Gettysburg Address
The Gettysburg Address is a speech that U. S. President Abraham Lincoln delivered during the American Civil War at the dedication of the Soldiers' National Cemetery in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, on the afternoon of Thursday, November 19, 1863, four and a half months after the Union armies defeated those of the Confederacy at the Battle of Gettysburg, it is one of the best-known speeches in American history. Although not the day's primary speech, Lincoln's crafted address came to be seen as one of the greatest and most influential statements of American national purpose. In just 271 words, beginning with the now iconic phrase "Four score and seven years ago," referring to the signing of the Declaration of Independence eighty-seven years earlier, Lincoln described the USA as a nation "conceived in Liberty, dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal," and represented the Civil War as a test that would decide whether such a nation, the Union sundered by the secession crisis, could endure.
He extolled the sacrifices of those who died at Gettysburg in defense of those principles, exhorted his listeners to resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain — that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom — and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth. Despite the speech's prominent place in the history and popular culture of the United States, its exact wording is disputed; the five known manuscripts of the Gettysburg Address in Lincoln's hand differ in a number of details, differ from contemporary newspaper reprints of the speech. Neither is it clear. Modern scholarship locates the speakers' platform 40 yards away from the traditional site in Soldiers' National Cemetery at the Soldiers' National Monument, which means that it stood within the private, adjacent Evergreen Cemetery. Following the Battle of Gettysburg on July 1–3, 1863, the removal of the fallen Union soldiers from the Gettysburg Battlefield graves and their reburial in graves at the National Cemetery at Gettysburg began on October 17.
In inviting President Lincoln to the ceremonies, David Wills, of the committee for the November 19 Consecration of the National Cemetery at Gettysburg, wrote, "It is the desire that, after the Oration, you, as Chief Executive of the nation, formally set apart these grounds to their sacred use by a few appropriate remarks."On the train trip from Washington, D. C. to Gettysburg on November 18, Lincoln was accompanied by three members of his Cabinet, William Seward, John Usher and Montgomery Blair, several foreign officials, his secretary John Nicolay, his assistant secretary, John Hay. During the trip Lincoln remarked to Hay. Hay noted that during the speech Lincoln's face had "a ghastly color" and that he was "sad, mournful haggard." After the speech, when Lincoln boarded the 6:30 pm train for Washington, D. C. he was weak, with a severe headache. A protracted illness followed, it thus seems likely that Lincoln was in the prodromal period of smallpox when he delivered the Gettysburg address. The program organized for that day by Wills and his committee included: Music, by Birgfeld's Band Prayer, by Reverend T. H. Stockton, D.
D. Music, by the Marine Band, directed by Francis Scala Oration, by Hon. Edward Everett Music, Hymn by B. B. French, Esq. music by Wilson G Horner, sung by Baltimore Glee Club Dedicatory Remarks, by the President of the United States Dirge, sung by Choir selected for the occasion Benediction, by Reverend H. L. Baugher, D. D. While it is Lincoln's short speech that has gone down in history as one of the finest examples of English public oratory, it was Everett's two-hour oration, slated to be the "Gettysburg address" that day, his now seldom-read 13,607-word oration began: Standing beneath this serene sky, overlooking these broad fields now reposing from the labors of the waning year, the mighty Alleghenies dimly towering before us, the graves of our brethren beneath our feet, it is with hesitation that I raise my poor voice to break the eloquent silence of God and Nature. But the duty to which you have called me must be performed, and ended two hours with: But they, I am sure, will join us in saying, as we bid farewell to the dust of these martyr-heroes, that wheresoever throughout the civilized world the accounts of this great warfare are read, down to the latest period of recorded time, in the glorious annals of our common country, there will be no brighter page than that which relates the Battles of Gettysburg.
Lengthy dedication addresses like Everett's were common at cemeteries in this era. The tradition began in 1831 when Justice Joseph Story delivered the dedication address at Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Massachusetts; those addresses linked cemeteries to the mission of Union. Lincoln's address followed the oration by Edward Everett, who subsequently included a copy of the Gettysburg Address in his 1864 book about the event (Address of the Hon. Edward Everett At the Consecration of the National Cemetery At Gettysburg, 19th November 1863, with the Dedicatory Speech of President Lincoln, the Other Exercises of the Occasion.
