In November 1860 a sharply divided electorate chose Abraham Lincoln as the nation's 16th president. The Illinois Republican won barely 40% of the vote in a four-way contest. His party's opposition to the spread of slavery lad South Carolina, six weeks lare, to secede from the Union. Six other Southern states followed-with eight more slaveholding states hanging in the balance as Lincoln prepared to assume the presidency.
This quilt was made by two ladies for a fundraising auction at the 1864 Sanitary Fair in Philadelphia. With the start of the war, many who couldn't fight on the front lines-women, older men, religious leaders-wanted to volunteer and contribute to the Union war effort. In 1861 the government formed the United States Sanitary Commission to coordinate these efforts. The Sanitary Commission was a precursor to today's Red Cross. It was signed ny many well-known politicians, artists, and military and religious leaders including Abraham Lincoln. It was shamed that I couldn't recognize all names.
John Wilkes Booth was a famous actor and a conservative racist. He strongly didn't agree with President Lincoln's proposal of the abolition of slavery in the United States. He decided to kill President Lincoln.
After John Wilkes Booth shot the president at close range with his single shot deringer, he drooped the pistol on the floor of the theatre box. Pulling out his knife, he swiftly moved to jump over the balcony, grappling momentarily with Major Henry Rathbone, a guest of the Lincolns. Rathbone was severly cut in the brief scuffle with Booth and suffered major blood loss.
President Lincoln was taken to the Petersen House after the shooting and died there the following morning.
It was a good opportunity to learn about Abraham Lincoln's time in Washington, the civil war and the events leading up to his assassination. I would like to share President's a famous saying. "It is not merely for to-day, but for all time to come that we should perpetuate for our children's children this great and free government, which we have enjoyed all our lives." -Abraham Lincoln, August 22, 1864
-CL
Thanks, Catherin. During the Civil War the executive secretary of the U.S. Sanitary Commission was the pioneering landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted, who had already built Central Park in New York, and who would later lay out the Capitol grounds. Olmsted was a great mobilizer of manpower, which you had to be in those days when earth-moving equipment meant a man with a shovel.
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