HistoryExtrahttps://www.historyextra.comHome of Britain’s bestselling history magazine and award-winning podcast2026-05-02T13:15:59.000Zhourly12000-01-01T12:00+00:00Pageantry and politics: a history of British royal visits to the UShttps://www.historyextra.com/membership/pageantry-politics-history-british-royal-visits-us/2026-04-27T01:10:19.000ZThe April 2026 royal visit to the United States came at a particularly challenging moment for the US-UK ‘special relationship’. In the preceding months, President Donald Trump had repeatedly singled out prime minister Keir Starmer for blunt criticism, even going so far as to declare that Starmer as “no Churchill”. Meanwhile, the royal family similarly found itself caught up in transatlantic controversy: the Epstein scandal.

If all that wasn’t challenging enough, King Charles’s visit to America also came at a time when the US-UK relationship was drawing even more scrutiny than usual. 2026 is year is the 80th anniversary of Winston Churchill’s famous ‘Iron Curtain’ speech, which popularised the phrase ‘special relationship’, and it’s also the 250th anniversary of the American Revolution. The latter was of course the event that severed the connection between the American colonies and the British Crown and thereby put the transatlantic relationship onto a very different trajectory.

In short, the visit came at a time of significant turbulence in the US-UK relationship. King Charles, however, might have been able to take some reassurance from the fact that several of his predecessors had similarly travelled to the United States during moments of challenge, change and upheaval...

1860: The first royal visit

The very first visit to the United States by a British royal came in 1860 and involved Albert Edward, the Prince of Wales. Its origins lay in an invitation received by Queen Victoria from Canadian leaders keen that she see for herself “the progress and prosperity of this distant part of your dominions”. Citing duty, the queen declined. But she despatched her eldest son in her place.

When President James Buchanan got wind of the situation, he then saw an opportunity and so extended an invitation for the prince to journey south of the border. The royal household happily accepted, and the man destined to become Edward VII thereby became the first British royal to visit the United States. Conscious of diplomatic protocol, his visit to the US was billed as ‘private’, and so he travelled under one of his many other titles, Lord Baron Renfrew.

The prince landed in Canada in July 1860 and spent two months touring, during which he was frequently greeted by cheering crowds. No one was quite sure, though, how he would be received when he crossed the border into the United States. After all, it was only just over 40 years prior that British soldiers had marched on Washington and burned down the White House. Still more recently, in the 1840s, the relationship between Britain and its former colonies had again been fraught, this time due to American designs on the Pacific Northwest.

• Read more | When was the White House built – and why is it white?

There was no need to worry, however, as just like in Canada the prince received a rapturous welcome. Travelling unofficially as ‘Renfrew’, he was met in Washington by President Buchanan and spent some time touring the capital. But the most celebrated moment came a few miles away, at Mount Vernon in Virginia. Here, Lord Renfrew laid a wreath at the tomb of George Washington, the man who had of course defeated his great grandfather, George III, all those years ago. It was a powerful gesture, and it has been something of a royal rite of passage ever since.

In 1970, for instance, the Prince of Wales – now King Charles III – laid his own wreath at Mount Vernon. Perhaps this month we will see his son, Prince William, do likewise.

1939: The storm clouds of war

The 1860 visit of ‘Lord Baron Renfrew’ occurred just as internal tensions in the United States were threatening to tear the country asunder. Within a couple of weeks of the prince’s departure, a new president – Abraham Lincoln – had been elected, while just a few months later war had broken out between North and South. The fighting would rage for the next four years, only ending in 1865.

Almost 80 years later, in the summer of 1939, another American tour by British royalty likewise unfolded amidst the gathering storm clouds of war, albeit this time in Europe rather than in the United States.

The 1939 visit by King George VI and Queen Elizabeth was a real landmark occasion: the first ever by a reigning British monarch. It came, moreover, at a particularly challenging moment for the royal family. Just three years earlier, in December 1936, Edward VIII abdicated the British throne. His decision provoked a constitutional crisis, but it also had ramifications for the US-UK relationship because it was at root a consequence of the king’s desire to marry an American divorcée, Wallis Simpson. The 1939 visit was thus a chance for the British royal family to shift the narrative. Equally important, it also provided an invaluable opportunity to strengthen transatlantic ties just as the Nazi threat in Europe intensified.

The visit unfolded in June and was keenly supported by the US president, Franklin D Roosevelt (FDR). Like Lord Baron Renfrew’s visit in 1860, the royal tour took in a number of famous American landmarks, including Mount Vernon, where the British monarch followed the example set by his grandfather and laid a wreath at the tomb of George Washington.

• Read more | Why was George Washington the pride of Victorian England?

Other significant episodes included a visit to the New York World’s Fair, a tour of the Capitol, and another wreath-laying, this time at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Arlington National Cemetery. Perhaps most famous of all, however, was the king and queen’s meeting with FDR at his Hyde Park home. To the delight of the American press, the king was seen enjoying typical American picnic fare: hot dogs!

By all accounts, the 1939 royal visit was a success. One American observer later wrote that “Their Majesties’ hundred hours in the United States had given rise to an enthusiasm without parallel in American history”. Later, one US newspaper even declared that because of the King’s visit “the old bond between the democracies has taken on higher, warmer, yes friendlier qualities than it ever had before”.

1957: The new Elizabethan era

Despite the success of the 1939 visit, the Americans did not immediately commit themselves to the British cause when war broke out in Europe later that year. But once the United States had entered the war (in December 1941) an alliance of unprecedented closeness was indeed forged. For the British prime minister, Winston Churchill, this was the beginning of what he would call the “special relationship”, a transatlantic partnership built on shared history, culture, values, and sacrifice. Nonetheless, for all its undoubted closeness the special relationship was frequently tested during the Cold War, most famously during the Suez Crisis of late 1956.

The crisis was precipitated by the decision of Egyptian leader Gamal Abdel Nasser to seize the Suez Canal zone, a vital trade route. In response, the British and French (with Israeli support) launched a military operation to regain control, but they did so without first securing American approval. Their actions quickly met with vigorous criticism from Washington, with President Eisenhower demanding an immediate Anglo-French withdrawal on pain of severe economic sanctions. Chastened, the British withdrew their forces, and with his credibility damaged beyond repair, prime minister Anthony Eden duly resigned, albeit citing ill health.

• Read more | How significant was the Suez Crisis?

Among the first key tasks of the new government of prime minister Harold Macmillan was therefore to restore trust with Washington. Fortunately ‘Super Mac’, as he was known, was very well-placed to do so – he knew President Eisenhower from their service together during the Second World War, while his ties to ‘Ike’s’ successor, President John F Kennedy, were even closer: he was uncle-in-law to JFK’s younger sister Kathleen ‘Kick’ Kennedy (tragically killed in a plane crash in 1948). These close ties would certainly pay dividends, but when it came to rebuilding the special relationship Macmillan also had a trump card to play – royalty. The chance to play it finally came a year after the Suez crisis, in October 1957.

Crowned in 1953 in a televised ceremony watched on both sides of the Atlantic, Queen Elizabeth II was eminently suited for the job of mending the special relationship, so recently strained by Suez. After all, she and the president were well-acquainted from the war years, and she was also already familiar with America. She had first visited – while still a princess – in 1951, during which visit she met with Eisenhower’s predecessor, President Harry Truman. The Queen was also very aware of the diplomatic impact of her parents’ visit in 1939. In short, this was one monarch ready and able to meet the challenge of the moment.

The extent to which the 1957 state visit represented a clear attempt to restore the special relationship is quickly apparent in the itinerary. This was full of evocative symbolism and included a visit to Jamestown – to mark the 350th anniversary of English settlement – as well as a state dinner at the White House and a ticker-tape parade in New York City. It was a resounding success and was followed during her reign by no less than three more state visits to the United States. The second, in 1976, occurred during another testing moment in the transatlantic relationship.

1976: The bicentennial

The Queen’s 1976 state visit to the United States was purposefully timed so as to coincide with a major anniversary celebration – the bicentennial of the American Revolution. But like the visit of 1957 it also unfolded in the aftermath of significant transatlantic tensions, this time connected to the Vietnam War. The conflict in southeast Asia had dominated US foreign policy in the 1960s and early 1970s, and it also caused disagreements with European allies, including Britain. At the crux of the matter was the persistent refusal of the British government to send troops to fight alongside their American ally, a decision which drew pointed criticism from Washington. For both governments, the Queen’s 1976 state visit – which came at the invitation of President Gerald Ford – was thus an opportunity to reset the relationship after the recent disagreements.

• Read more | Queen Elizabeth II’s relationships with US presidents

Like her 1957 visit, the details were worked out with an eye on the symbolism. The itinerary saw the Queen attend various bicentennial-focused ceremonies, and she also hosted her own reception at the British embassy in Washington. One of those in attendance declared that this was “the best diplomatic reception since King George VI and Queen Elizabeth visited in 1939”. But the highlight was a speech the Queen gave on her arrival at Philadelphia during which she expressed her “sincere gratitude” to “the Founding Fathers of this great republic for having taught Britain a very valuable lesson”. The Americans were delighted, with all differences – historic and recent – now happily forgotten.

2007: A fond farewell

The Queen’s fourth and final state visit to the US was in 2007, and like all its predecessors it occurred amidst geopolitical turmoil (it was the same with the third, in 1991, which came amidst the collapse of the Soviet Union and shortly after the Gulf War).

This time the turmoil was tied to the ongoing War on Terror, which had seen British forces again fight side by side with the American ally. But although this suggested that the special relationship was back on a sure footing elsewhere the picture was rather more complicated.

American unilateralism had in fact strained the transatlantic relationship, producing significant anti-war sentiment in Britain as well as vocal criticism of Washington from other European allies (especially the French). Frustrated by what they felt to be his slavish devotion to the Americans, some in the British press had even characterised the prime minister, Tony Blair, as President Bush’s ‘lapdog’.

Just as after both Suez and Vietnam, therefore, the 2007 state visit offered a chance to use pageantry and ceremony to repair some of the damage. This objective was again very apparent in the itinerary, which, in homage to the 1957 visit, included a trip to Jamestown, then marking the 400th anniversary of English settlement. Other stopovers, all of which were well-reported in the US press, included attendance at the Kentucky Derby (the Queen was well-known for her love of horse racing) as well as a formal state banquet at the White House.

It was the latter which also produced one of the trip’s most memorable moments: while giving a toast, President George W Bush had thanked the Queen for her role in the bicentennial celebrations, erroneously suggesting while doing so that this had occurred in 1776 (rather than 1976). The Queen raised her eyebrows in response, which in turn led the president to quip that she had given him “a look that only a mother could give a child”.

