27 Facts About President Abraham

1. President Abraham wrote at this time that God "could have either saved or destroyed the Union without a human contest.

2. President Abraham was private about his beliefs and respected the beliefs of others.

3. President Abraham signed the Homestead Act in 1862, making millions of acres of government-held land in the West available for purchase at very low cost.

4. President Abraham assumed that political control in the South would pass to white Unionists, reluctant secessionists, and forward-looking former Confederates.

5. President Abraham believed, as most Republicans did in April 1865, that the voting requirements should be determined by the states.

6. President Abraham had long made clear his opposition to the confiscation and redistribution of land.

7. President Abraham signed into law Senator Charles Sumner's Freedmen's Bureau bill that set up a temporary federal agency designed to meet the immediate material needs of former slaves.

8. President Abraham obtained Congress's consent to reinstate for Grant the rank of Lieutenant General, which no officer had held since George Washington.

9. President Abraham commented favorably on colonization in the Emancipation Proclamation, but all attempts at such a massive undertaking failed.

10. President Abraham felt such action could only be taken by the Commander-in-Chief using war powers granted to the president by the Constitution, and Lincoln was planning to take that action.

11. President Abraham ignored Lincoln's order to divide his troops, and possibly force Lee to do the same in Harper's Ferry, and tendered his resignation, which Lincoln accepted.

12. President Abraham expanded his war powers, and imposed a blockade on all the Confederate shipping ports, disbursed funds before appropriation by Congress, and after suspending habeas corpus, arrested and imprisoned thousands of suspected Confederate sympathizers.

13. President Abraham ended his address with an appeal to the people of the South: "We are not enemies, but friends.

14. President Abraham was the first president from the Republican Party.

15. President Abraham attended the May 1856 Bloomington Convention, which formally established the Illinois Republican Party.

16. President Abraham abandoned the bill when it failed to garner sufficient Whig supporters.

17. President Abraham was the only Whig in the Illinois delegation, but he showed his party loyalty by participating in almost all votes and making speeches that echoed the party line.

18. President Abraham was known for his "free soil" stance of opposing both slavery and abolitionism.

19. President Abraham partnered with Stephen T Logan from 1841 until 1844.

20. President Abraham was an affectionate, though often absent, husband and father of four children.

21. President Abraham attained a reputation for brawn and audacity after a very competitive wrestling match with the renowned leader of a group of ruffians known as "the Clary's Grove boys".

22. President Abraham became very close to his stepmother, whom he referred to as "Mother".

23. President Abraham was a descendant of Samuel Lincoln, an Englishman who migrated from Hingham, Norfolk, to its namesake of Hingham, Massachusetts, in 1638.

24. President Abraham made major decisions on Union war strategy, including a naval blockade that shut down the South's trade.

25. President Abraham suspended habeas corpus, and he averted British intervention by defusing the Trent Affair.

26. President Abraham gained national attention in 1858 debating a top national Democratic leader Stephen A Douglas.

27. President Abraham was a leader in building in the West the new Republican Party from Whigs and anti-slavery Democrats.