Introduction: Honest Abe Among the RulersAt noon on March 4, 1861, the moral situation of Abraham Lincoln of Illinois was abruptly transformed. That morning, arising in the Willard Hotel at 14th Street and Pennsylvania Avenue in downtown Washington, he had been a private citizen, making choices of right and wrong, better and worse, good and evil, as human beings do, in his own right, for himself, by his own lights, as an individual moral agent. That afternoon, standing on the steps of the East Portico of the Capitol, before thirty thousand of his fellow citizens, he became an oath-bound head of state.Although he had, in the previous two years, rather rapidly ascended from provincial obscurity to a certain national notice, and although he had in the morning the pendulant importance of a president-elect, he was as yet, so far as the law was concerned, one citizen alongside other citizens. At noon on that day he was transformed by the constitutional alchemy into something else–the “executive” of the federal government of the United States, the position that the framers in Philadelphia seventy-four years before h ... read full excerpt from: President Lincoln ebook