]]>Oh, Mary! makes a monster of Mary Todd Lincoln – but has history been too harsh?https://www.historyextra.com/period/victorian/mary-todd-lincoln/2026-04-07T07:14:30.000ZThe legacy of US President Abraham Lincoln is beyond reproach: he emancipated the slaves and saved the Union in the American Civil War. That’s enough to enshrine him as one of the best to have ever served in the Oval Office. When it came to his wife, Mary Todd Lincoln, however, the history books have been less kind.

The First Lady is remembered as a tragic figure with a troubled mental state, which worsened throughout her life as she endured a series of devastating personal losses, including Abraham Lincoln’s assassination in 1865. Prone to depression, headaches and tempers, she battled inner demons within and censure without. Her own son had her committed to an insane asylum.

While that does not sound like a story filled with laughs, Mary Todd Lincoln has inspired the darkly comic and deeply silly stage play Oh, Mary!, currently playing on Broadway in New York City and in London’s West End.

*Warning: spoilers for the stage play ahead *

Leaving historical accuracy far behind, it gleefully reframes her as a miserable alcoholic longing to escape her closeted homosexual presidential husband and become a cabaret star.

Who was the real Mary Todd Lincoln?

Mary Todd Lincoln was the wife of the 16th President of the United States, Abraham Lincoln, who served from 1861 to 1865. Following his assassination, she would live for another 17 years, although she was consumed by her grief and deteriorating mental health.

Her sad end was the more poignant given that, in her youth, Mary had the makings for a successful role in the political landscape of Washington, DC, thanks to an upbringing that fostered her education, intelligence and social standing.

Born on 13 December 1818, she was the fourth child of a wealthy and well-connected businessman, Robert Smith Todd, and Eliza Ann Parker Todd, daughter of a prominent family. Mary lost her mother at the age of six and her father quickly remarried. With a total of 16 children, there was little affection in the Todd household.

Yet Mary received an excellent education: her hometown of Lexington, Kentucky, was known as the ‘Athens of the West’ as it had grown into an intellectual and cultural stronghold for progressive thought. She had six years of studies, followed by four more at an elite institution called Madame Mentelle’s School for Young Ladies, where she excelled in numerous subjects, especially French.

• Read more | Was Abraham Lincoln the greatest US president?

How did Mary Todd meet Abraham Lincoln?

In 1839, Mary moved to Springfield, Illinois, to live with her sister Elizabeth. As her sister’s husband was the son of a former governor of Illinois, Mary immediately became accustomed to socialising with politicians. One rising star of the Democratic Party, Stephen A Douglas, tried to court her.

The man who caught her eye, though, was a country lawyer named Abraham Lincoln. With a dirt-poor upbringing and few prospects beyond a career in politics, he hardly made a fitting match with the accomplished, attractive and ambitious Mary. Yet their shared passions and intellectual pursuits brought them together and the two soon formed a close bond.

Although Mary’s family did not approve of Lincoln, the pair married at Elizabeth’s home on 4 November 1842. Over the next 11 years, living in Springfield, they had four sons – Robert, Edward, Willie and Tad – but it was not the happiest of marriages. Lincoln spent long periods of time away from home, either campaigning for office or travelling as a circuit lawyer.

Then, in 1850, their son Edward died from tuberculosis at the age of three. Coming less than a year after her father had passed away, a traumatised Mary fell into depression. It would not be the last time.

Yet all the while, she proved a crucial partner of her husband’s burgeoning political career, hosting events with influential people and acting as a behind-the-scenes counsel. With her support, he rose to be a presidential candidate for the anti-slavery Republican Party in the 1860 election – where, incidentally, one of his opponents would be none other than Douglas, the man who had unsuccessfully courted Mary.

Following Lincoln’s victory, the family moved to Washington, DC, and Mary prepared for her role as First Lady.

Was Abraham Lincoln gay?

Despite his marriage to Mary, the question of Lincoln’s sexuality has been widely debated with a growing school of thought claiming that he was gay or bisexual. Oh, Mary!’s Lincoln is very much married to Mary for appearances only.

In his youth, he was, according to his stepmother, “not very fond of girls,” and had intensely close relationships with several man, particularly Joshua Speed, a partner in a Springfield general store. Before his marriage, Lincoln shared a bed with Speed for a number of years, and they wrote intimate letters to each other. During his presidency, he was said to have shared a bed with his bodyguard, David Derickson.

Yet there is no definitive evidence of Lincoln’s sexuality. Such claims have been refuted with the argument that, in the 19th century, it was far from uncommon for men to share a bed in a non-sexual way. His relationships with men like Speed were a clear sign of intimacy, but not necessarily sexual attraction. The debate, therefore, continues.

Mary Todd Lincoln as First Lady

By the time of Lincoln’s inauguration in March 1861, seven southern states had seceded from the Union and the American Civil War was about to break out. This posed an immediate problem for Mary. As she was born to a slave owner in Kentucky, a state which now straddled the Union North and Confederate South, questions were raised about her loyalty. Indeed, she had a brother and three half-brothers had fought for the South; two of her half-brothers had died for it.

Mary, however, opposed slavery and was committed to her husband’s cause. To that end, she visited hospitals and battlefields, supported the Contraband Relief Association – which provided food, clothing, shelter and medical care to freed slaves – and set about sprucing up the White House in order to present a stable, modern government.

Those renovations came under attack from the press, who criticised her wild spending habits on the lavish redecorations. Around this time, in another moment of visible excess, she took to stockpiling expensive, glamorous gowns made by her personal dressmaker, Elizabeth Keckley, who had been formerly enslaved but had forged a reputation as a successful seamstress.

Vilified and unpopular, Mary then suffered the tragic loss of another son when Willie, aged 11, died of typhoid fever in 1862. Falling into despair, she did not leave her room for months and so missed the funeral, which was held in the East Room of the White House.

Meanwhile, the physical ailments that peppered her adult life worsened, including headaches, mood swings and almost manic fits of extravagant spending. In the years since, Mary’s health has fuelled countless attempts at diagnosis, ranging from bipolar disorder to an autoimmune disease called pernicious anaemia.

After her losses, a desperate Mary turned to spiritualism and even held seances in the hopes of reconnecting with her lost children. More loss followed just three years later when, on 14 April 1865 – just as the outlook appeared brighter with the end of the war – Abraham Lincoln was assassinated by John Wilkes Booth. Mary was sitting next to him in Ford’s Theatre when he was shot in the back of the head.

• Read more | Could modern medicine have saved Abraham Lincoln?

What happened to Mary Todd Lincoln after Abraham’s death?

With her mental health deteriorating in the aftermath of Abraham’s assassination, Mary fled the US – where grief and bad press plagued her – and travelled in Europe for several years. She grew increasingly paranoid about money, despite continuing her excessive spending, and lobbied for a widow’s pension from Congress, which was granted in 1870.

The following year, however, she had to endure yet another death: her son Tad, shortly after turning 18. Now in a deep depression, she returned to the US, where her last surviving son, Robert, became extremely concerned about her erratic behaviour.

He called for a trial on her sanity that resulted in Mary being institutionalised in 1875, confined to a sanatorium for several months. Even after being released and a second trial declaring her to be sane, the public humiliation was all but complete.

After a second escape to Europe, she spent her last years in failing health and living in Springfield once again.

On 16 July 1882, aged 63, Mary died of a stroke at her sister’s home, the same building where she had married Abraham almost 40 years earlier. She was buried alongside her husband and three sons in Oak Ridge Cemetery in Springfield.

]]>What is Juneteenth, and why is it celebrated? A historian explains the significance of the holiday todayhttps://www.historyextra.com/membership/what-is-juneteenth-and-why-is-it-celebrated-a-historian-explains-the-significance-of-the-holiday-today/2025-06-19T16:14:58.000ZEvery summer, the Juneteenth holiday offers Americans an opportunity to celebrate visions of black freedom in the United States. ‘Juneteenth’ refers to 19 June 1865 – the day that victorious federal troops read out a General Order to the inhabitants of Texas’s Galveston Island declaring that “all slaves are free” – but enslaved people knew the date was a bit arbitrary. President Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation had ended slavery in the Confederate states more than two years prior, and the ratification of the 13th amendment six months later would end it throughout the US. Emancipation came to the South not as a dramatic, singular event but, instead, agonisingly slowly over space and time.

Yet, for all the news that black Texans had passed to each other about slavery and the Confederacy being on the ropes in the years between the Emancipation Proclamation and the Union victory, slaveholders in the Confederacy’s western frontier held fast to their regime until the Union Army’s arrival made emancipation enforceable. Within weeks, the more than 250,000 black people enslaved across Texas began seizing their freedom. Within a year, they had begun commemorating it. And by 1900, historian Quintard Taylor notes, Juneteenth had become more widely celebrated among black Texans than the Fourth of July.

• Read more | Abraham Lincoln: the greatest US president?

Resistance through celebration

The holiday served as part of freedpeople’s self-fashioning. Juneteenth is now a national American holiday, but it began as a Texas Emancipation Day, conceived and institutionalised by the formerly enslaved and their descendants. Black women’s clubs, churches and civic organisations marshalled resources to secure spaces for public celebration. In Houston in 1872, for example, they purchased 10 acres that they named ‘Emancipation Park’ and began holding annual celebrations. Black residents in Austin did the same in the early 1900s. In these cities and elsewhere, African Americans celebrated with picnics, parades, balls, rodeos and reunions. They honoured their elders who had lived through slavery and recorded their memories so that the experience would not be forgotten – or, more likely, erased.

In celebrating, they were also resisting. The establishment of Juneteenth as a holiday coincided with white southern elites’ violent resistance to the democratic experiment of postwar Reconstruction and their revanchist rollback of Reconstruction-era democracy. Colloquially known as Jim Crow, the system of economic and political exploitation was secured in part by sadistic violence and in part by narrative claim.

To make Jim Crow palatable, even desirable, to white Americans across the regional divides, its defenders argued that US slavery was largely benign, enslaved people mostly content, and the antebellum South a white man’s romantic tragedy. Thus, every time black communities gathered in triumph and jubilation, they gave the lie to the claims of Jim Crow defenders. And in preserving freedpeople’s memories and knitting together family histories out of lives oft-defined by family separation, they built archives that preserved harder, but fuller, histories.