Hampton Roads Conference
The Hampton Roads Conference was a peace conference held between the United States and the Confederate States on February 3, 1865, aboard the steamboat River Queen in Hampton Roads, Virginia, to discuss terms to end the American Civil War. President Abraham Lincoln and Secretary of State William H. Seward, representing the Union, met with three commissioners from the Confederacy: Vice President Alexander H. Stephens, Senator Robert M. T. Hunter, Assistant Secretary of War John A. Campbell; the representatives discussed a possible alliance against France, the possible terms of surrender, the question of whether slavery might persist after the war, the question of whether the South would be compensated for property lost through emancipation. Lincoln and Seward offered some possibilities for compromise on the issue of slavery; the only concrete agreement reached was over prisoner-of-war exchanges. The Confederate commissioners returned to Richmond at the conclusion of the conference. Confederate President Jefferson Davis announced.
Lincoln drafted an amnesty agreement based on terms discussed at the Conference, but met with opposition from his Cabinet. John Campbell continued to advocate for a peace agreement and met again with Lincoln after the fall of Richmond on April 2. In 1864, pressure mounted for both sides to seek a peace settlement to end the long and devastating Civil War. Several people had sought to broker a North–South peace treaty in 1864. Francis Preston Blair, a personal friend of both Abraham Lincoln and Jefferson Davis, had unsuccessfully encouraged Lincoln to make a diplomatic visit to Richmond. Blair had advocated to Lincoln that the war could be brought to a close by having the two opposing sections of the nation stand down in their conflict, reunite on grounds of the Monroe Doctrine in attacking the French-installed Emperor Maximilian in Mexico. Lincoln asked Blair to wait. Davis was pressed for options as the Confederacy faced defeat. Peace movements in the South had been active since the beginning of the war, intensified in 1864.
Alexander H. Stephens, Vice President of the Confederate States, had by 1863 become an active advocate for ending the war. Stephens had begun negotiations with Lincoln in July 1863, but his efforts were thwarted after Confederate defeat in the Battle of Gettysburg. By 1864, Stephens was an outright dissident against the power of Davis's CSA government, was invited by General William T. Sherman to discuss independent peace negotiations between the State of Georgia and the federal Union. Stephens addressed the Confederate States Senate as its nominal presiding officer in Richmond on January 6, 1865, urging peace talks with the North; some Confederate legislators began to agitate for negotiations. John Campbell, another of the peace commissioners, had opposed secession. Campbell served earlier on the Supreme Court of the United States from 1853 to 1861, but began to consider resignation after Lincoln's first inaugural address in March 1861, he stayed on for the spring term of 1861 and supported the Corwin Amendment to protect slavery from federal intervention.
Hoping to prevent a war, Samuel Nelson enlisted Campbell to help broker negotiations over the status of Fort Sumter in Charleston harbor in South Carolina. On March 15, Campbell relayed to Martin Jenkins Crawford a supposed promise from Secretary of State Seward that the federal government would evacuate Fort Sumter within five days; as the Fort remained occupied on March 21, Confederate commissioners pushed Campbell to find out more. Lincoln had ordered the fort resupplied. By April 12th, diplomacy had evidently failed and the Bombardment of Fort Sumter began. Campbell went South. Fearing he would be persecuted as a Union sympathizer in his home state of Alabama, he moved instead to New Orleans. Campbell declined a number of positions in the CSA government, but accepted the post of Assistant Secretary of War in President Davis' cabinet in 1862. For the duration of the job, Campbell was criticized for trying to limit the scope of wartime conscription. By late 1864, he was pushing again for an end to the war.
In an 1865 letter to Judge Benjamin R. Curtis, he described the disastrous state of the Confederacy and marveled: "You would suppose there could be no difficulty in convincing men under such circumstances that peace was required, but when I look back upon the events of the winter, I find that I was incessantly employed in making these facts known and to no result." Lincoln would insist on full sovereignty of the Union. Slavery posed a more difficult problem; the Republican platform in 1864 had explicitly endorsed abolition. Within this precarious political situation, in July 1864 Lincoln issued a statement via Horace Greeley: To Whom It May Concern? Any proposition which embraces the restoration of peace, the integrity of the whole Union, the abandonment of Slavery, which comes by and with authority that can control the armies now at war against the United States, will be received and considered by the Executive Government of the United States, will be met by liberal terms on other substantial and collateral points.
