Thursday, June 27, 2013

Abraham Lincoln: the power used in good faith

HISTORICAL CHARACTERS
There is a fine line between those who use power for personal fulfillment or a few, of those who use them for the common good. Pobrably there is no absolute example of any of the two cases, but Abraham Lincoln is perhaps one of the best examples to follow. He had the power to persecute, arrest and impose magnanimous ideals that today would agree, but wake in his time more of an annoyance. He paid for his boldness with the highest price that could impose: his own life.
Abraham Lincoln was the sixteenth President of the United States and the first by the Party Republicano.Como a strong opponent of the expansion of slavery in the United States, Lincoln won the Republican Party nomination in 1860 and was elected president later that year. During his term, he helped preserve the United States by the defeat of the secessionist Confederate States of America in the American Civil War. He introduced measures that resulted in the abolition of slavery, issuing his Emancipation Proclamation in 1863 and promoting the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution in 1865.
Lincoln closely supervised the outcome of the war until it ended, especially the selection of top generals, including Ulysses S. Grant. Lincoln successfully mobilized public opinion through his rhetoric and speeches, his Gettysburg Address is but one example of this. After the war, Lincoln established the reconstruction, trying to quickly gather the country through a policy of generous reconciliation. His assassination in 1865 was the first assassination in the United States.
During his presidency, Lincoln is recognized as having freed the slaves with the Emancipation Proclamation,
but this release only in areas of the Confederacy not controlled by the Union. However, the proclamation made the abolition of slavery in the rebel states were an official war goal. This gave impetus to the adoption of the thirteenth and fourteenth amendments to the U.S. Constitution, which abolished slavery and established the federal civil rights enforcement. During the Civil War, Lincoln received Congressional powers that no previous president had exercised; managed funds without control of Congress and suspended habeas corpus. Thus Lincoln was able to arrest political opponents (many Democrats) and members of antiwar groups without prior court orders, in addition to censor these groups in the press (something contrary to freedom of expression).
His murder: at the time of reconstruction, and Mary Todd Lincoln left to attend a performance at Ford's Theatre. The play was Our American Cousin, a musical comedy. When Lincoln sat in the balcony, John Wilkes Booth, an actor from Maryland, Virginia resident and Southern sympathizer, appeared from behind fired a single shot with a bullet Deringer pistol round to the president's head and shouted "Sic semper tyrannis " (Latin expression meaning "Thus always to tyrants"), killing the "beloved" president. Booth jumped from the balcony to the stage, the audience thought that was incorporated bowing, but the truth is that he had broken a leg.

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