A national phenomenon

Through the 20th century, Juneteenth travelled with black mobility. Neighbouring states had already taken up the holiday, but the world wars and accompanying Great Migration of African Americans out of the US South and into the north and west meant that Juneteenth celebrations spread to cities like Milwaukee, Seattle and Los Angeles.

Civil rights work in the 1960s kept the holiday expanding at the grassroots; the organisers of the 1968 Poor People’s Campaign made 19 June a day of national solidarity for their march, spurring participants to carry the holiday from Washington DC back to their hometowns. It took hold because of what it offered. Joy – invaluable in social movements as well as in daily life – but also a way to remember, to honour, and to gird themselves for future struggles.

WATCH | Inside a Jim Crow asylum

View Green Video on the source website

Juneteenth’s journey from a local holiday to a national phenomenon tracks the black freedom struggle in the post-civil rights era and underscores its connection to earlier times. By 1980, Juneteenth had become a legislative issue as well as a local celebration. In Texas, a veteran of the civil rights movement, Al Edwards, had successfully shepherded a bill to make Juneteenth a state holiday. No small feat, as prizewinning historian and Texas native Annette Gordon-Reed has noted, for a state seemingly more interested in its cowboy mythos than its actual history of fighting two wars (the Texas Revolution and the Civil War) to stay a slave regime.

The pressure intensifies

Amid a growing call over the course of the 1990s and 2000s to have it declared a federal holiday, other states began recognising Juneteenth. The emergence of the Movement for Black Lives as a response to police violence in the 2010s intensified pressure on both state and the federal governments, but the pressure did not come from younger activists alone.

In 2016, educator-activist and local historian Opal Lee launched a walking campaign in cities from Fort Worth, Texas to Washington, DC to lobby Congress for the federal holiday she and other civic leaders had been pursuing for decades. As the 89-year-old Lee told a reporter for National Public Radio, the holiday was an offering to her “ancestors” as well as to her “great -great-grandchildren”, her “grandchildren” and her “children”. When President Joe Biden signed the bill finally making Juneteenth a federal holiday in June 2021, Opal Lee was at his side.

• Read more | Are black histories still being overlooked?

George Floyd’s death made the Juneteenth federal holiday possible. Floyd, a Texas-raised athlete who moved to Minnesota and was suffocated by a Minneapolis policeman, died so public and needless a death that it made the American epidemic of anti-black police violence hard to deny. In the short-lived racial reckoning that followed, activists laid out what they believed the nation needed: a return to robust voting rights; reform of militarised policing; a retreat from mass incarceration; and a vision for economic justice. Instead, Congress offered up Juneteenth.

“A heap of Juneteenths”

There was to be no structural change, but perhaps we can look to Juneteenth’s founders as a reminder that countering white supremacist narratives is part of challenging state violence. Many everyday Americans have a hard time contending with slavery, and they shy away even more from thinking through the systems of racialised power and exploitation that developed in slavery’s wake. Juneteenth celebrations offer an opportunity to engage slavery’s histories and legacies, to sit with other people’s memories, to learn, and to find pleasure even in knowing hard things. This will be true and necessary whether the federal government continues to acknowledge the holiday or whether it returns to its vibrant home in the grassroots.

Like most celebrations of liberation, Juneteenth marks something powerful and partial. “There’s been a heap of Juneteenths,” one of Ralph Ellison’s characters notes in his follow-up to Invisible Man, an unfinished novel named Juneteenth. “[And] I’ll tell you there’ll be a heap more before we’re truly free.”

When freedpeople rejoiced at slavery’s end, they did not celebrate America’s triumph so much as they did their own survival. America was a promise yet fulfilled whereas black life was fact. The way they took the fact and beauty of their living and used it to seed a better future, therein lies the story and its inspiration.

]]>Who was the greatest President of the United States in history?https://www.historyextra.com/membership/who-was-the-greatest-president-of-the-united-states-in-history/2025-01-23T10:59:20.000ZGeorge Washington

In office: 1789–97

Party affiliation: none

Nominated by: Thomas Kidd, historian and author of Thomas Jefferson: A Biography of Spirit and Flesh (Yale, 2022)

George Washington was the first president in US history – and I’m nominating him as the best, too. I am basing this on his success as a leader, his ability to negotiate conflict in his administration, and most importantly the example he set for future presidents.

Americans at the time of the Revolutionary War were enamoured with the ideal of the virtuous republican leader, in the model of the ancient Roman general Cincinnatus. Washington was no perfect man, of course, and like many elite southern Americans he was a slaveholder. But in politics he came the closest to manifesting the republican ideal of any American president.

Washington became president after serving as the commander of the Continental Army during the fight for independence from the British. His leadership of the army was not uniformly positive, but his tenacity ultimately led to a successful outcome. Many suspected he might simply remain in the position as a kind of benevolent autocrat, but he resigned from the army in late 1783, returning to his Mount Vernon home in Virginia.

Befitting the respect that he commanded, Washington was chosen to preside over the Constitutional Convention of 1787, where the US Constitution was drafted. Then he became the first president to be elected under that Constitution in 1789, in a unanimous vote of the electoral college.

Washington dealt with major political conflicts in his administration, especially between the treasury secretary, Alexander Hamilton, and secretary of state, Thomas Jefferson, who bitterly disagreed over economic policy and the direction of the new republic. Washington was largely (if not completely) able to rise above the partisan bickering, and always believed that the republic and its leaders needed to manifest consensus for the public good.

He assiduously reached out to minority religious groups, such as Jews, to assure them of their place in the republic. Washington was not constitutionally required to step down after his second term, but he did so once again to manifest the ideal of the public servant who did not want or need to hold onto power indefinitely.

• Read more | Did George Washington have wooden teeth?

Abraham Lincoln

In office: 1861–65

Party affiliation: Republican

Nominated by: Richard Carwardine, historian specialising in politics at the time of the American Civil War. His latest book is Righteous Strife: How Warring Religious Nationalists Forged Lincoln’s Union (Alfred A Knopf, 2025)

In his own era, Abraham Lincoln acquired a mythic status as the ‘Saviour of the United States’ and ‘Great Emancipator’. His death, from a shot fired on Good Friday, saw him canonised as the martyr of the glorious Union. Yet even stripping away the myth, most scholars still rank him the best American president.

When Lincoln took office, seven slaveholding states had already launched a separate Confederacy. The American Civil War followed. Inexperienced in executive and military leadership, the wartime president faced sustained criticism but drew on formidable self-reliance and indomitable physical strength. He grew in office. Essential to his power were his tenacious nationalism, strategic wisdom, political shrewdness and skill in communication.

The American republic’s unique mission, Lincoln insisted, lay in its ideological freight of liberty and equal opportunity. During the war, his nationalism fused with a deepening religious faith. He came to see that preserving the Union’s cargo demanded emancipating the enslaved, a constitutional amendment ending human bondage, and giving the vote to black soldiers.

• Read more | The Emancipation Proclamation: Abraham Lincoln's declaration that helped bring about the end of slavery

Lincoln shrewdly calculated the Union’s strategic priorities: controlling the rich resources of the upper South; securing international support; pursuing a military plan that played to the Union’s strengths while exploiting the enemy’s limitations; and mobilising the human and natural resources of the country.

Leadership demanded the deft handling of the levers of power. He controlled his party and broadened the coalition of Union loyalists. He mastered his cabinet and congress, though he was initially less confident with the military. A strong sense of self-worth meant he rarely stood on his dignity. Equally, his mental fortitude – forged through dark passages of depression – gave him resilience in extreme adversity.

Sensitive to public opinion, Lincoln recognised that growing war-weariness threatened the Union cause. In the wiry prose of his memorable public addresses (he used no speechwriter), and in the skilful use of a natural sense of humour, he touched the nerve of ordinary people, believing in their educability through reason.

Lincoln is the only president to have wrestled with civil war. Could any other have done it so well?

• Read more | Alternate history: what if Abraham Lincoln hadn't been assassinated?

Teddy Roosevelt

In office: 1901–09

Party affiliation: Republican

Nominated by: Jennifer Wright, popular historian and author of Glitz, Glam and Damn Good Time: Mamie Fish and the Gilded Age (Hachette, 2025)

There were dull presidents… and then there was Teddy Roosevelt. If he had not been the president, he would merely have been one of the most interesting men to ever live. The 26th president was a cattle rancher, a taxidermist, a Brazilian explorer, an amateur boxer, a historian who wrote The Naval War of 1812, and a Nobel Peace Prize winner for his help in bringing an end to the Russo-Japanese War.

Admittedly, he did not end the American Civil War, like Lincoln. But Lincoln did not take a bullet to the chest and still finish a campaign speech, as Roosevelt did.

Prior to being president, he was a war hero known for his prominent role with the Rough Riders during the Spanish-American War. This group of volunteer cavalrymen were comprised of anyone who could ride a horse well. That meant that polo-playing scions of New York families served alongside coal miners and Native Americans.

The notion of a country in which all people could thrive, work together and have great open spaces in which to ride would go on to become defining aspects of Roosevelt’s presidency. After succeeding to office in 1901, he increasingly promoted the idea of “a square deal for every man, big or small, rich or poor”.

That meant breaking up some of the big business monopolies that had dominated the gilded age and mediating a coal worker strike to ensure the public’s interest was protected (Roosevelt was on the side of the workers).

A square deal also meant protecting consumers. In 1906, Teddy Roosevelt lobbied for congress to pass the Pure Food and Drug and Meat Inspection acts — the meat portion of that perhaps a nod to the fact that Upton Sinclair’s novel The Jungle [which depicted unsanitary standards in the US meat-packing industry] had been serialised the previous year before being published as a book in February 1906.

• Read more | 8 facts you might not know about the White House, home of the president of the United States

It was also at Roosevelt’s behest that the Forest Service was created. Roosevelt, who is known as ‘the Conservation President’, was passionate about nature. He used his presidential powers to establish 230 million acres of public land that could not be exploited.

His presidency was defined by the notion of creating an America wherein the common man might find prosperity, safety and pleasure. It’s not essential that a president’s personality matches his accomplishments. Plenty of dull presidents have accomplished great things. But Teddy Roosevelt was a rare case where the magnetism of the man matched the grandeur of the office. And look, your kid doesn’t go to bed hugging a James K Polk bear.

Franklin D Roosevelt

In office: 1933–45

Party affiliation: Democrat

Nominated by: Iwan Morgan, emeritus professor of United States studies at University College London, and author of FDR: Transforming the Presidency and Renewing America (Bloomsbury, 2022)

In guiding the US through the Great Depression and Second World War, Franklin D Roosevelt, or FDR as he was known, transformed the presidency, hitherto a relatively small institution, into the modern office that is the fount of national leadership. Having to overcome physical disability after polio left him paralysed from the waist down at age 39 made his achievements all the more remarkable.

