I am sure that many of you may already know this story but I happened to stumble upon this today and it was something I didn't know about Lincoln before he became President. It seems that as Lincoln was running for president during his campaign he attracted a young girl by the name of Grace Bedell who was from Westfield, New York. She wrote Lincoln to express her excitement about his campaign and that she felt that he would gain much more support if he grew facial hair. In her letter to Mr. Lincoln she wrote, "I hope you won't think me very bold to write to such a great man as you are," she goes on, "I have 4 brothers and part of them will vote for you anyway and if you let your whiskers grow I will try and get the rest of them to vote for you you would look a great deal better for your face is so thin. All the ladies like whiskers and they would tease their husbands to vote for you and then you would be President."

In a letter dated October 19, 1960, Mr. Lincoln wrote back to Grace. "Having never worn any, do you not think that people would call it a piece of silly affection if I were to begin it now?" he asked. Yet, by the following January, the recently elected present was seen to have a beard growing in. The next month, in February 1861 a bearded President Lincoln made a stop in Westfield and met Grace Bedell in person.

As he continued to make his way by train to Washington, D.C., his facial hair filled in, and by the time of his March 1861 inauguration, he was the first United States President with a full beard.

I read this in History Facts and it was such an adorable story I just had to bring it here. For those of you who already know this story, I hope you will forgive me. I had never heard the story and thought that I would share it.

In her publication The Huntress, Washington, D.C. journalist Anne Royall included pen-portraits of new members of Congress, including Stephen Douglas, whom she described as "rather under middle height,” before assuring her readers, “In his manners, Judge Douglass [sic] is polite, and urbane, and to crown the whole, he is in the market. Ladies look out!”

Does anyone know if she met Congressman Lincoln? I tend to think not, as her biographer Bessie Rowland James doesn't mention it. (She did meet Jefferson Davis, whose manners she described as "extremely winning.")

I have a pretty basic question that I need some help with. Who won the famous wrestling match between Abraham Lincoln and Jack Armstrong of the Clary’s Grove boys?

I had always assumed that Lincoln had been the winner and thus, earned Jack’s respect. But in Joe DiCola’s wonderful book on New Salem that I just recently finished reading, he included a letter from Lynn McNulty Greene which implies that Jack brought Lincoln down. Is there an answer as to who actually won the wrestling match?

On this day 169 years ago (supposedly at 7pm CST), it seems Lincoln re-boosted his political career with his arguments against the Nebraska Bill. (After literally fleeing the "radical Republicans" in Springfield Oct 4th. That sounds funny.)

" 'Fools rush in where angels fear to tread.' At the hazard of being thought one of the fools of this quotation, I meet that argument — I rush in — I take that bull by the horns. I trust I understand and truly estimate the right of self government. My faith in the proposition that each [person] should do precisely as [they] please with all which is exclusively [their] own lies at the foundation of the sense of justice there is in me. I extend the principle to communities... as well as to individuals. I so extend it because it is politically wise, as well as naturally just; politically wise in saving us from broils about matters which do not concern us. Here, or at Washington, I would not trouble myself with the oyster laws of Virginia, or the cranberry laws of Indiana. The doctrine of self-government is right — absolutely and eternally right — but it has no just application as here attempted. ... When the white man governs himself, that is self-government; but when he governs himself and also governs [another], that is more than self-government — that is despotism. ... [My] ancient faith teaches me that 'all men are created equal,'..."

Denton Snider is quoted (in the Illinois Daily Journal?):
"Lincoln shows his hatred of slavery, in his Peoria speech, and pricks many a sophistical bubble cleverly blown by Douglas for vindicating himself before the people. Upon Lincoln has dawned a bright auroral promise of a new career at the age of forty-five years, in the very flowering of his highest talent. And let it not be forgotten! That adversary and antitype of his, so long triumphant over him, he can now clutch with the grip of Ophiuchus and hale the violator of what he deems the right before the judgment-seat of the Folk-Soul, Yea of the Ages."

I've read this story before, but it's been so long ago that I don't remember where I first read it.

This from the Internet Archive. The Archives gives this stories source as McClure's, November 1922
I had to enlarge the print to read it.

https://archive.org/details/lincolnsfirs...ew=theater

WRESTLING WITH HIS ANGEL
The Political Life of Abraham Lincoln, Volume II, 1849-1856
By Sidney Blumenthal

Douglas’s crowning, if ultimately catastrophic, achievement was the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, which forms the central armature of Blumenthal’s story. Beneath his expedient rhetoric, Douglas’s main goal may have been to line the pockets of his speculator friends, who stood to reap immense profits from the development of a transcontinental railroad. Douglas could only secure the deal with the support of the South, by agreeing to open part of the Nebraska Territory, and implicitly more of the West, to slavery. Brilliant though he was as a legislative strategist, Douglas failed to grasp the depth of outrage the act would spark across the North. Even racist whites did not want to compete for work with slaves. Irreconcilable fissures over slavery erupted in both the Democratic Party and among Lincoln’s Whigs.

