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Edwin M. Stanton

To stave off despair, the President relied on a sense of humor that was rich, self-deprecating—and surprisingly bawdy

A great “intensity of thought,” Abraham Lincoln once counseled his friend Joshua Speed, “will some times wear the sweetest idea thread-bare and turn it to the bitterness of death.” No aspect of Lincoln’s character has become more tangibly real in the literature than his melanch

Was it, as Navy Secretary Welles believed, “a conspiracy to overthrow the government”?

Suspected but not convicted, this General went to prison

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