Assuming office in 1933 amid the US’s worst slump, FDR failed to effect full recovery until war spending renewed prosperity, but otherwise enjoyed unmatched domestic success. His New Deal programme rescued the banking system from meltdown, enabled industrial workers to form unions that bargained for better pay and conditions, and created a new welfare state.

It forged a working-class coalition of urban, multi-ethnic voters that helped FDR to win an unprecedented four terms in office (a two-term constitutional limit was ratified in 1951) and transformed the Democrats into the majority party for the next half-century.

Roosevelt’s judicial appointments precipitated a constitutional revolution whereby the Supreme Court eventually accepted federal regulation of private enterprise as valid. An outstanding communicator, he uplifted national spirits through his speeches and broadcasts. Finally, he formed a memorable political partnership with First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, whose idealism offset his pragmatism.

As wartime commander-in-chief, FDR set spectacularly high production goals for America’s defence industries that ensured the Allies were far better equipped than their Axis enemies. He overruled his generals’ plans for a 1943 invasion of France as premature, then prodded a reluctant Winston Churchill into agreeing the D-Day invasion in 1944.

• HistoryExtra Academy | Take our four-week course, where you’ll discover everything you need to know about the Normandy landings

The driving force behind the creation of the United Nations Organisation in 1945, he nevertheless regarded great power collaboration as essential for sustainable peace. Accordingly, he accommodated Josef Stalin’s demands for Soviet control of eastern Europe to maintain good relations. For critics, this encouraged Stalin’s insatiable expansionism, but FDR saw no alternative with the region already under Red Army occupation.

Roosevelt’s sudden death while still in office in 1945 meant that history would never know if he could have pre-empted the wartime alliance’s rapid disintegration and descent into Cold War.

FDR’s record has some significant shortcomings, notably his limited advancement of African-American civil rights and his complicity in the worst federal abuse of citizen rights in history in signing an executive order in 1942 authorising relocation of approximately 120,000 Japanese-Americans in internment camps.

Nevertheless, his positive accomplishments were arguably far more significant. They justify his remembrance as America’s greatest president.

Lyndon Baines Johnson

In office: 1963–69

Party affiliation: Democrat

Nominated by: Clifford Williamson, a lecturer in modern British and American history at Bath Spa University

“Power is where power goes,” was the mantra of Lyndon Baines Johnson from his early days as a New Deal bureaucrat and teacher through to his time as president of the US.

LBJ, as he was often known, was a commanding and intimidating figure who handed out the ‘Johnson treatment’ in his pursuit of power and change in America. A tall man, he loomed over whoever he was seeking to impress, frighten or cajole into supporting him or his policies.

He was a member of Congress from 1937 until 1961; he graduated from the House to the Senate in 1948 and became a majority leader in 1955. His time in Congress would be key to his effectiveness as a president who used procedure, patronage and his powers of persuasion to break the entrenched opposition of, in particular, the southern Democrats.

LBJ was selected as the running mate to John F Kennedy in 1960, and was raised to the presidency following the assassination of JFK in November 1963. Almost immediately he proved his effectiveness by breaking the Congressional logjam over tax cuts – and, importantly, a Civil Rights Act which was passed in 1964.

• Read more | US civil rights movement: 5 landmark events

In May he launched his ‘Great Society’, a wide-ranging legislative programme where he claimed, “no child will go unfed, and no youngster will go unschooled”. There then followed a slew of initiatives that rivalled in scope the New Deal of his hero, Franklin D Roosevelt, and in many cases surpassed it.

Following the violent attacks on the peaceful Selma to Montgomery civil rights march, he would propose the 1965 Voting Rights Act that finally ended the poll taxes, literacy tests and Grandfather clauses that had hindered African-American political participation and enfranchisement. However, following a series of riots across the US (starting in Watts, Los Angeles in 1965), a growing white backlash would soon be palpable.

It was something that not even the formidable political talents of LBJ could stem. The crisis was exacerbated by the deteriorating situation in South Vietnam, where it was becoming increasingly evident that the US had become embroiled in an unwinnable war, despite sending hundreds of thousands of US troops.

Then, in 1968, the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese shocked the US by launching the Tet offensive, a major escalation in the conflict. In the face of spiralling opposition to the war among the American people, Johnson decided not to seek re-election in that year’s presidential election. It was a muted end to what had been a brilliant political career.

Ronald Reagan

In office: 1981–89

Party affiliation: Republican

Nominated by: Jeremy Black, author of books including The Cold War: A Military History (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015) and A Brief History of America (Robinson, 2024)

Ability and achievement come in many forms. The innovators and the explorers of the possibilities of politics and government win the most praise. But it is also necessary to honour the stabilisers, and Ronald Reagan, the much-mocked elderly ex-Hollywood actor from California, was one of the greatest.

America and the West were in grave difficulties at the end of the 1970s. The Vietnam War and Watergate had hollowed out confidence in American power and politics, and the two oil shocks of the 1970s had destabilised the economy and public finances, contributing to a sense of decline. At the end of the decade, the Iranian Revolution and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan took this malaise further.

What might have come next was a matter of hazard – and, indeed, in 1983, war between the Soviets and the west came very close. Detente had fallen and the Cold War reheated.

• Read more | Opinion: the conservative legacy of Ronald Reagan

Reagan proved an adept responder. Though castigated as a warmonger for his reference to a Soviet ‘evil empire’, and for the deployment of cruise and Pershing missiles, he believed in negotiations from strength – a stance that eventually bore fruit in the move towards a reduction of tension from 1985. Just as Richard Nixon had reached out to Chairman Mao, so Reagan responded to Gorbachev.

Earlier crises over Poland and Afghanistan were handled through measures short of war – so, for instance, the US supplied armaments to the Afghan resistance but didn’t commit ground troops. The same policy of subversion rather than invasion was employed in Central American countries such as Nicaragua.

The fall of the Soviet system suggested that the pressure of trying to match American military expenditure and economic development was potent, more so than the repeated moves into war and use of troops frequently employed by presidents from 1991 onwards. In light of this, Reagan appears more viable as a model than contemporary criticism often allowed for.

In domestic policy, Reagan pushed growth and deregulation. The American economy provided a clear contrast with the Soviet one, and was thus a more attractive partner for China. In social terms, Reagan was a libertarian, which would have jarred with the intolerance of many members of the modern Republican party.

Charismatic, a great communicator, able to take the pulse of the nation, a good delegator, and a man with a heart… Reagan was an attractive head of state and an accomplished leader.

Barack Obama

In office: 2009–17

Party affiliation: Democrat

Nominated by: Rebecca Brückmann, associate professor of history at Carleton College and author of Massive Resistance and Southern Womanhood (University of Georgia Press, 2021)

Barack Obama became the nation’s first African American president, 390 years after the first documented slave ship arrived in the continental British colonies. Obama’s identity should not eclipse his effectiveness: he oversaw the passage of urgent economic reforms and the first comprehensive healthcare law since Lyndon B Johnson signed the 1965 Medicare and Medicaid Act.

Obama expanded civil rights, reconfigured US foreign policy, and emphasised the fight against climate change.

• Read more | American presidents: 9 things you (probably) didn’t know

Obama’s 2008 ‘Yes We Can’ campaign centred his charisma and rhetorical skill. He tapped into widespread dissatisfaction with George W Bush’s administration amid the Iraq War and a worldwide economic recession, promoting a hopeful and inclusive vision of the country.

Once elected, he confronted the longest economic downturn since the 1930s. One month after Obama took office, in addition to offering financial ‘bailouts’ for banks and the automotive industry, Congress passed an $800bn stimulus package, investing in infrastructure, education and renewable energy. By the time Obama left office, unemployment had been cut in half.

The Affordable Care Act (‘Obamacare’), his landmark achievement, outlawed health insurance discrimination based on pre-existing conditions and halved the number of uninsured Americans. The Obama administration strengthened civil rights by bolstering equal pay provisions, repealing the anti-LGBTQ ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ military policy, supporting marriage equality, and offering a path to work authorisations for undocumented minors.

Confronted by an obstructionist Republican Congress that rebuffed attempts at bipartisan coalition building, the Obama administration increasingly relied on executive orders to effect political change. Obama raised the federal minimum wage, designated national monuments under an Indigenous commission, and cut federal greenhouse gas emissions.

Obama’s foreign policy saw the continuation of his predecessors’ military interventionism in the Middle East, which made critics question the Nobel Peace Prize he was awarded in 2009. However, he re-established diplomatic relations with Cuba after 54 years, and he brokered a new agreement on nuclear weapons development in Iran.

Most constructive of all was his spotlight on the climate crisis, which enabled the breakthrough 2016 Paris Agreement. In the face of racist threats, birtherist conspiracies and a conservative countermovement, Barack Obama was a remarkably effective president during socio-politically challenging times in the 21st century.

• Read more | Life after the White House: what the US presidents did next

This article was first published in the January 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine

]]>How Abraham Lincoln's 1860 election victory set America on the path to Civil Warhttps://www.historyextra.com/membership/a-country-at-the-crossroads-how-lincolns-1860-election-victory-set-america-on-the-path-to-civil-war/2024-11-04T11:09:23.000ZQ: What was the political prelude to the 1860 election?

A: Ever since the drafting of America’s federal constitution of 1787, the question of slavery had given rise to political contention and compromise. In the early years of the new American nation, several northern states adopted statutes of emancipation, while new technology and the international demand for cotton gave slave labour deep roots in the south. Plantation agriculture spread from the Atlantic states into the Gulf region. As a result, slave numbers would grow to four million by 1860.

Most Americans deemed that the constitution gave individual slave states alone the right to determine the future of their ‘peculiar institution’. However, the westward movement of settlers and the extension of the nation’s boundaries – through the purchase of Louisiana, the annexation of Texas, and the wresting of California and other parts of Mexico by force – prompted periodic crises over the status of slaveholding in the territories and the new states carved out of them.

In 1820 and again in 1850 threats of civil war between North and South prompted compromise, while the Democrats and Whigs – the dominant national parties during the 1830s and 1840s – worked in the main to keep the issue at bay. But in the 1850s it arose again. By then growing intransigence, and each faction’s sense of its moral and social superiority, put political compromise beyond easy reach.

• Read more | The story of the American Civil War: 32 key moments in the landmark conflict

Q: Why does the presidential election of 1860 matter?

