January 5, 2009 • 14 mins
When Lincoln delivered the Emancipation Proclamation, he hoped to demoralize the South. Learn the details behind President Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation in this podcast from HowStuffWorks.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm editor Candis Gibson, joined by staff writer Jane McGrath Taylor, Jane.
When you think about presidential speeches are really any speech
(00:20):
in general, there's essentially two different types of appeals that
you can make to the members of an audience. You
can make a path that's appeals and you're appealing to
someone's emotions, or you can make an ethos appeal and
you're appealing to someone's morality and in sense of ethics
is from my rhetoric class. Yeah, yeah. I I took
speech writing my senior year of college spring semester, thinking
(00:42):
it would try to be a snooze and it'd be,
you know, a way to pass the time until I graduated,
And it turned out to be a really tough class,
so it wasn't my favorite. I loved rhetoric, Yeah yeah,
And obviously I I've learned a lot about speech, judging
from my lofty annunciation and vocabulary. But the point being, um,
(01:02):
a couple of different presidents throughout history seems to have
preferred one method or another depending on the circumstances, and
there's some pretty memorable ones that speak to each of
these different types of um delivery. I think about the
Berlin Wall speech, which we've had a podcast about before,
when Kennedy said that he was a Berliner, or as
some people have misinterpreted, he was a deadly donut. That
(01:25):
definitely made a huge emotional appeal to people of Berlin, say,
I'm one of you. But when you kind of something
like ethos and appealing to someone's sense of morality, you
think about someone like Abraham Lincoln. Definitely Gettysburg address maybe,
and that one even I think had a bit of
an emotional residence to it too. But one of the
most ethical proclamations he made was the Emancipation Proclamation. That's true,
(01:50):
and it's pretty interesting, uh, in contrast to the Gettysburg Address.
It was it was very legal, it was a legal
document and it was a military top actic basically, and uh,
but like you said, it did appeal to morality at
the same time, So there is that contrast in it.
And if you read the Emancipation Proclamation, which we're not
going to do for you because I think it was
(02:11):
a very few lines through, it really has a bunch
of legal lads, and it's seven hundred words long, and
it actually didn't free any slaves at all, that's right,
and UH people say that, you know, it was kind
of unnecessary because there were congressional acts that were already
in place that that said that they that whatever um
slaves that the Northern UH troops encounter, they would free
(02:36):
if they um if they conquered that area. Right, So
essentially they set up the president that because slaves were property,
if the Union troops came in and conquered the area,
then they acquired all the property, the slaves being part
of that, and they would be free forever. And Lincoln
said from the beginning to his cabinet and his advisors
he wasn't going to try to free the slaves because
(02:57):
you know, the country was in such a state of
up people already. In His biggest concern was, you know, uh,
getting the succeeded south the Confederacy to come back to
the Union. And the cabinet had at least some support
for the idea of gradual emancipation, that this would be
something that could be you know, slowly handed out over time,
(03:17):
which is almost like I have to mention him, of course,
almost like the idea of Thomas Jefferson had in the
day about slavery, that eventually the institution would work its
way out. But Lincoln one day, he was actually on
the way to the War Secretary's infant's son's funeral, and
he was writing in a carriage with some of his
top confidants, and he said, you know what I'm gonna
(03:39):
do it. I'm going to set the slaves free. But
he did it in such a shrewd and calculated way
that it really clashes in my mind that the image
I've always had of Lincoln, which is this top hat wearing,
scraggly bearded, sort of droopy eyed, sad somber man. He
was quite a politician with us, that's true, and it
sort of was in the face of most people's ideal
(04:02):
image of of Lincoln in terms of someone who was
out for the slaves from the beginning. Like like you said,
coming back to your point, he didn't start this war
with the intent of ending slavery in the South, and uh,
he was against slavery, but um, like you said, he
wanted to preserve the Union first and foremost, and he
actually uh stumbled into this situation because it was a
(04:22):
great military tactic to use, and he actually calculated Lee
used the time of immediately after the Antietam the Battle
of Antietam, which happened to be the bloodiest war in
the Civil War, and the bloodies battle, excuse me and um.
And so after this happened, you know, the country is suffering. Obviously,
people are wondering what are we fighting about after all,
(04:45):
you know, and it's it's fairly confusing when what caused
the war, and it's not exactly slavery that caused in
the first place. So when Lincoln uh put out the
Emancipation Proclamation, it really focused everyone's mind on slavery itself.