Lincoln confided to James W. Singleton. In Singleton's words: "that he never has and never will present any other ultimatum—that he is misunderstood on the subject of slavery—that it shall not sta
Trent Affair
The Trent Affair was a diplomatic incident in 1861 during the American Civil War that threatened a war between the United States and the United Kingdom. The U. S. Navy illegally captured two Confederate diplomats from a British ship; the United States ended the incident by releasing the diplomats. On November 8, 1861, the USS San Jacinto, commanded by Union Captain Charles Wilkes, intercepted the British mail packet RMS Trent and removed, as contraband of war, two Confederate diplomats: James Murray Mason and John Slidell; the envoys were bound for Britain and France to press the Confederacy's case for diplomatic recognition and to lobby for possible financial and military support. Public reaction in the United States was to celebrate the capture and rally against Britain, threatening war. In the Confederate States, the hope was that the incident would lead to a permanent rupture in Anglo-American relations and even war or at least diplomatic recognition by Britain. Confederates realized their independence depended on intervention by Britain and France.
In Britain, the public disapproved of this violation of neutral rights and insult to their national honor. The British government demanded an apology and the release of the prisoners and took steps to strengthen its military forces in Canada and the Atlantic. President Abraham Lincoln and his top advisors did not want to risk war with Britain over this issue. After several tense weeks, the crisis was resolved when the Lincoln administration released the envoys and disavowed Captain Wilkes's actions, though without a formal apology. Mason and Slidell resumed their voyage to Britain but failed in their goal of achieving diplomatic recognition. Relations with the United States were strained and verged on war when Britain supported the Confederacy in the early part of the American Civil War. British leaders were annoyed from the 1840s to the 1860s by what they saw as Washington's pandering to the democratic mob, as in the Oregon boundary dispute in 1844 to 1846. However, British middle-class public opinion sensed a common "Special Relationship" between the two peoples, based on language, evangelical Protestantism, liberal traditions, extensive trade.
During the affair, London drew Washington retreated. The Confederacy and its president, Jefferson Davis, believed from the beginning that European dependence on Southern cotton for its textile industry would lead to diplomatic recognition and intervention, in the form of mediation. Historian Charles Hubbard wrote: Davis left foreign policy to others in government and, rather than developing an aggressive diplomatic effort, tended to expect events to accomplish diplomatic objectives; the new president was committed to the notion that cotton would secure recognition and legitimacy from the powers of Europe. One of the Confederacy's strongest hopes at the time was the belief that the British, fearing a devastating impact on their textile mills, would recognize the Confederate States and break the Union blockade; the men Davis selected as secretary of state and emissaries to Europe were chosen for political and personal reasons—not for their diplomatic potential. This was due, in part, to the belief that cotton could accomplish the Confederate objectives with little help from Confederate diplomats.
The Union's main focus in foreign affairs was just the opposite: to prevent any British recognition of the Confederacy. Notwithstanding a minor border incident in the Pacific Northwest, Anglo-American relations had improved throughout the 1850s; the issues of the Oregon territory, British involvement in Texas, the Canada–US border dispute had all been resolved in the 1840s. Secretary of State William H. Seward, the primary architect of American foreign policy during the war, intended to maintain the policy principles that had served the country well since the American Revolution: non-intervention by the United States in the affairs of other countries and resistance to foreign intervention in the affairs of the United States and other countries in the Western Hemisphere. British Prime Minister Lord Palmerston urged a policy of neutrality, his international concerns were centered in Europe, where both Napoleon III's ambitions in Europe and Bismarck's rise in Prussia were occurring. During the Civil War, British reactions to American events were shaped by past British policies and their own national interests, both strategically and economically.
