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Showing results 71 – 80 of 136

Glossary Term – Person

Abraham Lincoln

The mythologizing of Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865), which began almost immediately after his assassination, placed him in the pantheon of American heroes alongside George Washington. But behind the legend of “Honest Abe”—country raconteur, log cabin president, compassionate father figure, and, finally, national martyr—was a shrewd legal mind, astute politician, and adept student of human psychology. Though he lost his first senatorial election to Stephen Douglas in 1858, the Republican Lincoln outmaneuvered Douglas during the campaign by...

Glossary Term – Person

Horace Greeley

Horace Greeley (1811–1872) was the influential editor of the New York Daily Tribune. Greeley founded the Tribune in 1841 and edited the paper for more than thirty years. Greeley used the paper as a platform for reform causes. He opposed slavery, tobacco and alcohol use, gambling, and prostitution. Greeley also supported westward expansion. In 1854, after the disintegration of the Whig Party, Greeley became involved in the newly formed Republican Party and used the Tribune to promote its anti-slavery platform....

Glossary Term – Person

Andrew Johnson

Andrew Johnson of Tennessee was the only southern senator not to embrace secession and the Confederacy. In 1864, Johnson, a Democrat, became President Abraham Lincoln’s vice president; Lincoln hoped that Johnson’s vice presidency would appeal to both Unionists and Democrats in the border states. Upon Lincoln’s assassination in 1865, Johnson became president. As president, he instituted some of the first actions of Reconstruction, including his proclamation of...

Glossary Term – Person

Benjamin Butler

Benjamin Butler (1818–1893) was an American politician and a Union general during the Civil War. During the 1850s, Burnside served as a Democrat in the Massachusetts state legislature. Butler worked to compromise with Southerners to prevent disunion, but he steadfasty supported the Union when war broke out. He received a political appointment as a Union officer, and as brigadier general in the Massachusetts militia he commanded troops in putting down the Baltimore Riots of 1861. He was promoted to major general and stationed in command at...

Glossary Term – Person

Ulysses S. Grant

Glossary Term – Person

William Seward

William Henry Seward (1801–1872) was a US senator from New York and later secretary of state in the Cabinet of President Abraham Lincoln. Seward was an abolitionist, and he helped Lincoln revise the Emancipation Proclamation before it was issued. Seward was also attacked on the night of Lincoln’s assassination but survived to serve as secretary of state to Andrew Johnson. In that office he negotiated the 1867 purchase of Alaska.

Glossary Term – Person

Rutherford B. Hayes

Rutherford B. Hayes (1822–1893) won the presidency in 1877 on the Republican ticket after an embattled election. Charges of voting fraud and disputed electoral votes led to the Compromise of 1877 in which the Democrats accepted Hayes’s presidency and Hayes removed federal troops from the South. Hayes’s first year in office was marked by the Great Railway Strike of 1877, when he called in federal troops to help suppress rioters in strike regions. The next year Hayes vetoed the Bland-Allison Act, which restored coinage of the silver dollar....

Glossary Term – Person

Mary Edwards Walker

Mary Edwards Walker (1832–1919) was a female Civil War physician who received the Medal of Honor for her service. Walker received her medical degree from Syracuse Medical College in 1855. At the start of the Civil War, she offered to work as a surgeon for the Army. The Army initially refused her services, but she was able to practice after she agreed to work unpaid. Walker tended to Union wounded on site and at a hospital in Washington, DC. She earned the respect and admiration of her male colleagues and eventually received a paid contract...

Glossary Term – Person

Charles Sumner

Charles Sumner (1811–1874) was a Radical Republican senator and reformer who fought for abolition and rights for African Americans. Sumner was born in Boston and attended Harvard Law School. He began his first term in the US Senate in 1852. He immediately denounced the Compromise of 1850 in his first major speech. In May 1856, he delivered another anti-slavery speech. Focusing on the “Crime against Kansas,” Sumner denounced the events in “Bloody Kansas” as well as his pro-slavery colleagues. Among the people Sumner criticized in his speech...

Interactive

Abraham Lincoln: A Man of His Time, A Man for All Times

Two hundred years after his birth, Abraham Lincoln’s historical importance endures. . . . A man for all times, Lincoln has become a global figure. People around the world take inspiration from the principles, words, and resolute leadership of the sixteenth President of the United States.

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