It did. It boiled down the cause of the war
to slavery, and Lincoln was advised by the Secretary of
(05:06):
State WILLIAMS. Steward not to deliver the proclamation until the
Union had had a victory, because in his mind, he
thought it would look like the Union was claiming defeat
to the world. And it's important to remember that at
this time the South was still getting support, sort of
surreptitious support, albeit from France and England. So the Union
(05:27):
wanted to make sure that Europe and the rest of
the world knew it was still strong and it's right,
and I stumbled across that and it made me think, like,
why would these international powers support the South in the
first place. And it's interesting because it was a lot
about trade because obviously the South controlled the cotton and yeah,
and actually it wasn't a two distant memory that you know,
the Second War of Independence, the War of eighteen twelve,
(05:48):
it happened, and so they were still kind of hostile
towards the United States at that time. And also, um
there was there were questions and hostilities about the Canadian
border even more recently than that. So England was very
quickly jump on board to the South. But when when
the war became about slavery, they couldn't do that anymore, right,
because they had decried slavery in their own country several
(06:10):
several years ago, and so they couldn't possibly be on
board with a country. It's important to remember at this
time that the Confederacy was its own country essentially, at
least they consider themselves that. And we should note that
before the Emancipation Proclamation was delivered on January one, eight
sixty three, that's when it was laid down into law. Supposedly,
(06:30):
there was a preliminary one that came out on September
eighteen sixty two, and in this version, Lincoln was trying
to give the Confederacy a chance to rejoin the Union
and as a gift with purchase, I guess they could
keep their slaves as long as they came back to
the Union. He would work that out later on, but
(06:50):
none of the Confederate states hopped on board. There were
a couple of individual landowners who wanted to sign these
sort of one on one loyalty packs, but Lincoln he
wasn't buying that. Yeah, it's interesting. This document goes down
in history is like, oh, it freed the slaves and
free the slaves at the same time, Like, man, what
was Lincoln doing here? He was he was giving the
South and out. He was like, you can keep your slaves.
(07:11):
That's what the document was saying. You can keep them,
and it'll be fine if you rejoin now, if you
lay down your arms. And the reason there was such
opposition to this, at least in the cabinet, was that
they feared there'd be a total massacre and utter pandemonium
in the South if the slaves were freed. I guess
they thought that they would, you know, wipe out the
plantation owners and then they would storm up north and
(07:31):
take all the Northerners jobs. And racism was just as
prevalent in the North as it was in the South,
and there were some who even postulated that the war
was a conspiracy and all the northern soldiers were being killed,
said that the freed slaves to come up to the
north and take their jobs, and that's helped to spur
their draft rights at the time, right exactly. But you
know that the irony behind this was that even if
(07:53):
the Emancipation Proclamation had freed all the slaves and it
had accomplished that goal, you have to think about the
way that information was disseminated at this time. It's not
like we had SENNA, and it's not like we had NPR.
It took a while for the news to get out,
and in some cases at some plantations, in places like
the floor keys or even in Texas, the slaves didn't
(08:14):
hear the news until well after Lincoln's assassination, that's right,
and that's where we get the idea of June teenth. Uh.
It was a date where June nineteenth, I should say
nineteen sixty five was the date that slaves in Texas
actually first short of emancipation proclamation, and so that's when
Texas actually celebrates that date. And when you look at
(08:34):
the order in which the slave I'm sorry, the states
let go of the institution of slavery, you'll see them.
The border states really were some of the last two, uh,
losing their grip on the institution, that's right. And they
were left out of the proclamation, right, it didn't apply
to them at all, right, And that was another political move.
