Southerners initially despised Booth and his men for their cowardly actions, they came to hate the North further. Secret societies such as the Ku Klux Klan began guerrilla raids prompted by Booth, who became a wandering speaker whose left-legged limp became a trademark and a clandestine sign for fellow rebels. The violence earned more ire from the North, who began relocating criminals to camps in the Dakotas. As the South burned, many Southerners fled, ex-Confederates to Latin America or South Africa and Freedmen to the North or to protected cities where soldiers stood guard against routine attacks and arson. The violence turned generational with deadly bombings and costly sabotage lasting well into the twentieth century until purges and propaganda during the World War finally ended the Southern revolt.

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In reality, Booth only told Powell that they had come too far to give up now. Powell did as he was told but panicked and merely injured the Sewards. Herold heard the screams from inside and fled, leaving Powell stranded in unfamiliar Washington, where he wandered and hid in a tree for three days before finding Surratt’s boarding house. Atzerodt never worked up the nerve to assassinate Johnson and instead sat in the hotel bar and talked with the bartender about Johnson before wandering the streets drunk. Booth assassinated Lincoln but was soon shot himself during his escape. The other conspirators were hanged.

February 27, 1860 – Lincoln Outlines his Ideas on Slavery

In perhaps the greatest turning point of the career of the sixteenth president of the United States, Lincoln gave a speech that transcended his figure from a joking yokel to a serious national force. Lincoln had been invited east to speak at a series of lectures held by Plymouth Church, where word had spread about his able debates with Illinois Senator Stephen M. Douglas. Much of the debates had been over the issue of slavery, particularly its expansion into the new territories gained from the Mexican-American War. Popular sovereignty had created Bleeding Kansas, where Free-Staters and Bloody Ruffians had killed dozens of people in the fight over whether the territory would become a free or slave state. It was obvious that this strategy could not continue, and the actions of vigilante John Brown had shown that abolitionists meant to end slavery completely, some by any means necessary.

When Lincoln accepted the invitation, he began to pore over legal and political precedence to determine what exactly the spirit of America thought of slavery. He worked for months, causing William Herndon, his law partner, to note, "No former effort in the line of speech-making had cost Lincoln so much time and thought as this one.” After diligently outlining the careers and beliefs of each of the thirty-nine Founding Fathers of America, he traced twenty-one of them to speaking for limitation on slavery, particularly the matter of controlling its spread to new territories, first the Northwest Territory in the Ohio Valley, then the Louisiana Purchase. Rather than stop at this, however, he decided to show the future of what could be done by beginning the end of slavery in all states.

Lincoln gave an enormous 7,000 word speech (one of the longest of his career), tackling nearly all of the angles on the issue of slavery. He commented on the flip-flopping of politicians such as his old rival Stephen Douglas and Chief Justice Roger Taney. He also rebuked those who suspected Republicans of being willing to resort to violence to end slavery and showed that they “have failed to implicate a single Republican in his Harper's Ferry enterprise” and that “John Brown was no Republican.” Instead, the Republicans would do their work through the polls, legally and without force. To those who refused to acknowledge Federal authority and called for secession, he said, “But you will not abide the election of a Republican president! In that supposed event, you say, you will destroy the Union; and then, you say, the great crime of having destroyed it will be upon us! That is cool. A highwayman holds a pistol to my ear, and mutters through his teeth, "Stand and deliver, or I shall kill you, and then you will be a murderer!", a point that would be upheld by the Constitutional Unionists later in the election that November.

Later in the speech (which ended with a rallying cry to the Republican Party about their “sense of duty” and “right makes might”), he answered the question of what to do with freed slaves in a society where “a physical difference between the white and the black races which will forever forbid the two races living together on social or political equality” (a quote from his own 1858 speech in Charleston, IL) that rather segregation was the answer and that the Republicans ought to support efforts to “…colonize persons of African descent, with their consent, upon this continent or elsewhere, with the previously obtained consent of the government existing there.” Perhaps most critically, he explained that ending slavery could also be a boon for the nation as freedmen could purchase freedom with government bonds, which would be repaid in full over a few years’ taxes for the new citizen.

The speech was greeted by much applause, and one audience member described Lincoln with, "his face lighted up as with an inward fire; the whole man was transfigured. I forgot his clothes, his personal appearance, and his individual peculiarities…" Cooper Union proved to New Yorkers and Easterners overall that Lincoln would make a great campaign. At the 1860 Republican National Convention, Lincoln took the lead as other candidates had fallen back: William Seward the radical had bungled his attempts to moderate, Whigs distrusted Salmon Chase over tariffs, and Edward Bates was opposed by immigrants. Lincoln handily won the ticket, and, in November, won the election as the Democratic party was in pieces.

Many Southerners called to secede, but their voices were drowned out by many slaveholders who stood to make a great deal of money “liberating” their slaves with the government paying market rates to cover “loss of property” in voluntary compensated emancipation. While the Emancipation Act of 1862 was to be followed only at will, a wave of slaves hurried to gain their freedom. The question of what to do with so many freedmen (few embraced the idea of going back to Africa, despite the pamphlets of the American Colonization Society) was solved with the Homestead Act of 1862, populating much of the territories with free land proved up by former slaves. Lincoln’s two terms further expanded federalism by promoting large works projects such as the Intercontinental Railway (completed in 1865), followed by an abandoned effort at digging a Panama Canal suggested by Representative Benjamin Butler.

