In October 1862, Mathew Brady opened a photography exhibition at his studio in New York City. Entitled The Dead of Antietam, the exhibition attracted large crowds and brought the war home in a way that news articles and casualty listings could not. On October 20, 1862, an editorial in the New York Times explained that “the dead of the battle-field come up to us very rarely, even in dreams. We see the list in the...
The Emancipation Proclamation stands as the single most important accomplishment of Lincoln’s presidency. The preliminary proclamation, announced on September 22, 1862, served as a warning for Southern states that if they did not abandon the war, they would lose their slaves. More important, it was the first step toward the official abolition of slavery in the United States. While many Northerners were not initially abolitionists, their support of Abraham Lincoln and the Union military, as well as the demonstrated determination of slaves to...
Though the first holders of the job thought it more a burden than a position of honor or power, the office of chief justice of the...
![[Dividing the] National [Map]. [Cincinnati], 1860. (LC-DIG-ppmsca-33122)](http://gilderlehrman.org/sites/default/files/imagecache/aggregate-208x148/essay-images/33122u.synop_.web_.jpg "Political cartoon depicting the four presidential candidates in the election of 1860 tearing the country apart. (Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division)")
‘A house divided against itself can not stand’ I believe this government can not endure permanently, half slave, and half free . . . I do not expect the Union to be dissolved - I do not expect the house to fall; but I do expect it will cease to be divided . . . Either the opponents of slavery will arrest the further spread of it, and put it in course of ultimate extinction; or its advocates will push it forward till it shall become alike lawful in all the states, old, as well as new.
—Abraham...
