Day: October 10, 2018

Fred Morsell began to study Frederick Douglass in the fall of 1984. A black clergyman friend asked him to help develop alternative programs for inner city youth that would help them find a sense of self-respect and belief in themselves — an antidote to the environment of drugs and hopelessness in which they lived. Morsell … Read more

By Jonathan W. White Americans have been dreaming about Abraham Lincoln since at least 1861. In May of that year, a woman from Roches-ter, New York, sent a letter to Mary Todd Lincoln describing a dream that she’d had of the president towering over Washington, D.C., amid a tremendous thunderstorm. As the lightning flashed and … Read more

By John Hoffmann One of the most valued artifacts owned by the University of Illinois is an ox yoke–not an ordinary ox yoke but one believed to have been made by Abraham Lincoln himself. The traditional story of this yoke rests on brief references to it in 1875 and fuller accounts of it in 1900. … Read more

By Richard Brookhiser The first half of the Cooper Union Address was a response to a speech by Stephen Douglas. Campaigning for a fellow Democrat in Ohio in September 1859, Douglas had said, “our fathers, when they framed the government under which we live, under-stood this question just as well, and even better, than we … Read more

A familiar face will return to Spring-field for the 2014 Banquet. Dr. Tho-mas F. Schwartz will be the banquet speaker on Wednesday, February 12, 2014. His address is entitled, “Everything is darkness and doubt and discouragement”: Lincoln and the Election of 1864. [embeddoc url=”http://abrahamlincolnassociation.org/newsletters/For%20the%20People%20Winter%20%202013-2014%20December%2017%202013.pdf” download=”all”]

John Hay (1838-1905), who served as Lincoln’s assistant private secretary from 1860 to 1865, kept an informative diary during the Civil War. Unfortunately, the entry describing events in Gettysburg on November 19, 1863, is frustratingly skimpy: “In the morning I got a beast and rode out with the President’s suite to the Cemetery in the … Read more

By Robert J. Lenz President The Abraham Lincoln Association President Juan Rafael Mora is regarded as the most important political figure of Costa Rica and Central America in the 19th century. It is believed there are many similarities between the life of Lincoln and the life of Mora. In preparation for the February 8, 2014 … Read more

By Ervin Beck The campaign banner reproduced here was painted by J. H. Dille for the Wide Awake club of the Republican Party to use in a daylong rally in Goshen, Indiana, for the Lincoln-Hamlin ticket. The rally, on Saturday, October 6, 1860, featured a speech by the famous abolitionist U.S. Senator Cassius M. Clay … Read more

Stephen L. Carter is the William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Law at Yale, where he has taught since 1982. Among his courses are law and religion, the ethics of war, contracts, evidence, and professional responsibility. His most recent book is The Violence of Peace: America’s Wars in the Age of Obama (2011). Among his other … Read more