War with Spain broke out in 1870 after the execution of Captain Joseph Fry and 52 others as pirates, leading to American capture of much of Spain’s Caribbean holdings by 1872. It was an expansionistic dream long held by many Southerners, proud to see the Stars and Stripes above new capitals.


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In reality, Lincoln limited his speech to thoughts on the expansion of slavery to the territories. Lincoln’s ideas of colonization for former slaves would later be outlined in the Emancipation Proclamation of 1862, though not largely carried through.

December 3, 1839 - Abraham Lincoln Fails his Admission to the US Circuit Court

In another critical moment of failure of famed States Rights advocate Abraham Lincoln, his application to practice law at the federal level was dismissed, possibly due to finagling from Democratic opponents. The grounds for refusal were based in his fiery rhetoric and several challenges of his character, giving examples from his history of scatological humor and rough story telling. Lincoln could not deny these remarks and attempted a defense on First Amendment Free Speech, but he would soon give up as he fell into one of his "melancholies" (believed to be what modern psychologists would call clinical depression).

Lincoln's life had been fraught with hardships. Born in a one-room log cabin in Kentucky in 1809, young Lincoln was the son of Thomas Lincoln, who had become a wealthy and respectable man in the real estate business until he was wiped out in 1816 due to court cases over a faulty title. They moved to Indiana, a state where slavery was banned, and tragedy struck again as milk sickness (tremetol poisoning) took Lincoln's mother. Frontier life was hard, and the Lincolns moved westward again to Illinois to a new homestead. Lincoln left home and worked on a river barge before returning and starting a store that would ultimately fail. After losing a political campaign in 1832 and serving as a captain in the Black Hawk War, Lincoln finally found his path as an orator and lawyer.

He was famously self-educated, stating, "I studied with nobody." Instead, Lincoln read Blackstone's Commentaries on the Laws of England, the Revised Statutes of Indiana, the Declaration of Independence, and the United States Constitution while working as a secretary and surveyor in New Salem, Illinois. In 1834, along with his legal firm, he successfully began his career with the Illinois General Assembly as a Whig, following his hero Henry Clay, whose American System ideals he had begun to follow passionately. As a Whig, he would be firmly for investment in infrastructure to improve the nation, voting for projects such as the Illinois and Michigan Canal to connect Lake Michigan to the Mississippi River, roads, and railroads. With the Panic of 1837, however, the projects became bankrupt and Illinois was “littered with unfinished roads and partially dug canals" while its bonds tumbled in value. Lincoln suggested making up the money by Illinois purchasing federal land and selling it for a profit to private citizens, which the federal government refused. These disappointments by federalism would later impact his philosophy of state self-dependence.

Just as his career seemed to be on the proper path, Lincoln's subtly failing strength as a Whig became a stumbling block blamed for costing him the ability to argue cases in the US Circuit Court. His world collapsed as he settled into depression, even skipping offers by John Todd Stuart, a war buddy and benefactor who had inspired Lincoln to take up law, to meet his cousin Mary Todd. Eventually the two would meet and even marry, though they once broke their engagement due to second thoughts. During this time, Lincoln determined his ideas on independence and voluntary mass-agreements, like marriage, and he focused on local items for his legal practice and political career supporting federalism as less important.

In 1847, Lincoln advanced to the federal level as a representative in the US House. He argued bitterly against the Mexican-American War (disgusted with calls for the glories of war, which he called an “attractive rainbow, that rises in showers of blood”) and reaffirmed his “free soil” stance on slavery saying, "the Congress of the United States has the power, under the constitution, to abolish slavery in the District of Columbia; but that power ought not to be exercised unless at the request of the people of said District” while still denouncing the evils of slave-holding. He was rewarded with his support during the election of Zachary Taylor with an offering to be governor of the new Oregon Territory, but Lincoln declined, wanting to stay close to his home of Illinois.

Lincoln spent the next decade working to support his home state, running unsuccessfully in the 1858 Senate campaign but becoming famous after his publication of speeches in the Douglas-Lincoln Debates, including “I believe this government can endure permanently half slave and half free. I do not expect the Union to be dissolved—I do not expect the house to fall—but I do expect it will be divided.” He was proven wrong with the secession of the South after the narrow 1860 election of William H. Seward. During the Civil War, Lincoln argued for the rights of Southerners but agreed that a violation of the agreement of Union had taken place. He begrudgingly supported military action and rose significantly to the Illinois Senate, where his aid bills laid groundwork for military planning in decades to come.

After the war and the assassination of Seward, Lincoln became a powerful voice on Reconstruction and the necessity to return the South to normalcy, including the return of many rights. Gathering support from other wings of the Republicans and even former supporters of Douglas as well as revealing much of the corruption of victory-profiteers, Lincoln challenged and would eventually overthrow the Radical Republicans even though he had agreed with them on many anti-slavery issues before. Eventually, Lincoln’s fair-mindedness and disgust of corruption would get him elected President of the United States in 1868. Due to his deteriorating health and the increasing mental illness of his wife, Lincoln would retire from politics at the end of his term, though he had already set a new precedent for the United States with regional interest and a successful plurality of political parties. Many scholars would say this disjointedness did much to limit federal power that could have alleviated social woes in the next century’s Great Depression.


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In reality, Lincoln successfully passed on to argue in the US Circuit Court and continued his belief in an American system, championing many Whig and later Republican ideals. His victories through political thought and the Civil War laid much of America’s groundwork of federalism.