The President and His Cabinet

The Confederate President and His Cabinet

The U.S. House of Representatives and U.S. Senate

Abraham Lincoln (February 12, 1809 - April 15, 1865) was the 16th (1861 - 1865) President of the United States, and the first President from the Republican Party. He is well praised for successfully restoring the federal unity of the nation by defeating the secessionist Confederate States of America and along the way, playing in an important role in ending chattel slavery in the United States. However, a number of states' rights supporters continue to view Lincoln as a tyrant who suspended civil liberties and suppressed the "legitimate right" to secede. He was not a popular president during his lifetime but he has achieved greatness due to his legacy.

The human soul always finds language a weak mode of expressing great love, high admiration and deep veneration, and it naturally shrinks from attempting to put into any form whatever its thoughts on its noblest ideals. Still, to think or speak of a great soul at all is a means of elevating even ordinary men, and "great men taken up in any way are profitable company." "We cannot look, however imperfectly, upon a great man without gaining something. He is the living light fountain which it is good and pleasant to be near."

Comrades, Ladies, and Gentlemen: I answer your request for a statement of the cause of the war. It would be pleasant to speak of the heroic valor of the Confederate soldiers, of the skill and intrepidity of their officers, of the patriotism and wisdom of the members of Congress who enacted the laws for the organization and conduct of the Confederate government, of the great and patient labor of the Confederate cabinet and their assistants, of the masterly statesmanship, self-sacrificing devotion, and sublime courage and constancy of President Jefferson Davis, and of the matchless devotion, services, and holy prayers of the women of the Confederacy for the success of the cause in which their fathers, husbands, and sons were engaged. But for the present I must forego the discussion of these interesting themes, and call your attention from the glories of the past to the questions of future interest.

While all of us have been watching, with that admiring sympathy which never fails to wait on courage and magnanimity, the career of the new Timoleon in Sicily,--while we have been reckoning, with an interest scarcely less than in some affair of personal concern, the chances and changes that bear with furtherance or hindrance upon the fortune of united Italy, we are approaching, with a quietness and composure which more than anything else mark the essential difference between our own form of democracy and any other yet known in history, a crisis in our domestic policy more momentous than any that has arisen since we became a nation.

Any one who feels deeply the truths in which our great men of old founded this Democracy, and who sees clearly the great lines of political architecture by which alone it shall stand firm or rise high, finds in the direct plan and work the agency mainly of six men.