In the Western Hemisphere, as relations with the United States improved, Britain had become cautious about confronting the United States over issues in Central America. As a naval power, Britain had a long record of insisting that neutral nations honor its blockades of hostile countries. From the earliest days of the war, that perspective would guide the British away from taking any action that might have been viewed in Washington as a direct challenge to the Union blockade. From the perspective of the South, British policy amounted to de facto support for the Union blockade and caused great frustration; the Russian Minister in Washington, Eduard de Stoeckl, noted, "The Cabinet of London is watching attentively the internal dissensions of the Union and awaits the result with an impatience which it has difficulty in disguising." De Stoeckl advised his government that Britain would recognize the Confederate States at its earliest opportunity. Cassius Clay, the US minister in Russia, stated, "I saw at a glance where the feeling of England was.
They hoped for our ruin! They are jealous of our power, they care neither for the North. They hate both."At the beginning of the Civil War, the U. S. minister to the Court of St. James was Charles Francis Adams, he made clear that Washington considered the war an internal insurrec
West Virginia
West Virginia is a state located in the Appalachian region in the Southern United States, considered to be a part of the Middle Atlantic States. It is bordered by Pennsylvania to the north, Maryland to the east and northeast, Virginia to the southeast, Kentucky to the southwest, Ohio to the northwest. West Virginia is the 41st largest state by area, is ranked 38th in population; the capital and largest city is Charleston. West Virginia became a state following the Wheeling Conventions of 1861, after the American Civil War had begun. Delegates from some Unionist counties of northwestern Virginia decided to break away from Virginia, although they included many secessionist counties in the new state. West Virginia was admitted to the Union on June 20, 1863, was a key border state during the war. West Virginia was the only state to form by separating from a Confederate state, the first to separate from any state since Maine separated from Massachusetts, was one of two states admitted to the Union during the American Civil War.
While a portion of its residents held slaves, most of the residents were yeomen farmers, the delegates provided for gradual abolition of slavery in the new state Constitution. The Census Bureau and the Association of American Geographers classify West Virginia as part of the Southern United States; however the Bureau of Labor Statistics classifies West Virginia as a part of the Mid-Atlantic. The northern panhandle extends adjacent to Pennsylvania and Ohio, with the West Virginia cities of Wheeling and Weirton just across the border from the Pittsburgh metropolitan area, while Bluefield is less than 70 miles from North Carolina. Huntington in the southwest is close to the states of Ohio and Kentucky, while Martinsburg and Harpers Ferry in the Eastern Panhandle region are considered part of the Washington metropolitan area, in between the states of Maryland and Virginia; the unique position of West Virginia means that it is included in several geographical regions, including the Mid-Atlantic, the Upland South, the Southeastern United States.
It is the only state, within the area served by the Appalachian Regional Commission. The state is noted for its mountains and rolling hills, its significant logging and coal mining industries, its political and labor history, it is known for a wide range of outdoor recreational opportunities, including skiing, whitewater rafting, hiking, mountain biking, rock climbing, hunting. Many ancient man-made earthen mounds from various prehistoric mound builder cultures survive in the areas of present-day Moundsville, South Charleston, Romney; the artifacts uncovered in these give evidence of village societies. They had a tribal trade system culture. In the 1670s during the Beaver Wars, the powerful Iroquois, five allied nations based in present-day New York and Pennsylvania, drove out other American Indian tribes from the region in order to reserve the upper Ohio Valley as a hunting ground. Siouan language tribes, such as the Moneton, had been recorded in the area. A century the area now identified as West Virginia was contested territory among Anglo-Americans as well, with the colonies of Pennsylvania and Virginia claiming territorial rights under their colonial charters to this area before the American Revolutionary War.
Some speculative land companies, such as the Vandalia Company, the Ohio Company and Indiana Company, tried to legitimize their claims to land in parts of West Virginia and present day Kentucky, but failed. This rivalry resulted in some settlers petitioning the Continental Congress to create a new territory called Westsylvania. With the federal settlement of the Pennsylvania and Virginia border dispute, creating Kentucky County, Kentuckians "were satisfied, the inhabitants of a large part of West Virginia were grateful."The Crown considered the area of West Virginia to be part of the British Virginia Colony from 1607 to 1776. The United States considered this area to be the western part of the state of Virginia from 1776 to 1863, before the formation of West Virginia, its residents were discontented for years with their position in Virginia, as the government was dominated by the planter elite of the Tidewater and Piedmont areas. The legislature had electoral malapportionment, based on the counting of slaves toward regional populations, the western white residents were underrepresented in the state legislature.
