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It was an "ill-kept and dirty rickety concern," according to presidential secretary John G.Nicolay. "I wonder how much longer a great nation, as ours is, will compel its ruler to live in such a small and dilapidated old shanty, and in such a shabby-genteel style." A Nicolay associate in the President's office was less critical, describing the White House as "a very respectable building of brick and stone, painted white, built in the form of a parallelogram, two stories high fronting north; but, owing to the declivity, three stories fronting south toward the Potomac."

President Abraham Lincoln himself once called it "this damned house," and when he was besieged by office seekers and afflicted by bad news from the war front, the White House must have seemed truly damned. But, despite its drawbacks, the White House was a clear improvement on the family's previous living accommodations. Indeed, the President also declared it was "better than any house they have ever lived in." For the four years and one month of Mr. Lincoln's presidency from March 1861 to April 1865, it was home to the Lincoln family and the center of efforts to restore the Union and abolish slavery.

From the Founder of the Lincoln Institute

Lincoln at Peoria
The Turning Point
by Lewis E. Lehrman



Christopher Levenick - Writer for The Wall Street Journal


“Lincoln's return to politics, and the speeches it occasioned, is the subject of Lewis E. Lehrman's "Lincoln at Peoria." Intimately familiar with the primary sources and armed with a sweeping command of the historiography, Mr. Lehrman convincingly argues that Peoria marks the inflection-point in Lincoln's political development, when he discovered both the essence of the cause he embraced and the most persuasive way to convey it. At Peoria, Lincoln ceased to be an unremarkable Whig politician, concerned with the usual party platforms on internal improvements and protective tariffs. He gave evidence for the first time of his scrupulous study of the American founding. That fall day was, Mr. Lehrman suggests, the moment when Lincoln became Lincoln.”

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Mr. Lincoln and Robert A. Schenck

Mr. Lincoln and Robert A. Schenck

Political general from Ohio who was closer to Secretary of the Treasury Salmon P. Chase than to President Lincoln
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