Lincoln knew that his hold on Congress was pretty tenuous,
and he feared that he would polarize the Republican Party
(08:56):
and and lose all the Republicans support if he continued
to put this idea of emancipating the slaves. And really,
if if you listen to the detractors behind the emancipation proclamations,
criticism it was illegal. He was acting far out of
his jurisdiction if you uphold the fact that the Confederacy
(09:16):
was its own country at this time. And in our
article about the immense patient proclamation on how stuff works,
the author uses this really great analogy she said it
would be like the United States saying to France, you
have to outlaw smoking. We don't really have the authority
to say that to another country. And so Democrats and
Republicans who were really trying to follow the Constitution to
(09:36):
the letter, told Lincoln you can't do this, that's right,
And Lincoln actually violated the Constitution. Some say, uh in
many different ways. He withold habeas corpus and and stuff
like this, but he sort of um hid behind the
idea that these were military tactics, and uh, you know,
to this day like and as a hero um to
most people in this country, and they defend him in
(09:58):
these acts because they were military time optics. But back then,
I don't think he's satisfied a lot of people for
the proclamation. The abolitionists wanted complete freedom of all slaves,
and then the plantation owners, of course wanted to keep
holding on to their their workers. So he didn't why either,
he didn't satisfy anyone. It's like he was trying to
walk such a straight line that both sides just completely
(10:19):
scoffed to him. And then of course, you know, like
we already mentioned, they were the conspiracies from the Northerners
that thought all the slaves were just being sent up
north to take over their lives. Right. But one aspect
of this that was really brilliant, and it actually had
a great immediate effect, was the fact that um, black soldiers,
freed slaves would uh would join the north and become soldiers.
(10:39):
And there was about a hundred and eighty thousand I
believe that joined after the proclamation was declared, and the
proclamation made it explicitly clear that freed slaves, or I
guess all blacks in general, could join the armed forces.
And I think that people were suspicious of their efforts
at first, but they really proved themselves. I mean, obviously
this was a cause that they were perhaps the cloist too.
(11:01):
So um, we know also when we look at the
Emancipatient Proclamation that it's, like we said, it's a bunch
of legal lease. But one of the boldest things about it,
if you really get down to the language, is that
it's written in present tense, and some of the drafts
that Lincoln had made of the proclamation were written in
future tense. But he reasoned, no, I want this to
(11:22):
be immediate. I wanted to be prescient, and I want
people to really stand up and pay attention. And if
you think about it, that really would have grabbed people's attention,
you know, hearing slavery spoken of as an institution of
the past, it's not the future. That's kind of nebulous.
It may never happen, right, right, But perhaps the biggest
ripple effect from the Emancipatient Proclamation was that it dealt
(11:42):
a severe blow to the Southern psyche because for the
first time, poor white people in the South started to
realize that their family members and their sons and themselves
were dying so that wealthy white landowners could continue to build.
And they if they didn't hold slaves, they don't have
a stake in this. They might be anti slavery even
(12:05):
or you know, get behind the cell for other reasons
and the like the rights of the States reasons, but
now after them based in proclamation, it's all about slavery.
It really is. It really is, like we said, an
incredibly shrewd move. So it took a while for these
effects to take hold in the United States, and then
after the Civil War was over, we know that things
didn't exactly work out smoothly from there. On out. When
(12:26):
Andrew Johnson came into office after lincoln'ssassination, he was sharply
criticized for being too lenient on the Confederate's day because
he was just trying to you know, piece the Union
back together as Lincoln would have wanted, and again harsh
criticism from his detractors. And if we look at what
happened to the slaves after they were freed, we see
it's still not a pretty story at all constitutionally speaking either. Yeah,
(12:49):
that's right. They were contraband camps, I believe, I mean,
these were these were camps that were meant to to
protect the slaves uh near um northern forts, but at
the time, like it ended up being not the greatest
place to live, you know, these contraband camps, and it
ended up giving them not a very good living at
all at all. And when we look at the laws
(13:11):
that were passed in order to protect the newly freed slaves,
we have the thirteenth Amendment, which officially abolished slavery, but
it didn't give them citizenship. Then the fourteenth it prevented
states from holding out on slaves rights without due process,
and then the fifteenth gave all the free slaves voting rights,
and we know about the gym crow laws that we
followed and stut and the absurd tests that blacks would
(13:34):
be made to undergo at voting and polling stations. And
so they weren't completely assimilated into the American mainstream until
well after the civil rights movements. It was a long,
painful process, but at least the proclamation started. Yeah, and
we may have vested your view of the Emancipation Proclamation
(13:54):
and maybe of Lincoln. Maybe now when you think of him,
you won't think of him as the sad dide wartime president,
but you'll think of him as a very shrewd political
I know that my opinion has been changed to him.
And you can read even more about Lincoln and the
Civil War and the families that were torn apart by
the battle on how stuff works dot com for more
(14:15):
on this and thousands of other topics. Isn't how stuff
works dot com. Let us know what you think. Send
an email to podcast at how stuff works dot com.