More subsistence and yeoman farmers lived in the west and they were less supportive of slavery, although many counties were divided on their support. The residents of this area became more divided after the planter elite of eastern Virginia voted to secede from the Union during the Civil War. Residents of the western and northern counties set up a separate government under Francis Pierpont in 1861, which they called the Restored Government. Most voted to separate from Virginia, the new state was admitted to the Union in 1863. In 1864 a state constitutional convention drafted a constitution, ratified by the legislature without putting it to popular vote. West Virginia abolished slavery by a gradual process and temporarily disenfranchised men who had held Confederate office or fought for the Confederacy. West Virginia's history has been profoundly affected by its mountainous terrain and vast river valleys, rich natural resources; these were all factors driving its economy and the lifestyles of its residents, who tended to live in many small isolated communities in the mountain valleys.
A 2010 analysis of
Abraham Lincoln and slavery
Abraham Lincoln's position on slavery is one of the most discussed aspects of his life. Lincoln expressed moral opposition to slavery in public and private, he attempted to bring about the eventual extinction of slavery by stopping its further expansion into any U. S. by proposing compensated emancipation in the early part of his presidency. Lincoln stood by the Republican Party's platform of 1860 stating that slavery should not be allowed to expand into any more U. S. territories. He worried that the extension of slavery in new western lands could block "free labor on free soil."As early as the 1850s, Lincoln had been politically attacked as an abolitionist. Howard Jones says that "in the prewar period, as well as into the first months of the American Civil War itself.... Lincoln believed it prudent to administer a slow death to slavery through gradual emancipation and voluntary colonization rather than to follow the abolitionist and demanding an immediate end to slavery without compensation to owners."
In 1863, Lincoln ordered the freedom of all slaves in the areas "in rebellion" and insisted on enforcement freeing millions of slaves, but he did not call for the immediate end of slavery everywhere in the U. S. until the proposed 13th Amendment became part of his party platform for the 1864 election. In 1842, Abraham Lincoln had married Mary Todd, a daughter of a slave-owning family from Kentucky. Lincoln returned to the political stage as a result of the 1854 Kansas–Nebraska Act and soon became a leading opponent of the "Slaveocracy"—the political power of the Southern slave owners; the Kansas–Nebraska Act, written to form the territories of Kansas and Nebraska, included language, designed by Stephen A. Douglas, which allowed the settlers to decide whether they would or would not accept slavery in their region. Lincoln was outraged by the repeal of the 1820 Missouri Compromise, which had outlawed slavery above the 36-30' parallel. During the Civil War, Lincoln used the war powers of the presidency to issue the Emancipation Proclamation, in January 1863..
It declared "all persons held as slaves within any State or designated part of a State, the people whereof shall be in rebellion against the United States, shall be thenceforward, forever free" but exempted border states and those areas of slave states not in rebellion and therefore beyond the reach of the constitutional war power to emancipate. It changed the legal status of all slaves in the affected areas, as soon as the Union Army arrived, it did liberate the slaves in that area. On the first day, it affected tens of thousands of slaves, but when the war ended, in April 1865, only about fifteen percent of the slaves had been freed. Full abolition was achieved that year, with the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment, abolishing slavery everywhere in the United States. Lincoln was born on February 1809, in Hardin County, Kentucky, his family attended a Separate Baptists church, which had strict moral standards and opposed alcohol and slavery. The family moved north across the Ohio River to free territory and made a new start in Perry County.
Lincoln noted that this move was "partly on account of slavery" but due to land title difficulties. As a young man, he settled in the free state of Illinois. Lincoln, the leader most associated with the end of slavery in the United States, came to national prominence in the 1850s, following the advent of the Republican Party, whose official position was that freedom was "national," the natural condition of all areas under the direct sovereignty of the Constitution, whereas slavery was exceptional and sectional. Earlier, as a member of the Whig Party in the Illinois General Assembly, Lincoln issued a written protest of the assembly's passage of a resolution stating that slavery should not be abolished in Washington, D. C. In 1841, he won a court case, representing a black woman and her children who claimed she had been freed and could not be sold as a slave. In 1845, he defended Marvin Pond for harboring the fugitive slave John Hauley. In 1847, he lost a case representing a slave owner claiming return of fugitive slaves.
