LINCOLN BICENTENARY YESTERDAY

Yesterday I missed posting about the bicentenary of the birth of Abraham Lincoln, 16th President of the USA. 

I am certainly not a Lincoln scholar just a fan, fanatic Mrs Crime Scraps would say having been taken round Lincoln related sites in Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Kentucky and Indiana. 

Thanks to The Rap Sheet for directing me to Janet Rudolph's blog Mystery Fanfare where she posts here about Abraham Lincoln the Mystery Writer and his story "A Remarkable Case of Arrest for Murder" published in the Quincy Whig on 15 April 1846. 

Apparently President Barack Obama's favourite book about Lincoln, the only other President from Illinois, is Doris Kearns Goodwin's  Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln. It is to be discussed tonight on BBC Newsnight hopefully by a panel of people who can distinguish Abraham Lincoln from Benjamin Lincoln, and William Jefferson Clinton from George Clinton.

The Lincoln cabinet was not always regarded with awe, as this quotation from a contemporary source states:

"I never since I was born imagined that such a lot of poltroons and apes could be gathered together from the four corners of the globe as Old Abe had succeeded in bringing together in his Cabinet". 

[David Donald:Inside Lincoln's Cabinet]

There is another crime fiction link because the left hand figure in the photograph with President Lincoln is Allan Pinkerton. 

Pinkerton as well as founding the famous  detective agency, which later employed Dashiell Hammett,  wrote a series of detective stories which he claimed were based on his own exploits and those of his operatives.

"In giving freedom to the slave we assure freedom to the free-honorable alike in what we give and what we preserve. We shall nobly save or meanly lose the last best hope of earth." 

Abraham Lincoln, message to Congress, December 1, 1862