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm editor Candis Gibson, joined by staff writer Jane McGrath Taylor, Jane.
When you think about presidential speeches are really any speech
(00:20):
in general, there's essentially two different types of appeals that
you can make to the members of an audience. You
can make a path that's appeals and you're appealing to
someone's emotions, or you can make an ethos appeal and
you're appealing to someone's morality and in sense of ethics
is from my rhetoric class. Yeah, yeah. I I took
speech writing my senior year of college spring semester, thinking
(00:42):
it would try to be a snooze and it'd be,
you know, a way to pass the time until I graduated,
And it turned out to be a really tough class,
so it wasn't my favorite. I loved rhetoric, Yeah yeah,
And obviously I I've learned a lot about speech, judging
from my lofty annunciation and vocabulary. But the point being, um,
(01:02):
a couple of different presidents throughout history seems to have
preferred one method or another depending on the circumstances, and
there's some pretty memorable ones that speak to each of
these different types of um delivery. I think about the
Berlin Wall speech, which we've had a podcast about before,
when Kennedy said that he was a Berliner, or as
some people have misinterpreted, he was a deadly donut. That
(01:25):
definitely made a huge emotional appeal to people of Berlin, say,
I'm one of you. But when you kind of something
like ethos and appealing to someone's sense of morality, you
think about someone like Abraham Lincoln. Definitely Gettysburg address maybe,
and that one even I think had a bit of
an emotional residence to it too. But one of the
most ethical proclamations he made was the Emancipation Proclamation. That's true,
(01:50):
and it's pretty interesting, uh, in contrast to the Gettysburg Address.
It was it was very legal, it was a legal
document and it was a military top actic basically, and uh,
but like you said, it did appeal to morality at
the same time, So there is that contrast in it.
And if you read the Emancipation Proclamation, which we're not
going to do for you because I think it was
(02:11):
a very few lines through, it really has a bunch
of legal lads, and it's seven hundred words long, and
it actually didn't free any slaves at all, that's right,
and UH people say that, you know, it was kind
of unnecessary because there were congressional acts that were already
in place that that said that they that whatever um
slaves that the Northern UH troops encounter, they would free
(02:36):
if they um if they conquered that area. Right, So
essentially they set up the president that because slaves were property,
if the Union troops came in and conquered the area,
then they acquired all the property, the slaves being part
of that, and they would be free forever. And Lincoln
said from the beginning to his cabinet and his advisors
he wasn't going to try to free the slaves because
(02:57):
you know, the country was in such a state of
up people already. In His biggest concern was, you know, uh,
getting the succeeded south the Confederacy to come back to
the Union. And the cabinet had at least some support
for the idea of gradual emancipation, that this would be
something that could be you know, slowly handed out over time,
(03:17):
which is almost like I have to mention him, of course,
almost like the idea of Thomas Jefferson had in the
day about slavery, that eventually the institution would work its
way out. But Lincoln one day, he was actually on
the way to the War Secretary's infant's son's funeral, and
he was writing in a carriage with some of his
top confidants, and he said, you know what I'm gonna
(03:39):
do it. I'm going to set the slaves free. But
he did it in such a shrewd and calculated way
that it really clashes in my mind that the image
I've always had of Lincoln, which is this top hat wearing,
scraggly bearded, sort of droopy eyed, sad somber man. He
was quite a politician with us, that's true, and it
sort of was in the face of most people's ideal
(04:02):
image of of Lincoln in terms of someone who was
out for the slaves from the beginning. Like like you said,
coming back to your point, he didn't start this war
with the intent of ending slavery in the South, and uh,
he was against slavery, but um, like you said, he
wanted to preserve the Union first and foremost, and he
actually uh stumbled into this situation because it was a
(04:22):
great military tactic to use, and he actually calculated Lee
used the time of immediately after the Antietam the Battle
of Antietam, which happened to be the bloodiest war in
the Civil War, and the bloodies battle, excuse me and um.
And so after this happened, you know, the country is suffering. Obviously,
people are wondering what are we fighting about after all,
(04:45):
you know, and it's it's fairly confusing when what caused
the war, and it's not exactly slavery that caused in
the first place. So when Lincoln uh put out the
Emancipation Proclamation, it really focused everyone's mind on slavery itself.