A: Abraham Lincoln’s victory in November 1860 as the Republican candidate for the White House forever changed the relationship between the American government and the institution of slavery.

It wasn’t that Lincoln was the first nominee for the presidency to run on an antislavery platform. Minority parties, alarmed by the increasing entrenchment of plantation slavery, had fielded emancipationists in every presidential election since 1840, and in 1856 the newly formed Republican Party had celebrated a powerful showing on a manifesto committed to containing slavery – a “relic of barbarism” – within existing limits. But the real turning-point came four years later when, for the first time in the history of the American republic, an antislavery candidate committed to putting slavery in the way of ultimate extinction triumphed in the electoral college.

• Read more | Lincoln and slavery: "If I could save the union without freeing any slave, I would"

Lincoln’s success prompted South Carolina’s withdrawal from the Union. At a special secession convention on 20 December the state declared she had taken her place “once again amongst the nations of the world”. Within two months, six other states of the lower South had joined her in forming an independent confederacy. The US constitution dictated that the outgoing president, the Democrat James Buchanan, remain in office between the election and Lincoln’s inauguration as the 16th president on 4 March 1861. ‘Old Buck’ lacked both the authority and will to defuse the greatest crisis in the nation’s history. Its resolution would depend on the wisdom and courage of his successor.

Read more about the transatlantic slave trade:

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• 7 key questions about the transatlantic slave trade – answered

Q: Who were the 
Republicans?

A: Like all political parties, the new Republican organisation was a coalition. Its constituent elements emerged from the fractured politics of the mid-1850s that created a political vacuum by destroying the Whig party and weakening their rivals, the Democrats. The Kansas-Nebraska 
Act of 1854, the work of US senator Stephen A Douglas, an Illinois Democrat, opened up to slave-holding settlers a vast trans-Mississippi region previously deemed the preserve of free labour. The immediate explosion of anger in the North prompted state-level ‘anti-Nebraska’ coalitions of 
disaffected Democrats, antislavery Whigs, independent ‘free-soilers’, and out-and-out abolitionists. At the same time an influx of immigrants, many 
of them Catholic, prompted a native-born backlash that further strained political loyalties.

The emergent Republican Party’s opposition to the extension of slavery provided the policy glue that bound 
its elements together: radical emancipationists driven by moral purpose, racists determined to found lily-white western settlements, social progressives who deemed the South archaic and stagnant, and opponents of the political influence of southern planters – the so-called ‘Slave Power’ that had allegedly hijacked the federal government.

• Read more | From Lincoln to Trump: a brief history of the US Republican Party

By 1860 the party of ‘Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men’ had broadened its platform to embrace homesteads for western settlers, a protective tariff and 
a Pacific railroad. The Massachusetts Springfield Republican located its strength in “the great middling-interest class”, men “who work with their own hands, who live and act independently, who hold the stakes of home and family, of farm and workshop, of education and freedom”. Republicans made much of their role as the party 
of conscience, and as such appealed successfully to ‘nativist’ anti-Catholics, while also winning support within influential communities of Protestant and radical immigrants, above all 
the Germans.

Q: Why did the Republican Party choose Lincoln as 
its candidate?

A: Republican leaders met in Chicago in May 1860 to choose a presidential nominee. Attention focused above all on Senator William H Seward, the former governor of New York, who was widely expected to carry the day. But his reputation for radicalism, recently heightened by a speech depicting the struggle between slave and free societies as an “irrepressible conflict”, put doubts in the minds of Republican managers. Could he win the support of essential conservative voters in those states of the lower North (Pennsylvania, Indiana and Illinois) who had previously blocked the party’s route to power?

Seward’s supporters took comfort from the handicaps under which most of his rivals laboured. Edward Bates of Missouri was too conservative, Simon Cameron of Pennsylvania too corrupt, Supreme Court justice John McLean too old, Salmon P Chase of Ohio too radical. But Seward had not reckoned on the dark horse, Abraham Lincoln.

Lincoln’s seven open-air debates with Stephen Douglas across Illinois in 1858, in pursuit of election to the United States senate, had won him national attention and, by holding his own against the Democratic ‘Little Giant’, the respect of antislavery voters. More recently, his well-crafted Cooper Union speech in New York City alerted easterners to the intellectual sophistication and moral backbone of a westerner they had not before encountered in the flesh. “He’s the greatest man since St Paul,” a newspaperman declared. “No man ever before made such an impression on his first appeal to a New York audience.”

Adamant that to restrict slavery was to sustain the purposes of the nation’s founders and the principles of the Declaration of Independence, but insistent on the constitutional rights of the southern states to the protection of their “domestic institutions”, and personally untainted by nativism, Lincoln offered a blend of moral radicalism and legal conservatism that allowed his managers at Chicago to present him as the party’s most reliable hope in the doubtful states. Rational political logic, not luck, secured his nomination.

Q: Why did the Democratic Party split?

A: Enthusiastic expansionists, the Democrats as a national party had to fashion a policy for the western territories that would minister to the incompatible ambitions of free-soil and pro-slavery settlers. For a time Stephen Douglas’s formula of ‘popular sovereignty’ – leaving the settlers themselves to resolve the issue by a local vote – kept northern and southern Democrats happy. But the doctrine was inherently ambiguous: as a unifying principle it could not survive the civil war between pro-slavery and free-soil settlers in ‘bleeding’ Kansas or President Buchanan’s feeble yielding to supporters of a pro-slavery constitution there. Douglas’s political survival in Illinois and the wider North forced him to turn against the national administration.

Even so, as the country’s leading Democrat he expected to win his party’s presidential nomination in 1860. By then, however, influential southerners had jettisoned popular sovereignty and, emboldened by the Supreme Court’s landmark decision in the Dred Scott case (which declared slave-owners’ property rights sacrosanct), had begun to call for federal legal protection of slavery in the territories. The party’s fraught national conventions saw it split over the issue of a federal slave code, leaving Douglas to fight the election as the candidate of the regular Democrats, and the Kentucky slave-owner, John C Breckinridge, to stand as the representative of southern radicals who stood ready to countenance quitting the Union if they did not get their way.

Q: Why didn’t Lincoln run in the South?

A: Southern nervousness over the rise of an antislavery party boiled over in the fall of 1859 following the misbegotten attempt of the abolitionist John Brown to spur a slave uprising by seizing the federal armoury at Harpers Ferry, Virginia. Horrified southern leaders denounced the ‘Black Republicans’ as fomenters of racial revolution. But the Republicans cast themselves as the genuinely national party, loyal to the intentions of the nation’s founders and true to the interests of the non-slaveholding whites of the South. This was a self-perception reinforced by the polemical writings of a North Carolinian, Hinton Rowan Helper, whose Impending Crisis of the South attributed the condition of impoverished southern whites and the backwardness of their economy to slavery’s corrosive effect on enterprise and opportunity.

• Read more | When the Ku Klux Klan was a mass movement

The book became a mainstay of Republican propagandists in 1860. Southern authorities banned it, while vigilantes murdered or drove out those who preached its doctrines. Lincoln’s party put up candidates in some of the states of the slave border region, and Lincoln himself earned several thousand votes in border slave states such as Missouri and Delaware, but did not risk life and limb in the lower South, where no Republicans appeared on the ballot.

Q: Did the Democrats’ schism hand the election to the Republicans?

A: Lincoln won the presidency with a mere 40 per cent of the popular vote, seven per cent less than the combined ballots of his two Democrat rivals. But the split in the Democratic Party did not itself deliver the Republican victory, for Lincoln secured clear majorities in almost every free state, including New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Massachusetts and the other populous states where the presidential electors were concentrated. Even as a combined force, the opposition parties would not have won.

Lincoln easily dominated the electoral college, with 180 votes to Breckinridge’s 72 and Douglas’s 12. 
A fourth candidate for the presidency, John Bell, appealing to conservative voters who had lost their political home with the death of the old Whig party, won just 39. More significant than the Democrats’ schism in opening the door to Lincoln’s victory was the Republicans’ success in putting a squeeze on Bell’s Constitutional Union party in the lower North.

View Riddle on the source website

Q: Did Lincoln’s election warrant the secession of southern states?

A: Southern nationalist ‘fire-eaters’ moved quickly to mobilise support for secession from a Union that had elected a ‘Black Republican’ on a purely sectional vote. Jumpy southern whites believed that an abolitionist in the White House would use the levers of government to bring about the revolution that had eluded John Brown. For their part, southern conservatives cautioned against hasty action that smacked of both panic and hubris. 
As South Carolina led the charge towards separation, a dyspeptic realist, James Pettigru, remarked that the state was too small for a republic, yet too large for a lunatic asylum.

Prudent slave-owners pointed out that the Republicans were no immediate menace to the South: the party controlled neither Congress nor the Supreme Court, and Lincoln was anyway no radical abolitionist. They were correct in judging immediate secession a far riskier course than waiting for an overt act of aggression from the new administration in Washington. Southern radicals, however, confident in the Cotton Kingdom’s capacity to sustain itself at home and abroad, exploited the fevered times and carried the day. Above all, they played on fears that the new president would stock the slave-states with federal post-holders – a nucleus of antislavery fifth-columnists dedicated to effecting a political and racial revolution throughout the region.

Q: What part did the election outcome play in the coming of civil war?

A: War followed upon southern secession because Lincoln, supported by a majority of northerners, refused to concede that any of his fellow countrymen had a constitutional right of withdrawal from a ‘perpetual’ Union, and certainly not in response to a democratic election fairly contested and legitimately won. When in early April 1861 Lincoln sent an unarmed vessel to resupply a federal fort in Charleston harbour, the Confederate batteries opened fire. As Lincoln later put it: “Both parties deprecated war; but one of them would make war rather than let the nation survive; and the other would accept war rather than let it perish.”

The war, then, was about the survival of the nation and, in its early stages at least, not about the survival or death of slavery. But the election of 1860 revealed the huge fissure between North and South over their incompatible understandings of the peculiar institution’s future in the republic. That fissure had grown more profound since the annexation of Texas (1845) and the Mexican cession (1848) had raised fundamental questions about the status of slavery in the new acquisitions. The political contention reached its climax in the election of 1860.

Whatever the later claims of Confederates and their modern successors, the crisis of the Union of 1861–65 was not about ‘state’s rights’ in the abstract. It was about the apparent threat to the power of the slave states to regulate their ‘domestic institutions’.

• Read more | What if Abraham Lincoln hadn't been assassinated?

