Protecting President Lincoln

From his election in November 1860 to his death in April 1865, Abraham Lincoln faced constant danger from those hostile to him and to the Union cause. Lincoln's enemies made four overt attempts on his life, including a Confederate partisan effort to infect him with yellow fever by sending a contaminated valise of clothing to the White House. Because Lincoln's life ended with John Wilkes Booth's assassination plot, the president's protection has come under extreme scrutiny, with many considering it flawed, inadequate, or completely lacking. By providing the first thorough exploration of the security surrounding Lincoln, this intriguing study offers new insight into this long-running issue. Detailing the dangers, real and uncertain, facing Lincoln and the unprecedented measures taken to protect his life and health, this work presents a fresh perspective on the presidency of the Great Emancipator.

This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of the original. Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment for protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature in affordable, high quality, modern editions that are true to the original work.

After conducting exclusive interviews with more than one hundred current and former Secret Service agents, bestselling author and award-winning reporter Ronald Kessler reveals their secrets for the first time. Never before has a journalist penetrated the wall of secrecy that surrounds the U.S. Secret Service, that elite corps of agents who pledge to take a bullet to protect the president and his family. Kessler portrays the dangers that agents face and how they carry out their missions--from how they are trained to how they spot and assess potential threats. With fly-on-the-wall perspective, he captures the drama and tension that characterize agents’ lives and reveals what they have seen, providing startling, previously untold stories about the presidents, from John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson to George W. Bush and Barack Obama, as well as about their families, Cabinet officers, and White House aides.

Our American Cousin is a three-act play written by English playwright Tom Taylor. The play opened in London in 1858 but quickly made its way to the U.S. and premiered at Laura Keene’s Theatre in New York City later that year. It remained popular in the U.S. and England for the next several decades. Its most notable claim to fame, however, is that it was the play U.S. President Abraham Lincoln was watching on April 14, 1865 when he was assassinated by John Wilkes Booth, who used his knowledge of the script to shoot Lincoln during a more raucous scene. The play is a classic Victorian farce with a whole range of stereotyped characters, business, and many entrances and exits. The plot features a boorish but honest American cousin who travels to the aristocratic English countryside to claim his inheritance, and then quickly becomes swept up in the family’s affairs. An inevitable rescue of the family’s fortunes and of the various damsels in distress ensues. Our American Cousin was originally written as a farce for an English audience, with the laughs coming mostly at the expense of the naive American character. But after it moved to the U.S. it was eventually recast as a comedy where English caricatures like the pompous Lord Dundreary soon became the primary source of hilarity. This early version, published in 1869, contains fewer of that character’s nonsensical adages, which soon came to be known as “Dundrearyisms,” and for which the play eventually gained much of its popular appeal.

Lincoln became great from reading, writing, studying, thinking, making speeches, working steadily as a lawyer and working continuously on self improvement. We are fortunate that Lincoln was rebellious as a child and learned to read. There was another rebellious class of people at the time-slaves. Slaves were forbidden to learn to read and write. Many of them made a decision to do the opposite of what their masters ordered. They secretly learned to read and write. Lincoln as president had a great respect for former slaves who wrote and lectured. To him, they were heroic. Many were self taught and seemed more intelligent than Lincoln himself in spite of being badly mistreated before escaping slavery. Sojourer Truth noticed that President Lincoln seemed to admire black people. She said, "he showed as much kindness and consideration to the colored persons as to the white-if there was any difference, more." At his second inaugural reception he said to Frederick Douglass, "Douglass, I saw you in the crowd today listening to my inaugural address. There is no man's opinion that I value more than yours: what did you think of it?" "It was a sacred effort," said Douglass. Lincoln became an early martyr for African American Civil Rights. During his last speech he said, "It is unsatisfactory to some that the elective franchise is not given to the colored man. I would myself that it were now conferred on the very intelligent and on those who served our cause as soldiers." That was too much for John Wilkes Booth. He decided to kill him.

Was Abraham Lincoln a racist, as some critics would have us believe? Was he the father of big government, as some others maintain? Was the sixteenth president a traitor to the cause of free society and constitutional government? Are the political principles that guided him relevant today? In this provocative and timely book, Thomas L. Krannawitter sets out to defend the man many consider to be our greatest president from critics on both the left and the right. For although public opinion polls tend to rank Lincoln among the country's most venerated presidents, he is also, paradoxically, the president who is least understood. While Lincoln's name is frequently invoked in contemporary American politics, few Americans understand or agree with the moral and political principles for which Lincoln gave his last full measure of devotion. Many influential authors view Lincoln as an antiquated monument, a man of his age who knew only nineteenth-century prejudices and lacked twenty-first-century enlightenment. Other writers denounce Lincoln as a tyrant who trampled upon the Constitution and states' rights, and thereby inaugurated big government and the kind of politics feared by the Founding Fathers. Krannawitter argues that both views spring from a misunderstanding of Lincoln. Today, at precisely the moment when America is most in need of his moral and political understanding, we are more removed from Lincoln's thought than ever before. Vindicating Lincoln reintroduces us to Lincoln the statesman, the man who defended our greatest ideals of freedom and equality at the darkest moment in American history. Krannawitter shows us why it is in our interest not only to learn about Abraham Lincoln, but to learn from him—to understand that Lincoln's guiding principles were true not only for his time, but that they remain true for ours as well. On the eve of the bicentennial of his birth in 2009, Lincoln can offer moral and political guidance to us all.

A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice An innovative account of Abraham Lincoln, constitutional thinker and doer Abraham Lincoln is justly revered for his brilliance, compassion, humor, and rededication of the United States to achieving liberty and justice for all. He led the nation into a bloody civil war to uphold the system of government established by the US Constitution—a system he regarded as the “last best hope of mankind.” But how did Lincoln understand the Constitution? In this groundbreaking study, Noah Feldman argues that Lincoln deliberately and recurrently violated the United States’ founding arrangements. When he came to power, it was widely believed that the federal government could not use armed force to prevent a state from seceding. It was also assumed that basic civil liberties could be suspended in a rebellion by Congress but not by the president, and that the federal government had no authority over slavery in states where it existed. As president, Lincoln broke decisively with all these precedents, and effectively rewrote the Constitution’s place in the American system. Before the Civil War, the Constitution was best understood as a compromise pact—a rough and ready deal between states that allowed the Union to form and function. After Lincoln, the Constitution came to be seen as a sacred text—a transcendent statement of the nation’s highest ideals. The Broken Constitution is the first book to tell the story of how Lincoln broke the Constitution in order to remake it. To do so, it offers a riveting narrative of his constitutional choices and how he made them—and places Lincoln in the rich context of thinking of the time, from African American abolitionists to Lincoln’s Republican rivals and Secessionist ideologues. Includes 8 Pages of Black-and-White Illustrations

In the closing days of the Civil War, Beth Wendland, a Union spy in Richmond, learns of a Confederate conspiracy to send a wagon bomb to destroy the White House and kill President Lincoln and his generals. Abandoned by her political masters, Beth must evade Rebel soldiers and the bomb's mastermind to deliver the information to Washington before the conspirators can unleash their deadly attack. Assisted by the Federal officer who loves her, Beth risks more than her life to snuff out the burning fuse of the world's first vehicle bomb and prevent disaster on the eve of victory. With it's strong and resourceful heroine, Saving Lincoln will appeal to readers who enjoyed Cold Mountain and Eye of the Needle.