It did. It boiled down the cause of the war
to slavery, and Lincoln was advised by the Secretary of
(05:06):
State WILLIAMS. Steward not to deliver the proclamation until the
Union had had a victory, because in his mind, he
thought it would look like the Union was claiming defeat
to the world. And it's important to remember that at
this time the South was still getting support, sort of
surreptitious support, albeit from France and England. So the Union
(05:27):
wanted to make sure that Europe and the rest of
the world knew it was still strong and it's right,
and I stumbled across that and it made me think, like,
why would these international powers support the South in the
first place. And it's interesting because it was a lot
about trade because obviously the South controlled the cotton and yeah,
and actually it wasn't a two distant memory that you know,
the Second War of Independence, the War of eighteen twelve,
(05:48):
it happened, and so they were still kind of hostile
towards the United States at that time. And also, um
there was there were questions and hostilities about the Canadian
border even more recently than that. So England was very
quickly jump on board to the South. But when when
the war became about slavery, they couldn't do that anymore, right,
because they had decried slavery in their own country several
(06:10):
several years ago, and so they couldn't possibly be on
board with a country. It's important to remember at this
time that the Confederacy was its own country essentially, at
least they consider themselves that. And we should note that
before the Emancipation Proclamation was delivered on January one, eight
sixty three, that's when it was laid down into law. Supposedly,
(06:30):
there was a preliminary one that came out on September
eighteen sixty two, and in this version, Lincoln was trying
to give the Confederacy a chance to rejoin the Union
and as a gift with purchase, I guess they could
keep their slaves as long as they came back to
the Union. He would work that out later on, but
(06:50):
none of the Confederate states hopped on board. There were
a couple of individual landowners who wanted to sign these
sort of one on one loyalty packs, but Lincoln he
wasn't buying that. Yeah, it's interesting. This document goes down
in history is like, oh, it freed the slaves and
free the slaves at the same time, Like, man, what
was Lincoln doing here? He was he was giving the
South and out. He was like, you can keep your slaves.
(07:11):
That's what the document was saying. You can keep them,
and it'll be fine if you rejoin now, if you
lay down your arms. And the reason there was such
opposition to this, at least in the cabinet, was that
they feared there'd be a total massacre and utter pandemonium
in the South if the slaves were freed. I guess
they thought that they would, you know, wipe out the
plantation owners and then they would storm up north and
(07:31):
take all the Northerners jobs. And racism was just as
prevalent in the North as it was in the South,
and there were some who even postulated that the war
was a conspiracy and all the northern soldiers were being killed,
said that the freed slaves to come up to the
north and take their jobs, and that's helped to spur
their draft rights at the time, right exactly. But you
know that the irony behind this was that even if
(07:53):
the Emancipation Proclamation had freed all the slaves and it
had accomplished that goal, you have to think about the
way that information was disseminated at this time. It's not
like we had SENNA, and it's not like we had NPR.
It took a while for the news to get out,
and in some cases at some plantations, in places like
the floor keys or even in Texas, the slaves didn't
(08:14):
hear the news until well after Lincoln's assassination, that's right,
and that's where we get the idea of June teenth. Uh.
It was a date where June nineteenth, I should say
nineteen sixty five was the date that slaves in Texas
actually first short of emancipation proclamation, and so that's when
Texas actually celebrates that date. And when you look at
(08:34):
the order in which the slave I'm sorry, the states
let go of the institution of slavery, you'll see them.
The border states really were some of the last two, uh,
losing their grip on the institution, that's right. And they
were left out of the proclamation, right, it didn't apply
to them at all, right, And that was another political move.