No one explained this better than Lincoln himself, a month before his assassination. The slaves, he said, “constituted a peculiar and powerful interest. All knew that this interest was, somehow, the cause of the war. To strengthen, perpetuate, and extend this interest was the object for which the insurgents would rend the Union, even by war; while the government claimed no right to do more than to restrict the territorial enlargement of it.” The election of 1860 was at the heart of this story.

Richard Carwardine is emeritus Rhodes professor of American history at St Catherine’s College, Oxford. His books include Lincoln: Profiles in Power (Longman, 2003)

This article first appeared in the November 2010 issue of BBC History Magazine

]]>Thomas ‘Boston’ Corbett: the man who killed Lincoln’s assassin, John Wilkes Boothhttps://www.historyextra.com/period/victorian/thomas-boston-corbett/2024-04-15T14:32:22.000ZThomas ‘Boston’ Corbett is a vital figure in the story of the assassination of Abraham Lincoln and the subsequent hunt for John Wilkes Booth – events depicted in the Apple TV+ series, Manhunt, which follows the gripping 12-day search for Lincoln’s Confederate killer.

Corbett killed Booth, against orders, and this was an event that would define his life. However, both before and after this infamous act, Corbett was an individual shrouded in tragedy and intrigue.

Who was Boston Corbett?

Corbett hailed from Britain. Born in London in 1832, Corbett emigrated to the US around 1839 with his family, settling in New York City.

He initially worked as a hat maker – notably, a trade known for its prominent use of mercury. The element’s use would be the subject of much speculation in later years, as the inhalation of mercury vapour came to be known to cause symptoms including psychosis, and excitability (the symptoms became so common in hatters that the phrase “mad as a hatter” was born).

Corbett’s life would go on to be shaped by his immense devotion to the Christian faith. After the loss of his wife, who died during childbirth, Corbett found purpose in religion after becoming a regular attendee of street preaching congregations.

• Read more | Could modern medicine have saved Abraham Lincoln?

In the late 1850s, his evangelism led him to change his first name from Thomas (or Tom), to ‘Boston’, as it was in Boston, Massachusetts, that he devoted himself to religion.

Such was the fervour of his faith, Corbett became a street preacher and, in order to address his sexual impulses, he’s recorded as having castrated himself with scissors.

Boston Corbett’s role in the Civil War

Upon the outbreak of the American Civil War, Corbett enlisted in the Union Army in 1861, and he fought with the 16th New York Cavalry after re-enlisting in 1863.

He military record is largely unremarkable, though there are some tales of him demonstrating particular courage and conviction.

During the height of the war, Corbett was confined as a prisoner of war at the notorious Andersonville Prison where he was subject to appalling conditions and contracted a handful of illnesses and diseases. However, he ultimately survived the ordeal, and was released in late 1864, when he would then recover in hospital.

A few months after his release, the war effectively ended when Confederate general Robert E Lee surrendered to Union forces.

Boston Corbett’s part in the manhunt for John Wilkes Booth

On the evening of 14 April 1865, John Wilkes Booth fatally shot President Abraham Lincoln at Ford's Theatre.

Twelve days later, on 26 April 1865, amid the chaos following the assassination, Corbett was a member of the Union Army detachment pursuing Booth as part of a large-scale manhunt organised by high-level Washington figures including US secretary of war Edwin Stanton.

Corbett was among those who helped to encircle Booth within a barn in Garrett Farm, Virginia, while their leader, Lieutenant Edward P Doherty, engaged in a back-and-forth conversation with Booth, trying to lure him out.

Hours later, patience had run dry.

• Read more | The real history of Mary Surratt's controversial role in the Lincoln conspiracy

Booth was cornered in the now-burning barn when Corbett shot and fatally wounded him through a gap in the barn exterior, despite receiving no order to do so.

The instructions issued to Corbett and his detachment had been the opposite – to capture Booth alive as senior figures in Washington wanted to extract more information about the conspiracy and its motivations.

Was there a conscious motivation behind his decision, or was it simply an unconsidered calculation made in the context of immense stress and pressure? Either way, Corbett’s actions meant that it was he, not Booth, who was sent to Washington for questioning. However, backed by Edwin Stanton himself, Corbett was not court martialled for his actions and, for a short time, was hailed as a hero.

After providing his testimony about the events that led to the killing of Booth, Corbett left the Union Army and returned to his career as a hatter and a preacher.

What happened to Boston Corbett after he killed John Wilkes Booth?

Over the course of the next 20 years, Corbett’s mental state dramatically deteriorated.

Paranoid that Confederate assassins would attempt to target him as revenge for killing Booth, and dogged by hate mail, Corbett isolated himself and built up a reputation as being erratic and unpredictable, and he would brandish his weapons while in public.

Historians have since noted that the decline in his mental condition may have been hastened by his career as a hatter, with the mercury vapours produced in the hat-making process being known to contribute to serious neurological damage.

On 1 October 1887, after a string of violent and threatening displays, Corbett was declared insane and was confined to an asylum in Topeka, Kansas. However, his story continued.

Corbett escaped the asylum in 1888 and told Richard Thatcher, a fellow former Andersonville inmate, that he was heading for Mexico. However, there is no verified evidence of where Corbett went, or what he did, after his escape. From this point onwards, the fate of Corbett remains steeped in mystery.

How and when did Boston Corbett die?

There are no official records of how or when Boston Corbett died.

But there are, of course, rumours about how Corbett met his end, including the suggestion that he died in Minnesota in 1894, in the Great Hinckley Fire.

However (and whenever) he died, Corbett’s life was marked by chaos resulting from a combination of tragedy, faith, short-lived fame, and mental illness. His legend remains just as complex as that of the man he famously killed, and is arguably even more ambiguous.

On the podcast | Period drama podcast episodes

]]>The real history of Mary Surratt's controversial role in the Lincoln conspiracyhttps://www.historyextra.com/period/victorian/mary-surratt-real-history-death/2024-03-22T09:02:03.000ZMary Surratt is known for her contentious role in the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln, in 1865. Prior to Lincoln’s murder, Surratt would have been regarded as an ordinary woman living a typical middle-class existence. However, her implication in John Wilkes Booth’s conspiracy to attack several members of the Union government – as well as Abraham Lincoln – led to Surratt becoming the first woman to be executed by the federal government in the United States.

Now, with the release of Apple TV+ historical drama Manhunt, a seven-part series focussing on the immediate aftermath of Lincoln’s assassination at the effective end of the American Civil War and the pursuit of the conspirators by officials including Edwin Stanton, we explore the true story of Mary Surratt’s role in the conspiracy, including the ambiguity as to her guilt.

The true story of Mary Surratt’s involvement in the conspiracy to assassinate Lincoln

Mary Surratt, born in the early 1820s, was a widow who owned a boarding house in Washington DC. She had moved there in 1864, after encountering substantial financial difficulties following the death of her husband in 1862. Her boarding house was used by John Wilkes Booth and his fellow conspirators to plot the abduction and assassination of President Lincoln, and by Confederate agents more broadly.

However, it wasn’t the conspirators’ use of Surratt’s boarding house as a place to organise themselves that condemned Surratt. Rather, it was her close personal connections to the conspirators, quotes attributed to her, along with her suspicious activity, that established her involvement in the plot.

Mary Surratt’s son, John Surrat Jr, was a confidant of John Wilkes Booth, and he introduced Booth to his mother. She saw Booth regularly coming in and out of her boarding house, which became a hive of Confederate activity.

Additional evidence against Mary Surratt, in the trial that led to her conviction and eventual death, further cemented her as a figure who was involved with the conspiracy.

• Read more | Could modern medicine have saved Abraham Lincoln?

Professor Rosalind Crone writes that, “In March 1865, on the eve of Lincoln’s inauguration as president for a second term, Mary made a fateful comment that one of her boarders remembered: ‘Something is going to happen to Old Abe, which will prevent him from taking his seat.’”

Adding to the evidence against Surratt, a government clerk named Louis J Weichmann, who had been staying at her boarding house, explained that Surratt tried to enlist him in a mission to transport a package to Booth on the day of the assassination, fuelling suspicions against her. Also, during the trial, fellow tavern manager John Lloyd testified that Surratt had asked him to hide prepared firearms on his property shortly before the event.

In light of this evidence, the 1865 military tribunal ruled that Mary Surratt wasn’t only tangentially aware of some secretive plot being planned, but was actively involved in aiding the conspirators while being entirely cognisant of their plans.

Historians have since agreed. As American historian Kate Clifford Larson argued in a 2009 lecture, “there is no question that Mary Surratt was guilty of aiding and abetting John Wilkes Booth… that cannot be denied and the evidence is so strong against her it’s remarkable.”

After being found guilty, Mary Surratt was hanged on 7 July 1865 along with three other conspirators. Her final words are recorded as being: “Please don’t let me fall.”

How guilty was Mary Surratt, and was she really a conspirator?

While Mary Surratt was convicted and hanged for her association with the conspirators and her proximity to their plot, some modern historians have questioned the true nature of her role in the conspiracy, suggesting that Surratt may not have either been entirely innocent or entirely guilty – but somewhere in between.

Ambiguity about her guilt and position as a conspirator primarily stems from the lack of direct evidence linking her to the crime, and the circumstantial nature of the evidence presented at trial.

Some historians have it that the quotes attributed to Surratt are vague and open to interpretation, and the contents of the mysterious parcel that she involved Weichmann in transporting are still unknown and could have been entirely unrelated to the plot. Equally, asking Lloyd to be prepared for violence by having firearms hidden could have multiple explanations, such as the fact that she lived in an unstable and chaotic environment.

• Read more | The real Edwin Stanton: the true story of Lincoln’s secretary of war

Additionally, historians have pointed to a lack of motive for Surratt to become involved in such a high-stakes crime. While she was a Confederate sympathiser, the same was true of a significant portion of the country, and her views may have been a reflection of the context in which she lived, rather than a deeply held conviction.

Ultimately though, the idea that Surratt had at least some knowledge of the plans, however vague or detailed, formed the basis of the claims against her.

As many have noted, regardless of how involved Surratt was, the feverish political and public desire to bring those who were culpable to justice was a substantial factor behind the severity of her sentence. And, with all considered, it seems likely that Mary Surratt occupied a place somewhere between guilt and innocence, meaning that speculation about her role continues to thrive.

Boston Tea Party: Igniting a Revolution

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]]>Why did John Wilkes Booth kill Abraham Lincoln? And how was he caught?https://www.historyextra.com/period/victorian/why-john-wilkes-booth-shot-killed-lincoln-how-caught/2024-03-15T13:55:57.000ZOn 14 April 1865, an actor by the name of John Wilkes Booth entered Ford’s Theatre in Washington DC, not to perform but to murder the president of the United States, Abraham Lincoln.