According to one Illinois colleague, Lincoln even feared “that the tendency of the times was to make slavery universal, and that Illinois ... would soon legalize slavery there.”

Stumbled across this article in my searching recently. It's from the Feb. 13, 1913 issue of The Chronicle=News out of Trinidad, Colorado.

Anyone ever heard of a housekeeper at the Lincoln home in Springfield named Clara Louisa Farley aka Louisa Klink?

In 1842 there appeared in the Sangamo Journal a series of four letters, the "Rebecca Letters".

These letters were a satirical, insulting, somewhat anonymous letters signed "Rebecca"
The letters attacked a proclamation published and signed by the Governor, State Trasurer and Auditor James Shields.
With Shields becoming the focus of the letters.

https://presidentlincoln.illinois.gov/Bl...blog-post/

These letters were the foundation of a challenge resulting in a duel between James Shields and Abraham Lincoln.

Lincoln scholars over the years have disagreed regarding Lincoln's involvement in the letters. Did he write all of them, only one or two, or none at all.
And what about the duel. There were several different versions of what happened. Except for the accounts published in the Sangamo Journal by Dr. Merryman (Lincoln's friend) and General Whiteside (James Shield's friend), there is no real evidence of what took place. And these two gentlemen were not the most reliable reporters.

This article from "Lincoln Lore" dated September 21, 1942 fills in some of the details. https://www.friendsofthelincolncollectio...-21_01.pdf

The last sentence of the article adds further speculation to contributing factors of this story.
What part did Mary Lincoln play in this drama?

Your thoughts?

A lithograph on ebay has yielded a number of early bids and the seller states that he has been unable to identify another. Apparently, it was part of some institutional collection. I don't know how to post pictures, but it can be easily accessed searching on ebay for "Abraham Lincoln rare lithograph" in case anyone is interested. Given how quickly it has drawn bids upwards of $800, it seems that there may be something special about it.

Opinion Columnist Jamelle Bouie of the New York Times wrote the following statement in a February 28, 2023 opinion piece, titled “1776 Is Not Just What Ron DeSantis Wants It to Be”:

“The assertion that all men are created equal was of no practical use in effecting our separation from Great Britain,” observed none other than Abraham Lincoln, “and it was placed in the Declaration, not for that, but for future use.”


The following is what Lincoln stated in a single paragraph quotation on the subject of “the meaning and objects of that part of the Declaration of Independence which declares that ‘all men are created equal.’” (Speech at Springfield, Illinois - June 26, 1857):

Chief Justice Taney, in his opinion in the Dred Scott case, admits that the language of the Declaration is broad enough to include the whole human family, but he and Judge Douglas argue that the authors of that instrument did not intend to include negroes, by the fact that they did not at once, actually place them on an equality with the whites. Now this grave argument comes to just nothing at all, by the other fact, that they did not at once, or ever afterwards, actually place all white people on an equality with one or another. And this is the staple argument of both the Chief Justice and the Senator, for doing this obvious violence to the plain unmistakable language of the Declaration. I think the authors of that notable instrument intended to include all men, but they did not intend to declare all men equal in all respects. They did not mean to say all were equal in color, size, intellect, moral developments, or social capacity. They defined with tolerable distinctness, in what respects they did consider all men crated equal – equal in ‘certain inalienable rights, among which are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.’ This they said, and this meant. They did not mean to assert the obvious untruth, that all were then actually enjoying that equality, nor yet, that they were about to confer it immediately upon them. In fact they had no power to confer such a boon. They meant simply to declare the right, so that the enforcement of it might follow as fast circumstances should permit. They meant to set up a standard maxim for free society, which should be familiar to all, and revered by all; constantly looked to, constantly labored for, and even though never perfectly attained, constantly approximated, and thereby constantly spreading and deepening its influence, and augmenting the happiness and value of life to all people of all colors everywhere. The assertion that ‘all men are created equal’ was of no practical use in effecting our separation from Great Britain; and it was placed in the Declaration, not for that, but for future use. Its authors meant it to be, thank God, it is now proving itself, a stumbling block to those who in after times might seek to turn a free people back into the hateful paths of despotism. They knew the proneness of prosperity to breed tyrants, and they meant when such should re-appear in this fair land and commence their vocation they should find left for them at least one hard nut to crack.

I have now briefly expressed my view of the meaning and objects of that part of the Declaration of Independence which declares that ‘all men are created equal.’



In my opinion, the history of President Abraham Lincoln (before and during the American Civil War) should have been [and should be now] thoroughly taught in every high school American History or Civics class throughout this democracy. This supposition is based on the proven theory that “those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

It seems to me that the United States is at another genuine dividing time in history and with a population that possesses little or no detailed knowledge of the causes of divisions that led to the American Civil War.