Impact of the Murder of Abraham Lincoln

My Captain does not answer, his lips are pale and still,

My father does not feel my arm, he has no pulse nor will,

The ship is anchored safe and sound, its voyage closed and

From fearful trip the victor ship comes in with object won:

Walk the deck my Captain lies,

Abraham Lincoln, 16th President of the United States, died victim of an assassin's bullet. That assassin was John Wilkes Booth, a Southern sympathizer and, by the type of coincidence that would make the modern media salivate, brother of the then-famous Shakespearean actor Edwin Booth. There was no need for the modern media frenzy that would accompany such an event today: the murder of Lincoln brought to an end the political innocence of the United States of America with a vengeance that affected every inhabitant of the nation and its frontier territories. It will be the intention of this paper to examine how this particular shooting of a political leader, by no means the first nor the last in American history, achieved that dubious distinction.

As Abraham Lincoln slumped mortally wounded in his box seat at Ford's Theater in Washington, D.C., the War Between the States had just been resolved in favor of the Northern states fighting for preservation of

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facts do not support. The Lincoln that this paper finds described by fact - the Lincoln whose assassination dealt an untimely death-blow to America's political innocence - is a great man for totally different reasons. If Lincoln accomplished the deeds for which he is acclaimed and/or cynically admired - and the facts support the contention that he did - it was not because he was a "great" man handling a leviathan task. Rather, Lincoln became great because he was an unprepared politician, with severe personal limitations, who was thrust into national crisis, made serious mistakes as President, learned from them, and managed to surmount both limitations and mistakes to re-unite the nation while freeing a significant minority of the population from slavery. Abraham Lincoln learned how to do great things. In so learning he, like the America described by Robert Penn Warren on page 14 of this paper, had to shed his "old America" innocence, with its virtues and defects, to force a new vision. Fellow-Citizens... I have spoken as I [have] thought. I may be wrong in regard to any or all of them; but holding it a sound maxim, that it is better to be only sometimes right, than at all times wrong, so soon as I discover my opinions to b
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Approximate Word count = 9137
Approximate Pages = 37 (250 words per page)

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