The events of that infamous assassination and the subsequent hunt for Booth and his fellow conspirators are in the spotlight again as the focus of a seven-part drama, Manhunt, streaming on Apple TV+ from 15 March.

The drama is based on James L Swanson’s bestselling 2007 book Manhunt: The 12-Day Chase for Lincoln's Killer and stars Hamish Linklater as Lincoln; Tobias Menzies as Edwin Stanton, the man who zealously headed the manhunt; and Anthony Boyle (last seen in Masters of the Air) as Booth.

Who was John Wilkes Booth?

Born the ninth of 10 children on 10 May 1838 in Maryland, John Wilkes Booth grew up in an acting family. His father Junius Brutus Booth had come to the US from England with his mistress Mary Ann Holmes and established an esteemed career as a Shakespearean star, and was followed in the career by Wilkes Booth’s older brothers Edwin, best known for a long run as Hamlet, and Junius Brutus Jr.

Booth took to the stage himself while still a teenager and was soon earning rave reviews thanks to his energetic performances and smouldering good looks. By the end of the 1850s, he had risen to be one of the country’s most promising leading actors.

Away from the stage, Booth became increasingly outspoken in his political views. What began with an association with an anti-immigration party, the Know Nothings, intensified into vociferous support for slavery and hatred towards abolitionists.

He briefly joined up with a militia in Virginia in 1859 just so he could watch the hanging of abolitionist John Brown, who had led a raid of the federal armoury at Harpers Ferry in the hope of inciting a slave revolt.

Why did John Wilkes Booth kill Abraham Lincoln?

In November 1860, Abraham Lincoln won the presidential election with the anti-slavery Republican Party, and became the 16th president of the United States. By April of the following year, seven southern states had seceded – later joined by four more – and the American Civil War had begun.

• Read more | How Lincoln's 1860 victory set America on the path to civil war

Ideologically, Booth was on the side of the Confederate States of America in the South, fighting to preserve their slave-based economy. While his state of Maryland remained in the Union, it straddled the Mason-Dixon Line (the symbolic border between North and South).

If it was not for a promise to his mother not to fight, Booth would likely have enlisted in the Confederate army. Instead, he carried on acting as the war raged.

Yet his lack of action festered in his mind over the years, especially as the North gained momentum. Fuelling his frustrations was a deep loathing for Lincoln. The president had started the war, in his eyes, issuing the Emancipation Proclamation, freeing the slaves in the South; and, following his re-election in 1864, pushing through the 13th Amendment which abolished slavery altogether.

To Booth, he was a tyrant that needed to be stopped.

Forming a small band of Confederate conspirators, Booth believed he could save the Confederacy by kidnapping Lincoln. None of these plans went anywhere, leading the increasingly desperate Booth to turn his sights from abduction to assassination.

• On the podcast | The secret plot to kill Lincoln

Things came to a head after 9 April 1865, when Confederate commander Robert E Lee surrendered to Union general Ulysses S Grant at Appomattox, signalling the effective end of the war. A couple of days later, Lincoln spoke from the White House balcony addressing the difficulties of rebuilding the nation and voicing support of limited black suffrage.

An infuriated Booth was in the crowd and declared afterwards, “That is the last speech he will ever make.”

How did John Wilkes Booth assassinate Abraham Lincoln?

On 14 April 1865, having known peace for just five days, Lincoln planned to spend the evening with his wife in Ford’s Theatre watching the farcical comedy, Our American Cousin. Booth saw his opportunity.

He had acted in that theatre – in fact, Lincoln had seen Booth on that stage in 1863 – so he knew his way around, and his celebrity status should help gain access to the presidential box. Killing the president was only part of the plan, though.

At the same time that Booth would be shooting Lincoln, another conspirator named Lewis Powell would kill the Secretary of State William Seward, while a third attack by George Atzerodt would eliminate Vice President Andrew Johnson.

The victorious Grant should have been a fourth target, as he was supposed to be sitting with the president at the theatre, but he pulled out since his wife did not get on with the First Lady, Mary Lincoln. In place of the Grants, the socialite Clara Harris and her fiancé, Major Henry Rathbone of the Union army, were invited.

So it was that during the third act, after 10pm, Booth crept into the box. He had not been stopped: the president’s bodyguard, John Frederick Parker, was absent, having gone to a tavern during the intermission – for which he went unpunished.

Booth shot Lincoln in the back of the head with a .44 calibre derringer pistol, timed to coincide with a big laugh in the play to drown out the bang. Rathbone instantly intervened and Booth slashed at him with a knife, breaking free long enough to jump from the box down to the stage. It is believed that this was when Booth broke his leg that night.

Why did John Wilkes Booth yell, “Sic semper tyrannis”?

According to accounts, Booth stood on the stage and yelled “Sic semper tyrannis”, meaning ‘thus always to tyrants’. The phrase was both the Virigina state motto and something commonly associated with Brutus, a chief conspirator in the assassination of Julius Caesar in 44 BC.

Booth was also heard shouting “The South is avenged!”, before escaping out the theatre’s side door and onto a horse waiting for him.

Did Abraham Lincoln die instantly?

Despite being shot in the head, Lincoln was still alive. However, he never regained consciousness. Initially treated by a doctor in the audience, he was then carried across the street to the house of William Petersen, where members of his family, including a devastated and overwrought Mary, and the cabinet held an all-night vigil. He died at 7.22am the next morning.

• Read more | Could modern medicine have saved Abraham Lincoln?

As for the other parts of the conspiracy, while Powell succeeded in stabbing Seward multiple times in the face and neck, the Secretary of State survived thanks to the splint he was wearing following a recent carriage accident.

Atzerodt never attacked Andrew Johnson, who became president following Lincoln’s death and led the US into the Reconstruction era.

How was John Wilkes Booth caught?

Booth met up with another accomplice, David Herold, and fled into rural Maryland. On the way, they picked up weapons left at a tavern owned by Mary Surratt (who regularly hosted conspiratorial meetings), and had Booth’s leg treated by a doctor named Samuel Mudd.

Both Surratt and Mudd would be arrested and tried as conspirators, although the level of their involvement remains a hotly debated issue. Afterward, the doctor became forever associated with the phrase, ‘your name is mud’ (though this phrase existed long before Mudd’s trial).

What followed was a massive manhunt for Booth, with thousands of Union troops searching for anyone involved in the president’s death. Dozens of people were arrested initially, and an astonishing $100,000 reward put on Booth’s head.

For days, Booth and Herold hid in a pine thicket near Zekiah Swamp before they crossed the Potomac River into Virginia. All the while, Booth kept a diary, in which he wrote how the US “owed all her troubles” to Lincoln and that “God simply made me the instrument of his punishment”.

Yet he expressed dismay that the assassination was not being celebrated as widely as he thought it would. Rather than a hero or saviour of the nation, the press vilified him as a “common cutthroat”.

After 12 days on the run, Booth and Herold were holed up in a tobacco barn belonging to a Virginia farmer, Richard Garrett, having told him that they were Confederate soldiers on their way home after the war. Hot on their trail, however, were the troops of the 16th New York Cavalry led by Edward Doherty and a pair of detectives, Luther Baker and Everton Conger.

How did John Wilkes Booth die?

In the early hours of 26 April, the pursuers – ordered to bring the conspirators in alive – called out to Booth and Herold to surrender. The latter did so, much to Booth’s chagrin – who refused to give himself up and stalled for time.

Eventually, those outside lost patience and set the barn alight. As Booth scrambled inside, a sergeant named Boston Corbett advanced, poked his rifle through the slats of the barn and shot the presidential assassin in the neck, paralysing him. Corbett later claimed that he saw Booth readying his weapons.

Corbett would be initially arrested and court-martialled. To many in the US, however, he was, as a newspaper put it, “one of the World’s great avengers”. He was discharged and given a portion of the reward money.

What were John Wilkes Booth’s last words?

Carried out of the burning barn, Booth managed to say, “Tell my mother I die for my country”. Yet these were not to be his last words, as he lingered for hours in such agonising pain that he often called out to the soldiers to “kill me”.

When the end finally came, he asked for his hands to be raised in front of his face and, looking at them, he muttered “useless, useless” before dying.

There has been much speculation to the meaning of those words: was he simply in shock at the uselessness of his now-paralysed body? Or was he referring to his useless attempt, symbolised by his hands with a president’s blood on them, to save the Confederacy?

Booth died on 26 April, at the time that Lincoln’s body was in the middle of a funeral procession through American cities, visited by millions of mourners.

Where is John Wilkes Booth’s grave?

Booth’s body – confirmed by Dr John Frederick May and identified by an operation scar and a tattoo of his initials on his wrist – was taken back to Washington DC and secretly buried at a military prison. It would be in the same place that four other conspirators were hanged.

In all, eight conspirators faced trial at a military tribunal. Herold, Powell, Atzerodt and Surratt (the first woman executed by the United States government) met their fates at the end of a rope; three others were given life sentences, although two were later pardoned, with a third dying in prison before he could be pardoned; and one sentenced to six years of hard labour.

In 1869, Booth’s body was exhumed and re-buried at the family plot in Green Mount Cemetery in Baltimore, Maryland. Today, the unmarked stone believed to be his grave is often seen covered in a mound of pennies left by visitors. On one side of each coin is the face of Lincoln.

• Alternate history | What if Abraham Lincoln hadn't been assassinated?

]]>Could modern medicine have saved Abraham Lincoln?https://www.historyextra.com/period/victorian/could-modern-medicine-have-saved-abraham-lincoln-after-shot-john-wilkes-booth-history/2024-03-15T10:28:45.000ZAbraham Lincoln was shot at point-blank range on 14 April 1865 by John Wilkes Booth, wielding a Philadelphia Derringer pistol. The bullet entered his head just under his left ear, went through his brain and lodged just behind his right eye. He immediately lost consciousness and lived for about eight hours.

• Read more | The Abraham Lincoln assassination: what really happened?

His doctors correctly said he could not be saved, given the state of medicine and surgery in 1865. There were then no possibilities of intensive care, with IV drips, assisted ventilation and steroids to reduce the cerebral swelling.

The bullet’s trajectory probably spared Lincoln’s frontal lobes and his vital brain stem areas. He would have sustained damage to his cerebellum, the area of the brain that controls movement, and we can never know what other brain structures might have also been damaged.

