| Patriotic Quotes
Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country. What pity is it That we can die, but once to serve our country. Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it. Patriotism is not short, frenzied outbursts of emotion, but the tranquil and steady dedication of a lifetime. |
Abraham Lincoln Posters
Abraham Lincoln: Sixteenth President of
United States (1861-1865)
Born: February 12, 1809, in Hodgenville, Hardin County, Kentucky
Died: April 15, 1865. Lincoln died the morning after being shot at Ford's
Theatre in Washington, D.C. by John Wilkes Booth, an actor.
 Abraham Lincoln 18.00x22.00in. Print |
 Lincoln 8.00x10.00in. Poster |
Lincoln 16.00x20.00in. Poster |
 Lincoln 8.00x10.00in. Poster |
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Lincoln 20.00x24.00in. Poster |
Lincoln 16.00x20.00in. Poster |
 Abraham Lincoln 24.00x36.00in. Poster |
 Abraham Lincoln, 1887 24.00x32.00in. Print |
 The Spirit of Lincoln 9.00x11.00in. Print |
The Spirit of Lincoln 12.00x15.00in. Print |
 Lincoln & McClell 8.00x10.00in. Poster |
Lincoln & McClell 16.00x20.00in. Poster |
 Boyhood of Lincoln 28.00x34.00in. Print |
 President Lincoln at Antietam, 1862 16.00x20.00in. Photograph |
President Lincoln at Antietam, 1862 11.00x14.00in. Photograph |
Lincoln warned the South in his Inaugural Address: "In your hands, my
dissatisfied fellow countrymen, and not in mine, is the momentous issue of civil
war. The government will not assail you.... You have no oath registered in
Heaven to destroy the government, while I shall have the most solemn one to
preserve, protect and defend it."
Lincoln thought secession illegal, and was willing to use force to defend
Federal law and the Union. When Confederate batteries fired on Fort Sumter and
forced its surrender, he called on the states for 75,000 volunteers. Four more
slave states joined the Confederacy but four remained within the Union. The
Civil War had begun.
The son of a Kentucky frontiersman, Lincoln had to struggle for a living and for
learning. Five months before receiving his party's nomination for President, he
sketched his life:
"I was born Feb. 12, 1809, in Hardin County, Kentucky. My parents were both born
in Virginia, of undistinguished families--second families, perhaps I should say.
My mother, who died in my tenth year, was of a family of the name of Hanks....
My father ... removed from Kentucky to ... Indiana, in my eighth year.... It was
a wild region, with many bears and other wild animals still in the woods. There
I grew up.... Of course when I came of age I did not know much. Still somehow, I
could read, write, and cipher ... but that was all."
Lincoln made extraordinary efforts to attain knowledge while working on a farm,
splitting rails for fences, and keeping store at New Salem, Illinois. He was a
captain in the Black Hawk War, spent eight years in the Illinois legislature,
and rode the circuit of courts for many years. His law partner said of him, "His
ambition was a little engine that knew no rest."
He married Mary Todd, and they had four boys, only one of whom lived to
maturity. In 1858 Lincoln ran against Stephen A. Douglas for Senator. He lost
the election, but in debating with Douglas he gained a national reputation that
won him the Republican nomination for President in 1860.
As President, he built the Republican Party into a strong national organization.
Further, he rallied most of the northern Democrats to the Union cause. On
January 1, 1863, he issued the Emancipation Proclamation that declared forever
free those slaves within the Confederacy.
Lincoln never let the world forget that the Civil War involved an even larger
issue. This he stated most movingly in dedicating the military cemetery at
Gettysburg: "that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in
vain--that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom--and that
government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from
the earth."
Lincoln won re-election in 1864, as Union military triumphs heralded an end to
the war. In his planning for peace, the President was flexible and generous,
encouraging Southerners to lay down their arms and join speedily in reunion.
The spirit that guided him was clearly that of his Second Inaugural Address, now
inscribed on one wall of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D. C.: "With malice
toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us
to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in; to bind up the
nation's wounds.... "
On Good Friday, April 14, 1865, Lincoln was assassinated at Ford's Theatre in
Washington by John Wilkes Booth, an actor, who somehow thought he was helping
the South. The opposite was the result, for with Lincoln's death, the
possibility of peace with magnanimity died.