threepiecesuit

They always say Lincoln was a homely man. I would say he was quite handsome here. Can you see the seeds of greatness here?

I think this is a very nice picture of president Abraham Lincoln. He looks great in this picture. We must thank Shepherd, Nicholas H., the photographer for taking this picture of the president. The picture of the president is a great memory of a great man!

Lincoln was a tyrant.

idswart, lincoln probably was a tyrant. wikipedia outlines the most basic aspects of this, saying he: "suspended the writ of habeas corpus, spent money before Congress appropriated it, and imprisoned 18,000 suspected Confederate sympathizers without trial." Lincoln violated the rule of law, the constitution, the human rights of thousands - to a much greater extent than any president that came before him. the very troubling thing is that out of this tyranny, and perhaps even because of this tyranny, the even greater tyranny of slavery was ended. when we look at Lincoln we see an incredibly complicated figure who challenges our ideas of what is just and what is right from many different directions. it does depend somewhat on your definition of tyranny though. Lincoln never declared himself emperor or king or president-for-life, which is usually what people think of when they think of tyrants. this is why even though Lincoln violated the constitution and trampled on rights throughout the course of the civil war, it is difficult to put him in the same class as Napoleon or Mao.

I agree with most of what you had to say, but I believe that the original Constitutional Republic built by our founding fathers ceased to be after the end of the War Between the States.

See www.flickr.com/photos/library_of_congress/2535981129/ where Harry Angstrom indicates that Crain is a Baltimore democrat. January 10, 1912, NYT, query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=9C04E0D8163CE633A... gives him a role in getting Baltimore as the location for the 1912 Democratic convention. He headed the "Baltimore boom" -- any ideas what "boom" means in this context? According to Wikipedia, "Robert Crain Highway is the designation given to the former alignment of U.S. Route 301 from Bowie, Maryland, USA, to Baltimore."

@ swang – Baltimore as well as Charles County, Maryland, experienced tremendous increases in population and commerce after the opening of the Southern Maryland Trunk Line in 1922 – later renamed the Robert Crain Highway after it's most ardent supporter. The changes in the economic development as a result of this highway, and other factors, have been called "transformational". Perhaps the use of the term in the article referred to the beginning of this boom. (?)

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henri_Poincar%c3%a9