However, modern medical interventions could have kept Lincoln alive for a while, and brain scans might have allowed his doctors to assess the precise extent of damage. Had he survived the immediate aftermath, modern neurosurgeons could have assessed whether removal of damaged tissue, and possibly the bullet itself, would have helped him.

Whether his quality of life could have been partially restored is another, separate question, and one we simply can’t answer.

This Q&A was answered by William Bynum, emeritus professor of the history of medicine at UCL, and first appeared in the May 2013 issue of BBC History Magazine

]]>Abraham Lincoln: the greatest US president?https://www.historyextra.com/period/victorian/abraham-lincoln-life-achievements-death/2024-03-14T16:43:14.000ZIn 1861, Abraham Lincoln was the 16th man to be elected to the presidency of the United States, and, for many, the greatest. His record speaks for itself: he led the Union to victory in the American Civil War, abolished slavery, and delivered some of the most famous speeches in human history.

Lincoln’s words, without the stain of ego or self-interest, have echoed through the years and continue to inspire.

Then with his assassination on 14 April 1865, he became an eternal symbol. Someone who transcended the reality of his mortal life and deeds so that he is remembered as more than the statesman and orator, the great emancipator and saviour of the nation, but as the embodiment of democracy, the exemplification of an ideal United States, and the supreme martyr.

When was Abraham Lincoln born, and what was his early life like?

Born 12 February 1809 to Thomas and Nancy Lincoln in a tiny log cabin in Kentucky, Lincoln had a tough upbringing on the American frontier. His younger brother Thomas died in infancy, his mother Nancy passed away when he was nine, and his older sister Sarah died in childbirth when he was 18. Luckily, he became extremely close with his father’s new wife Sarah Bush Johnston, a widow with three children, whom Thomas married in 1819, and Abraham came to call “mother”.

While Lincoln grew up tall, strong and athletic, with axe-wielding skills, he thoroughly disliked his days of ploughing hard, dusty fields or splitting logs for rail fences. A physical pursuit he did enjoy was wrestling. In fact, today he is in the National Wrestling Hall of Fame, recognised as an “Outstanding American” in the sport.

Determined not to have a life dependent on manual labour rather than intellectual pursuits, the sparsely-educated Lincoln taught himself how to read and write. He devoured every book he could get until he was able to recount Shakespeare and the Bible from memory, then turned his intellect to law and passed the bar in 1836.

As president, Lincoln was always acutely aware of the political advantage gained from his childhood. Guests to the White House would be befuddled with folksy anecdotes of his upbringing in Kentucky and Indiana, as he cultivated a reputation as a man of the people and a true American who thrived from individual initiative and hard work.

How tall was Abraham Lincoln?

In the ubiquitous image of Lincoln, he appeared as a slightly awkward and gangling figure too tall for his time, accentuated by his signature stovepipe hat and beard.

Standing at six feet and four inches, he remains the tallest occupant of the Oval Office, just ahead of Lyndon B Johnson. His lanky frame has led some physicians over the years to speculate whether Lincoln had a genetic condition, such as Marfan syndrome (an inherited disorder characterised by looseness of joints).

Abraham Lincoln’s personality and family life

Lincoln had a wicked sense of humour, a humble outlook and a propensity for telling the truth, hence his nickname ‘Honest Abe’. But he could also be laid low by bouts of depression.

• Read more | Lincoln's funniest jokes

In 1842, he married Mary Todd, the daughter of a wealthy businessman, and they had four sons together. However, only one, Robert, would live beyond the age of 18, as the others succumbed to various diseases between 1850 and 1871.

Mary suffered from depression too, as well as headaches and a mental condition that was dismissed in her time but now recognised as possibly bipolar disorder or complications from pernicious anaemia. Grief would be a constant factor for Mary as well; after all, she would lose three children, live through the deadliest war in the country’s history, and witness her husband murdered in front of her.

When was Abraham Lincoln elected, and why?

By the time Lincoln married Mary, he had already established a successful career as a lawyer in Springfield, Illinois, and was taking the first steps into politics. He served four terms in the state legislature and had one unremarkable stint in the US House of Representatives from 1847-49.

It was only in the 1850s that his path to the White House opened up before him. And the catalyst was the debate over the future of slavery. Lincoln joined the nascent Republican Party to oppose the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, which had been sponsored by the incumbent Illinois senator Stephen Douglas to raise the question of extending slavery to new territories.

• Read more | Did Abraham Lincoln’s beard win him the election?

The country was divided. Businessmen and politicians in the South, the cotton-producing hub of the world, were angered by progressive voices from the North, including Lincoln’s. Although no staunch abolitionist, he believed slavery to be morally wrong.

In 1858, he challenged Douglas for his senate seat, leading to a series of seven intense and career-launching debates. During this campaign, he gave his famous speech in which he declared, “A house divided against itself cannot stand.”

Although ultimately unsuccessful in the election, the passion and eloquence of his oratory propelled Lincoln to national acclaim and set him up to be the Republican candidate for a presidential run in 1860. Taking on Douglas again, he won by sweeping the votes in the North and out west, but without claiming a single slave state.

• Read more | How Abraham Lincoln's 1860 election victory set America on the path to Civil War

This was the last provocation the South was going to stand. Before Lincoln took office in March 1861, seven southern states seceded from the Union and formed the Confederate States of America, later joined by four more.

The president-elect had three options: accept this new Confederacy, make sweeping concessions, or refuse to accept their legitimacy and force them to rejoin the Union – by force if need be.

Abraham Lincoln and the American Civil War

For Lincoln, division was “the essence of anarchy” and a threat to the free government and liberty on which the US had been built. It therefore came as little surprise when he vowed to “make one vast grave yard of the valley of the Mississippi – yes of the whole South, if I must – to maintain, preserve and defend the Union and Constitution in all their ancient integrity”.

And so began the deadliest chapter in the nation’s history. Yet it was in the crucible of the American Civil War that Lincoln forged his immortal reputation. For four gruelling years, Lincoln was driven, almost obsessively, by the goal of keeping the country united.

From the opening salvo at Fort Sumter in April 1861 to Robert E Lee’s surrender in April 1865, an estimated 750,000 men, women and children died in the fighting.

During that time, Lincoln had to grow as a commander-in-chief. Other than a short spell as captain of a militia in 1832, he had no military experience. But, much the same way he taught himself to read and write, Lincoln learned battle tactics and, waking before dawn, spent hours in telegraph stations awaiting updates from his officers.

He expanded the powers of the federal government, made decisions without consulting Congress, and suspended the legal precedent of habeas corpus – which allowed for the arrests of any suspected Confederate sympathisers. A new paper currency, the ‘greenback’, was introduced to pay his Union armies as well.

What were Abraham Lincoln’s greatest achievements?

Lincoln’s growth as a wartime leader deserves to be commended, especially when faced with a succession of generals who failed to deliver what was expected of them. The president finally found his man in Ulyssess S Grant. Ultimately, one of Lincoln’s – and Grant’s – greatest achievements had to be winning the American Civil War and thus preserving the Union.

Arguably though, his supreme political accomplishment was in how he controlled his cabinet. He brought together men from all viewpoints within the Republican Party, including the brilliant moderate William Seward as Secretary of State and the star of the radical faction, Salmon P Chase, to head the Treasury. Lincoln adroitly juggled this group, dubbed the ‘team of rivals’, so as to keep everyone on message.

On 1 January 1863, that message changed. For that was when the president issued the Emancipation Proclamation, which freed all the slaves in Confederate territory.

“My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union and is not either to save or destroy slavery,” Lincoln had said earlier in the conflict. “If I could save the Union without freeing any slave, I would do it.” The Emancipation Proclamation drastically changed that, inextricably binding the fate of the North with the end of slavery.

Then in early 1865, he cajoled Congress into passing the 13th Amendment and so abolishing slavery throughout the entire country.

• Read more | Rebuilding America after the Civil War: what was the Reconstruction era and why did it fail?

By that point, Lincoln had won a landslide re-election, and with the war entering its final stages he could begin to look forward to a time of peace and reconstruction for the US. His second inaugural address was a poetic powerhouse, adding to his other great achievements in oratory – most notably the Gettysburg Address in 1863.

When did Abraham Lincoln die?

Lincoln’s re-election assured him that he was the man not just to save the Union from the brink, but to rebuild it, bigger and better. That was not to be.

When he woke up on 14 April 1865, he was in an unusually good mood. Five days earlier, the Confederate commander Robert E Lee had surrendered to Grant at Appomattox Court House. And so, for the first time in four years, the burden of bloodshed was not pressing down on the president’s shoulders.

That evening, he went with his wife Mary to Ford’s Theatre to see the farcical comedy, Our American Cousin. They arrived late and the performance was halted while they took their seats in the presidential box, to a rousing ovation from the audience.

Lurking in wait, however, was the Confederate sympathiser John Wilkes Booth, a popular actor of the day who had long plotted to get rid of Lincoln in order to save the South.

• Read more | Why did John Wilkes Booth kill Abraham Lincoln? And how was he caught?

Booth crept into the box during the third act and shot Lincoln in the back of the head with a .44 calibre derringer pistol. Having then attacked one of Lincoln’s guests, Major Henry Rathbone, he leaped from the box to the stage, breaking his leg on landing, and shouted the Viriginia state motto: “Sic semper tyrannis!” (‘Thus always to tyrants!’)

Despite a massive manhunt being orchestrated to track down all conspirators involved in Lincoln’s assassination, Booth remained on the run for 12 days before being cornered in a barn in Virginia and shot.

As for Lincoln, he lived for another nine hours, although he never regained consciousness. He was carried across the street to the house belonging to William Petersen, where he died at 7.22am the following morning. At his bedside was Edwin Stanton, Secretary of War, who reportedly said, “Now he belongs to the ages.”

• Read more | Could modern medicine have saved Abraham Lincoln?

The country mourned. On ‘Black Easter’, just a day later, sermons preached of how Lincoln made a similar sacrifice to Jesus Christ, and millions of people came to see the funeral procession that took the president’s body from Washington DC to Springfield, Illinois, by train.

Whether peering up at the Lincoln Memorial, with the nine-metre-high marble statue gazing down in thoughtful repose, or at Mount Rushmore, or staring into the arresting and melancholic eyes of his famous photograph, it is easy to feel that here is a man who is so much more than a man. Like the freed slaves who worshipped his name, many have come to see Lincoln as an incorruptible symbol, a beacon for humankind.

Boston Tea Party: Igniting a Revolution

Member exclusive | Discover the causes, tensions, and violent origins of the Boston Tea Party. Join leading experts as they explain the key players involved in the plan – and why tea was so important to the story.

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