Notes recounting doctor's bid to save dying Lincoln found after 150 years

World Jun. 11, 2012 - 07:35AM JST ( 10 )

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nandakandamandaJun. 11, 2012 - 11:55AM JST

Well that's all fine and dandy, and an interesting read, but having made the effort to read the whole article I am still wondering about the important bit. What did he do to save the President?

Surely not just have him carried over the road and placed diagonally on a short bed? :sigh:
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LizzJun. 11, 2012 - 12:17PM JST

Leale tried to dislodge what he thought was the bullet; but of course Lincoln's head wound was fatal in and of itself; even modern medicine probably couldn't have saved him.
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vinnyfavJun. 11, 2012 - 02:54PM JST

Comparing a marriage to the union and the civil war politics is a logically unsound at best, and a hyperbole at worst. Of course, I personally disagree with any war and death, but that doesn't make such sentimental statements any more true. Whether or not the Union should have been preserved is up to debate, but using violence in marriage as a reason why not would fall under fallacy.
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smithinjapanJun. 11, 2012 - 03:08PM JST

Interesting read, and good that they found the documents, but not really all that relevant to anything save the people of the Project itself.
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FadamorJun. 12, 2012 - 12:15AM JST

They're constantly finding little "gems" of history in those archives. This account provides just a little more detail to Lincoln's final hours of life. While most people will not care (and some will take the occasion to criticize the President for actually trying to keep the Union together), historians in general and Presidential historians in particular will find this account very relevant to their work.
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ChubakaJun. 12, 2012 - 03:57AM JST

Most Americans and historians consider Abraham Lincoln to be our greatest President, not to mention the most-written about political figure in the annals of American history. That alone makes this latest archival find to be of interest to both Lincoln scholars and the average American reader. The era in which Lincoln served was the most important in US history, and to have allowed a weak sister Confederacy run by incompetents like Jefferson Davis to continue in existence would have been far more draining to the nation in the long term. Politicians in South Carolina and elsewhere forced the issues after several decades of attempted appeasement. Wealthy Southern landowners addicted to a cruel economic policy carried on the backs of African-American slaves fully supported these belligerents, eventually using disadvantaged whites to carry out their dictums. To slam Lincoln and the Union over the causes of the Civil War shows just how uninformed you are...
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sfjp330Jun. 12, 2012 - 04:57AM JST

Lincoln was a lifelong segregationist and opponent of black social equality and a white supremacist with a low opinion of black intellectual abilities. Lincoln seems to have gone to his grave without imagining any amendments to the Constitution beyond the abolition of slavery. The Fourteenth Amendment eradicated Black Laws by preventing the restriction of black migration by individual states. However, Lincoln apparently did not envision a constitutional amendment like the Fourteenth that would create national citizenship. If Lincoln had lived, the slavery would have been abolished in every state, but the states would have retained their discretion to deny citizenship to blacks. Lincoln was willing to let the states deny the suffrage to black citizens; at most, he would suggest that black citizens be subject to literacy tests and property qualifications.Lincoln drew a sharp distinction between abstract natural rights and practical civil rights that were possessed by all human beings. However, Lincoln believe that civil rights should be limited to whites only. Lincoln, like most of his white contemporaries at that time, believed that blacks were inferior to whites. Lincoln wanted a white-only American republic.