Lincoln Visits Cleveland

By Dale Thomas
The Cleveland Civil War Roundtable
Copyright © 2008, All Rights Reserved

Editor’s note: This article was originally published in The Charger in the spring of 2002.


On the way to Washington, three days after his 53rd birthday, President-elect Abraham Lincoln stopped overnight in Cleveland for his only visit to the city. (Three days later in Montgomery, Alabama, Jefferson Davis was inaugurated President of the Confederacy.) To feel the immediacy of the times, the story is best told directly from the pages of the Cleveland Plain Dealer, which was then an evening newspaper. These accounts are quoted over a two-day period beginning on Friday evening, February 15, 1861.

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James McPherson Speaks On Lincoln

By William F.B. Vodrey
The Cleveland Civil War Roundtable
Copyright © 2000, 2008, All Rights Reserved

Editor’s note: James M. McPherson, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Battle Cry of Freedom, amongst other Civil War books, spoke at The Western Reserve Historical Society in April 2000. This report on McPherson’s talk by then Roundtable President William Vodrey was originally published in The Charger in the fall of that same year.


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Mr. Lincoln at 200

By William F.B. Vodrey
The Cleveland Civil War Roundtable
Copyright © 2009, All Rights Reserved

Editor’s note: This is adapted from an article that originally appeared in the February 2009 issue of The Charger.


In February we honor all those who have served as President of the United States. By coincidence, the birthdays of two of the republic’s great early leaders, George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, both fall in February. Unfortunately, what were once distinct holidays are now one, the rather generic “Presidents’ Day.”

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Booth in the Confederate Secret Service

By John C. Fazio
The Cleveland Civil War Roundtable
Copyright © 2012, All Rights Reserved

John Wilkes Booth was an agent of the Confederate Secret Service. It is not known, and may never be known, when or exactly under what circumstances he was recruited and accepted his role as such, but that he was an agent and was in regular contact with other agents, who had ties to the Confederate leadership, or who had ties to other agents who had such ties, has been firmly established. Asia Booth described her brother as “a spy, a blockade-runner, a rebel!”1

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Lincoln and History

By John C. Fazio
The Cleveland Civil War Roundtable
Copyright © 2007, All Rights Reserved

I am of the opinion that major historical events, and some minor ones too, occur only in the fullness of time, which is to say that they occur only when conditions are ripe for their happening. Attempts to accomplish them in non-conducive circumstances, or at inappropriate times, will fail. Examples are endless and superfluous, but I shall give one because it is especially relevant to our area of interest.

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On Inconvenient Truth and Convenient Fiction

By John C. Fazio
The Cleveland Civil War Roundtable
Copyright © 2016, All Rights Reserved

Editor’s note: John C. Fazio is a past president of the Cleveland Civil War Roundtable and the author of numerous articles on the Lincoln assassination as well as the book, Decapitating the Union: Jefferson Davis, Judah Benjamin and the Plot to Assassinate Lincoln, published in 2015 by McFarland.


Truth, like a bastard, comes into the world, never without ill-fame to him who gives her birth. – Thomas Hardy

All great truths begin as blasphemies. – George Bernard Shaw

Shall truth be first or second with us? “Us” is we historians, real or fancied, amateur or professional. Lincoln said that history isn’t history unless it is the truth. I agree with that, to which I would add only “or some reasonable facsimile thereof arrived at conscientiously and with due diligence.” Therefore, if truth is to be second with us, second, that is, to convenience, aka political correctness or some other approximation of comfort, then I suggest that we are in the wrong business and that we should find some other vocation or avocation, one that doesn’t tax our character so meanly.

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The Fox and the Hedgehog: The Hampton Roads Conference

By Mel Maurer
The Cleveland Civil War Roundtable
Copyright © 2008, All Rights Reserved

Just east of Petersburg, Virginia – near the rim of “The Crater” on Sunday, January 29, 1865 – a white flag appeared on the Confederate side of the lines. A delegation of commissioners from Jefferson Davis (Alexander Stephens, vice president of the Confederacy, John A. Campbell, a former U. S. Supreme Court Justice – now assistant secretary of war, and Robert Hunter, president pro tem of the Senate) had arrived to be taken to a meeting with Union representatives to discuss “issues and options for peace.” Hopeful rumors the war was ending soon circulated on both sides of the lines. The ensuing meeting on February 3rd aboard the steamer River Queen became known as the Hampton Roads Conference.

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Abraham Lincoln and the Case of the Altered Almanac

By Mel Maurer
The Cleveland Civil War Roundtable
Copyright © 2006, All Rights Reserved

Abraham Lincoln an unscrupulous lawyer? That was one of the charges made against him in his senatorial race against Steven Douglas and later again in his run for the presidency. Lincoln, so it was claimed, had altered the almanac used so successfully in his most famous trial – a murder trial in 1858. It was a serious charge against anyone but especially against a man well-known for his integrity.

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“The Prince of Rails”: Robert Todd Lincoln

By Mel Maurer
The Cleveland Civil War Roundtable
Copyright © 2004, All Rights Reserved

Robert Todd Lincoln – “Bob” to his family and friends – was dubbed the “Prince of Rails” during his “Railsplitter” father’s 1860 campaign for president, after a visit to this country by England’s Prince of Wales. Robert was a prince who would never ascend to the throne.

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