![]() ![]() He had self-educated himself to become a lawyer and while serving in the Illinois legislature was admitted to the bar. He was seventh-generation American, from stable, if not always prosperous stock, with some history of public service. It was what Lincoln wanted known but not entirely accurate. When asked about his family history, he called up a line from Thomas Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard”: “The short and simple annals of the poor.” “That’s my life,” he said, “and that’s all you or any one else can make of it.” 3 His humble origins are well known, and the idea was even promoted by him. Had Lincoln not remained close to politics and his life become less entwined in the new Republican Party with its key issue the prevention of slavery into the territories, he eventually might well have taken his family from Springfield to booming Chicago. ![]() Certainly by any measure the father was among the most prominent corporation lawyers in the Midwest. The Lincolns were hardly the nobodies one is sometimes led to think. Robert, the eldest, turned 18 in 1861 Willie 11 and Tad 8. Four boys had been born to the Lincolns in their hometown of Springfield, Illinois. Lincoln by another route were the three sons. A plot to kidnap or murder him was bypassed through the skillful management of Allan Pinkerton, a detective on the Chicago police force who also ran a private detective agency. The Lincolns, Abraham, age 52, and his wife Mary Todd Lincoln, age 42, moved to Washington under the most perilous circumstances. Just eighty-five years separated their inaugurations from the signing of the Declaration of Independence. It must have seemed incredible to them that the nation was falling apart. Both children of the generation that followed the American Revolution, Lincoln and Davis were born about 100 miles apart, not quite a year apart. We are without machinery without means and threatened by powerful opposition but I do not despond and will not shrink from the task imposed upon me.” 2Įach man hoped politics might solve the problem, and each soon realized that a peaceful solution was not possible. The audience was large and brilliant upon my heavy breast was showered smiles plaudits and flowers, but beyond them I saw troubles and storms insurmountable. Two days after his inauguration in Montgomery, Davis wrote to his wife: “I was inaugurated on Saturday night. ![]() Let us confidently hope that all will yet be well.” 1 Without the assistance of that Divine Being, who ever attended him, I cannot succeed. I now leave, not knowing when, or whether ever, I will return, with a task before me greater than that which rested upon Washington. To his friends in Springfield, Lincoln spoke from the back of the departing train: “No one, not in my situation, can appreciate my feeling of sadness at this parting. Before each was a future that can only have seemed puzzling and, at its worst moments, rightly imagined as an impending nightmare. Both men went to their capitals on the train, and both took their families. They had lived in a two-story frame house in Alabama during the three months the Confederate capital was at Montgomery, where Davis had been inaugurated in February. The Davises moved into the Richmond house on August 1 for a six-year term. The Lincolns moved to the White House for a four-year term on March 4, 1861, immediately following the inauguration. The building in Richmond, which was built with a tall, columned porch on the rear or south side, had gained a third floor not so long before it was purchased by the city and furnished for Jefferson Davis as the presidential residence of the Confederate States of America. This was a glorious year in the period buoyantly called the Era of Good Feelings.īy the time the Lincolns moved there, the White House in Washington had been improved with the addition of porches north and south, making it the house we recognize today. The house in Richmond, built by one John Brockenbrough to designs by Robert Mills, once a draftsman for Hoban, was completed in 1818. Designed by James Hoban, the White House had been rebuilt by him and completed late in 1817, after its destruction in the British invasion three years before. They were the same age and architecturally were cousins. Standing 90 miles apart, across the Virginia landscape, one overlooked the Potomac River and the other the James. For a four-year period in American history, two official houses carried the name White House. ![]()
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