Need Help? Text The summer before Abraham Lincoln was elected president, he wrote a response to Samuel Haycraft, who had asked Lincoln to return to Kentucky to visit his boyhood home. Courtesy the Kentucky Historical Society. Clark Center for Kentucky History in Frankfort. Courtesy of the Kentucky Historical Society.
Lincoln Birthplace Cabin, Hodgenville, Kentucky : Located in the Lincoln Birthplace Memorial near Hodgenville, this cabin is representative of the type of cabin that Lincoln's family would have lived in when he was born in In , Lincoln wrote, "My earliest recollection is of the Knob Creek place.
The first thing more careful observation reveals about these 30 numbers is that all of them end with the digits 0, 2, 5, 7, or 9. You might not think that is too remarkable until you realize that it eliminates half of the possible numbers. It is like seeing a list of 30 numbers that are all even. Something else must be going on here. And 7, of course, has a prominent place in biblical symbolism beginning with the Sabbath.
This could explain why all the reported ages end in 0, 2, 5, 7, or 9. For some of the numbers in Genesis 5, the combinations have to get more complicated. These and all the others can be generated by combinations of 60, 5, and 7. Now perhaps it might be claimed that you can come up with most any number if you let the combinations get complex enough. Such practices are often vague and ambiguous under the light of rational investigation.
We may never know for sure what significance the numbers had for the ancient Hebrews who wrote the text. Knowing what we do about the culture, and in the absence of any persuasive reasons for thinking that the ages of these men were so radically different than they are today, it seems that a symbolic or rhetorical interpretation is a legitimate option and maybe even a preferable one.
Taking the biblical text as a product of an ancient culture which was very different from our own forces us to do a lot of difficult work in order to interpret it correctly. I believe that anyone can pick up the Bible and read it profitably. Even if we never know for sure how genres worked in the ancient world or how long the patriarchs actually lived, we know enough to understand what God expects us to take from the text.
We make it to the time of Noah, and God starts things over again, preserving Noah to carry on the human race. His first inaugural address was an appeal to the rebellious states, seven of which had already seceded, to rejoin the nation.
His first draft of the speech ended with an ominous message: "Shall it be peace, or the sword? Fort Sumter, situated in the Charleston Harbour, was a Union outpost in the newly seceded Confederate territory. Lincoln, learning that the Fort was running low on food, sent supplies to reinforce the soldiers there. The Southern navy repulsed the supply convoy. After this repulse, the Southern navy fired the first shot of the war at Fort Sumter and the Federal defenders surrendered after a hour long battle.
Throughout the war, Lincoln struggled to find capable generals for his armies. As commander-in-chief, he legally held the highest rank in the United States armed forces, and he diligently exercised his authority through strategic planning, weapons testing, and the promotion and demotion of officers.
McDowell , Fremont, McClellan , Pope , McClellan again, Buell , Burnside , Rosecrans --all of these men and more withered under Lincoln's watchful eye as they failed to bring him success on the battlefield.
He did not issue his famous Emancipation Proclamation until January 1, after the Union victory at the Battle of Antietam. Nevertheless, it changed the tenor of the war, making it, from the Northern point of view, a fight both to preserve the Union and to end slavery. In , Lincoln ran again for President. After years of war, he feared he would not win.
Only in the final months of the campaign did the exertions of Ulysses S. Lincoln's legacy of executive authority did not last beyond his death, and over the next forty years both Congress and the courts overshadowed the White House in power and influence. Still, the most lasting accomplishments attributed to Lincoln are the preservation of the Union, the vindication of democracy, and the death of slavery, all accomplished by the ways in which he handled the crisis that most certainly would have ended differently with a lesser man in office.
His great achievement, historians tell us, was his ability to energize and mobilize the nation by appealing to its best ideals while acting "with malice towards none" in the pursuit of a more perfect, more just, and more enduring Union.
No President in American history ever faced a greater crisis and no President ever accomplished as much. Grant Rutherford B. Hayes James A. Garfield Chester A. Roosevelt Harry S. Truman Dwight D. Eisenhower John F.
Kennedy Lyndon B. Bush Bill Clinton George W. Help inform the discussion Support the Miller Center.
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