While a congressman from Illinois in 1846 to 1848, Lincoln supported the Wilmot Proviso, which, if it had been adopted, would have banned slavery in any U. S. territory won from Mexico. Lincoln, in collaboration with abolitionist Congressman Joshua R. Giddings, wrote a bill to abolish slavery in the District of Columbia with compensation for the owners, enforcement to capture fugitive slaves, a popular vote on the matter. After leaving Congress in 1849 Lincoln became somewhat less active in politics until he was drawn back into it by the Kansas–Nebraska Act of 1854, which allowed territories to decide for themselves whether they would allow slavery. Lincoln was politically opposed to any expansion of it. At issue was extension into the western territories. On October 16, 1854, in his "Peoria Speech", Lincoln declared his opposition to slavery, which he repeated in his route to presidency. Speaking in his Kentucky accent, with a powerful voice, he said the Kansas Act had a "declared indifference, but as I must think, a covert real zeal for the spread of slavery.
I hate it. I hate it because of the monstrous injustice of slavery itself. I hate it because it deprives our republican example of its just influence in the world..."Impressed by the strength of anti-black racism in his
1860 United States presidential election
The 1860 United States presidential election was the nineteenth quadrennial presidential election to select the President and Vice President of the United States. The election was held on Tuesday, November 6, 1860. In a four-way contest, the Republican Party ticket of Abraham Lincoln and Hannibal Hamlin emerged triumphant; the election of Lincoln served as the primary catalyst of the American Civil War. The United States had become divided during the 1850s over sectional disagreements regarding the extension of slavery into the territories. Incumbent President James Buchanan, like his predecessor Franklin Pierce, was a northern Democrat with sympathies for the South. During the mid-to-late 1850s, the anti-slavery Republican Party became a major political force in the wake of the Kansas–Nebraska Act and the Supreme Court's decision in the 1857 case of Dred Scott v. Sandford. By 1860, the Republican Party had replaced the defunct Whig Party as the major opposition to the Democrats. A group of former Whigs and Know Nothings formed the Constitutional Union Party, which sought to avoid secession by pushing aside the issue of slavery.
The 1860 Republican National Convention nominated Lincoln, a moderate former Congressman from Illinois, as its standard-bearer. The Republican Party platform promised not to interfere with slavery in the states, but opposed the further extension of slavery into the territories; the first 1860 Democratic National Convention adjourned without agreeing on a nominee, but a second convention nominated Senator Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois for president. Douglas's support for the concept of popular sovereignty, which called for each individual territory to decide on the status of slavery, alienated many Southern Democrats; the Southern Democrats, with the support of President Buchanan, held their own convention and nominated Vice President John C. Breckinridge of Kentucky for president; the 1860 Constitutional Union Convention nominated a ticket led by former Senator John Bell of Tennessee. Despite minimal support in the South, Lincoln won a plurality of the popular vote and a majority of the electoral vote.
The divisions among the Republicans' opponents were not in themselves decisive in ensuring the Republican capture of the White House, as Lincoln received absolute majorities in states that combined for a majority of the electoral votes. Lincoln's main opponent in the North was Douglas, who finished second in several states but only won the slave state of Missouri and three electors from the free state of New Jersey. Bell won three Southern states; the election of Lincoln led to the secession of several states in the South, the Civil War soon began, with the Battle of Fort Sumter. The election was the first of six consecutive victories for the Republican Party; the 1860 presidential election conventions were unusually tumultuous, due in particular to a split in the Democratic Party that led to rival conventions. Northern Democratic candidates: Stephen Douglas, senator from Illinois James Guthrie, former treasury secretary from Kentucky Robert Mercer Taliaferro Hunter, senator from Virginia Joseph Lane, senator from Oregon Daniel S. Dickinson, former senator from New York Andrew Johnson, senator from Tennessee At the Democratic National Convention held in Institute Hall in Charleston, South Carolina, in April 1860, 51 Southern Democrats walked out over a platform dispute.
