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Partisan Newspaper Accuses Lincoln's Son of War Profiteering
March 1863. One of the most adroitly vocal and vehement
 | | Robert Todd Lincoln, 1865, Library of Congress |
Copperheads -- northerners with southern sympathies -- was, according to Carl Sandburg, "Wilbur Fisk Storey, publisher of the Chicago Times, a broken-down newspaper he had vitalized and made the voice of the extremist enemies of the Lincoln administration. A Vermont boy, . . . Storey cultivated suspicion as a habit. During March '63 . . . [w]ithout basis or explanation, . . . the Chicago Times and like party organs printed the one sentence: 'The President's son, "Bob," as he is called, a lad of some twenty summers, has made half a million dollars in government contracts.' That was the item entire. How or where the President's son made his money, by what particular contracts, was not told or hinted at."
- Submitted by Peter A. Gilbert, Vermont Humanities Council Executive Director
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Lincoln on the Importance of Black Troops
April 1, 1863. Lincoln
wrote to Union General David Hunter to
 | | Sgt. Major Christain Fleetwood, Medal of Honor recipient in the Civil War |
commend him for using black troops in his attack on Jacksonville, Florida. "It is important to the enemy that such a force shall not take shape, and grow, and thrive, in the South; and in precisely the same proportion, it is important to us that it shall.
Hence the utmost certain caution and vigilence [sic] is necessary on our part. The enemy will make extra efforts to destroy them; and we should do the same to preserve and increase them."
- Submitted by Peter A. Gilbert, Vermont Humanities Council Executive Director
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Sick but Retaining His Sense of Humor, Lee Writes His Wife
April 3, 1863. General Lee wrote his wife, "I am getting better I
 | | General Robert E. Lee, circa 1864, by Julian Vannerson, Library of Congress |
trust though apparently very slowly & have suffered a great deal since I last wrote. I have had to call upon the doctors who are very kind & attentive & do every thing for me that is possible. I have taken a violent cold, either from going in or coming out of a warm house, perhaps both, which is very difficult to get rid of & very distressing to have."
Two days later, he wrote her again, saying, "I am suffering with a bad cold as I told you, & was threatened the doctors thought with some malady which must be dreadful if it resembles its name, but which I have forgotten. . . . I have not been so very sick, though have suffered a good deal of pain in my chest, back, & arms. It came on in paroxysms, was quite sharp, . . . . They have been tapping me all over like an old steam boiler before condemning it."
- Submitted by Peter A. Gilbert, Vermont Humanities Council Executive Director
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Senator Thaddeus Stevens Criticizes Emancipation Proclamation
April 4, 1863. Now, thanks to the film Lincoln, we can better
 | | Hon. Thaddeus Stevens of Pennsylvania, Library of Congress |
understand a remark made by Pennsylvania Senator Thaddeus Stevens criticizing Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation; Stevens made the comment in a speech to the Union League in Lancaster, Pennsylvania on April 4, 1863: "The 'Proclamation of Freedom,' as it is charitably called, although indicative of a sound heart, does not reach the evil. It exempts from its operations every place where it could be enforced."
- Submitted professor Beverly Wilson Palmer, Professor of History at Pomona College, Claremont, California
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