Our Visit to the Lincoln Memorial Washington, D.C.

As the United States continued to expand westward, toward the Pacific Ocean, the unfinished work of our country's Founders came up time and time again.  The ethics of owning slaves; the treatment of runaway slaves and tensions that arose when new states entered the Union....  Would a new state be free or slave holding?  Will slavery spread across the entire country?

The Presidential Election of 1860 put slavery and its inequities before the American public. The Republican Party opposed the institution of slavery and its expansion into new states. The Democratic Party continued to support popular sovereignty (state's rights) and the expansion of slavery into new states.  Both parties were fractured.  Four candidates ran for President in 1860. Abraham Lincoln, the lawyer from Springfield, Illinois, won with forty percent of the vote....  He did not have a popular mandate and the country was badly fractured.






Eric & I join hundreds of
visitors to the Lincoln
Memorial.







The new President refused to promise the southern states that he would support slavery as it was currently practiced.  Led by South Carolina in December 1860, ten more southern states seceded from the Union and set up the Confederate States of America.  After Southern troops fired on Fort Sumter on April 12, 1861 in Charleston Harbor, the Civil War had begun.

We weave our way up the

steps of the Memorial.

A seated Abraham Lincoln 

gazes wearily over the

crowds.

Slavery, the unresolved issue

America was founded with

had ended in war.

On January 1 1863, President Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, which set free all the slaves in the "rebellious states."  The North's aim in winning the war was the end of the institution of slavery.  

President Lincoln delivered the

 Gettysburg Address in about

two minutes at the dedication 

 of the Gettysburg National

 Cemetery on November 19, 1963.

In just 272 words, Abraham Lincoln honored those who gave their lives during the three day battle at Gettysburg and described the nation he envisioned after the war ended.... A united country with all of its citizens free.  There would be no more New Yorkers, Ohioans, Kentuckians.... The President envisioned Americans all, rededicated to the Union..

In the midst of war, Abraham Lincoln won his second Presidential Election on November 8, 1864.

For four long years, the battles raged.  Finally, Confederate General Robert E. Lee surrendered his depleted, supplied-starved Army to Union General Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Courthouse on April 9, 1865.  An estimated 620,000 soldiers died during the
Civil War.

Originally a plot to kidnap President Lincoln, John Wilkes Booth shot the President in the head at Ford's Theater on April 14, 1865.  The mortally wounded Lincoln was brought to Williams Peterson's house, across the street,where he died the next morning.  Secretary of War Edmund M. Stanton was in attendance when President Lincoln died.  He said, "Now he belongs to the ages."

An extraordinary man and President was martyred.

We walk down the steps
of the Memorial with
a hundred or more visitors.

The drained Reflecting Pool
is in the distance.





We should come to Washington, D.C. when the weather is warmer and everything is ready for visitors.