The extreme pro-slavery "Fire-Eater" William Lowndes Yancey and the Alabama delegation first left the hall, followed by the delegates of Florida, Louisiana, South Carolina, three of the four delegates from Arkansas, one of the three delegates from Delaware. Six candidates were nominated: Stephen A. Douglas from Illinois, James Guthrie from Kentucky, Robert Mercer Taliaferro Hunter from Virginia, Joseph Lane from Oregon, Daniel S. Dickinson from New York, Andrew Johnson from Tennessee. Three other candidates, Isaac Toucey from Connecticut, James Pearce from Maryland, Jefferson Davis from Mississippi received votes. Douglas, a moderate on the slavery issue who favored "popular sovereignty", was ahead on the first ballot, but needed 56.5 more votes to secure the nomination. On the 57th ballot, Douglas was 51.5 votes short of the nomination. In desperation, the delegates agreed on May 3 to adjourn the convention; the Democrats convened again at the Front Street Theater in Baltimore, Maryland, on June 18.
This time, 110 Southern delegates walked out when the convention would not adopt a resolution supporting extending slavery into territories whose voters did not want it. Some considered Horatio Seymour a compromise candidate for the National Democratic nomination at the reconvening convention in Baltimore. Seymour wrote a letter to the editor of his local newspaper declaring unreservedly that he was not a candidate for either spot on the ticket. After two ballots, the remaining Democrats nominated Stephen A. Douglas from Illinois for president. Benjamin Fitzpatrick from Alabama was nominated for vice president; that nomination went instead to Herschel Vespasian Johnson from Georgia. Southern Democratic candidates: John C. Breckinridge, Vice President of the United States Daniel S. Dickinson, former senator from New York Robert Mercer Taliaferro Hunter, senator from Virginia Joseph Lane, senator from Oregon Jefferson Davis, senator from Mississippi The Charleston bolters reconvened in Richmond, Virginia on June 11.
When the Democrats reconvened in Baltimore, they rejoined. When the convention seated two replacement delegations on June 18, they bolted again, now accompanied
Lincoln Catafalque
The Lincoln catafalque is a catafalque hastily constructed in 1865 to support the casket of Abraham Lincoln while the president's body lay in state in the Capitol Rotunda in Washington, D. C; the catafalque has since been used for all those who have lain in state in the Capitol Rotunda, as listed below. When not in use, the catafalque is kept in the United States Capitol Visitor Center in a small vaulted chamber, it was kept in an area called Washington's Tomb, intended, but never used, as the burial place for George Washington, the first President of the United States. No law, written rule, or regulation specifies. Any person who has rendered distinguished service to the nation may lie in state if the family so wishes and Congress approves. In the case of unknown soldiers, the President or the appropriate branch of the armed forces initiates the action. Senators and representatives have lain in state on the catafalque elsewhere in the Capitol. An example of this was when the catafalque was used for the six hours that Senator Robert C. Byrd lay in repose on the Senate floor on July 1, 2010.
The catafalque has been used seven times in the Supreme Court Building, for the lying in state of former Chief Justice Earl Warren on July 11–12, 1974. July 28, 1997. In addition, it was used in the Department of Commerce building on April 9–10, 1996, for the lying in state of Secretary of Commerce Ronald H. Brown; the catafalque is a simple bier of rough pine boards covered with black cloth. Although the base and platform have been altered to accommodate the larger size of modern coffins and for the ease of the attending military personnel, it is the same today as it was in Lincoln's time. Presently the catafalque measures 7 feet 1 inch long, 2 feet 6 inches wide, 2 feet high; the attached base is 8 feet 10 inches long, 4 feet 3 1⁄2 inches wide, 2 inches high. The platform is 11 feet 1 inch long, 6 feet wide, 9 1⁄4 inches high. Although the cloth covering the catafalque has been replaced several times, the style of the drapery is similar to that used in 1865. A list of those who have lain on the catafalque appears below.
This article incorporates public domain material from websites or documents of the United States Government. "Catafalque". Architect of the Capitol. Retrieved on September 30, 2009
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