Lincoln knew that his hold on Congress was pretty tenuous,
and he feared that he would polarize the Republican Party
(08:56):
and and lose all the Republicans support if he continued
to put this idea of emancipating the slaves. And really,
if if you listen to the detractors behind the emancipation proclamations,
criticism it was illegal. He was acting far out of
his jurisdiction if you uphold the fact that the Confederacy
(09:16):
was its own country at this time. And in our
article about the immense patient proclamation on how stuff works,
the author uses this really great analogy she said it
would be like the United States saying to France, you
have to outlaw smoking. We don't really have the authority
to say that to another country. And so Democrats and
Republicans who were really trying to follow the Constitution to
(09:36):
the letter, told Lincoln you can't do this, that's right,
And Lincoln actually violated the Constitution. Some say, uh in
many different ways. He withold habeas corpus and and stuff
like this, but he sort of um hid behind the
idea that these were military tactics, and uh, you know,
to this day like and as a hero um to
most people in this country, and they defend him in
(09:58):
these acts because they were military time optics. But back then,
I don't think he's satisfied a lot of people for
the proclamation. The abolitionists wanted complete freedom of all slaves,
and then the plantation owners, of course wanted to keep
holding on to their their workers. So he didn't why either,
he didn't satisfy anyone. It's like he was trying to
walk such a straight line that both sides just completely
(10:19):
scoffed to him. And then of course, you know, like
we already mentioned, they were the conspiracies from the Northerners
that thought all the slaves were just being sent up
north to take over their lives. Right. But one aspect
of this that was really brilliant, and it actually had
a great immediate effect, was the fact that um, black soldiers,
freed slaves would uh would join the north and become soldiers.
(10:39):
And there was about a hundred and eighty thousand I
believe that joined after the proclamation was declared, and the
proclamation made it explicitly clear that freed slaves, or I
guess all blacks in general, could join the armed forces.
And I think that people were suspicious of their efforts
at first, but they really proved themselves. I mean, obviously
this was a cause that they were perhaps the cloist too.
(11:01):
So um, we know also when we look at the
Emancipatient Proclamation that it's, like we said, it's a bunch
of legal lease. But one of the boldest things about it,
if you really get down to the language, is that
it's written in present tense, and some of the drafts
that Lincoln had made of the proclamation were written in
future tense. But he reasoned, no, I want this to
(11:22):
be immediate. I wanted to be prescient, and I want
people to really stand up and pay attention. And if
you think about it, that really would have grabbed people's attention,
you know, hearing slavery spoken of as an institution of
the past, it's not the future. That's kind of nebulous.
It may never happen, right, right, But perhaps the biggest
ripple effect from the Emancipatient Proclamation was that it dealt
(11:42):
a severe blow to the Southern psyche because for the
first time, poor white people in the South started to
realize that their family members and their sons and themselves
were dying so that wealthy white landowners could continue to build.
And they if they didn't hold slaves, they don't have
a stake in this. They might be anti slavery even
(12:05):
or you know, get behind the cell for other reasons
and the like the rights of the States reasons, but
now after them based in proclamation, it's all about slavery.
It really is. It really is, like we said, an
incredibly shrewd move. So it took a while for these
effects to take hold in the United States, and then
after the Civil War was over, we know that things
didn't exactly work out smoothly from there. On out. When
(12:26):
Andrew Johnson came into office after lincoln'ssassination, he was sharply
criticized for being too lenient on the Confederate's day because
he was just trying to you know, piece the Union
back together as Lincoln would have wanted, and again harsh
criticism from his detractors. And if we look at what
happened to the slaves after they were freed, we see
it's still not a pretty story at all constitutionally speaking either. Yeah,
(12:49):
that's right. They were contraband camps, I believe, I mean,
these were these were camps that were meant to to
protect the slaves uh near um northern forts, but at
the time, like it ended up being not the greatest
place to live, you know, these contraband camps, and it
ended up giving them not a very good living at
all at all. And when we look at the laws
(13:11):
that were passed in order to protect the newly freed slaves,
we have the thirteenth Amendment, which officially abolished slavery, but
it didn't give them citizenship. Then the fourteenth it prevented
states from holding out on slaves rights without due process,
and then the fifteenth gave all the free slaves voting rights,
and we know about the gym crow laws that we
followed and stut and the absurd tests that blacks would
(13:34):
be made to undergo at voting and polling stations. And
so they weren't completely assimilated into the American mainstream until
well after the civil rights movements. It was a long,
painful process, but at least the proclamation started. Yeah, and
we may have vested your view of the Emancipation Proclamation
(13:54):
and maybe of Lincoln. Maybe now when you think of him,
you won't think of him as the sad dide wartime president,
but you'll think of him as a very shrewd political
I know that my opinion has been changed to him.
And you can read even more about Lincoln and the
Civil War and the families that were torn apart by
the battle on how stuff works dot com for more
(14:15):
on this and thousands of other topics. Isn't how stuff
works dot com. Let us know what you think. Send
an email to podcast at how stuff works dot com.
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