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Abraham Lincoln
Ended slavery in the south with the Emancipation Proclimation. Declared that the Civil War had a new objective, a birth of new freedom in the nation. -
Ulysses S. Grant
General during the Civil War. Won at the Battle of Appomattox. Suffered from scandals caused by corrupt appointees. -
James A. Garfield
attacked political corruption and won back for the Presidency. successfully led a brigade at Middle Creek, Kentucky, against Confederate troops. At 31, Garfield became a brigadier general, two years later a major general of volunteers. -
Chester A. Arthur
During his brief time as Vice President, Arthur stood firmly beside Conkling in his struggle against President Garfield. Arthur effectively marshalled the thousand Customs House employees under his supervision on behalf of Roscoe Conkling's Stalwart Republican machine. -
Benjamin Harrison
In the Presidential election, Harrison received 100,000 fewer popular votes than Cleveland, but carried the Electoral College 233 to 168. Harrison was proud of the vigorous foreign policy which he helped shape. The Democrats defeated him for Governor of Indiana in 1876 by unfairly stigmatizing him as "Kid Gloves" Harrison. -
Grover Cleveland
At 44, he emerged into a political prominence that carried him to the White House in three years. -
Theodore Roosevelt
Roosevelt held the ideal that the Government should be the great arbiter of the conflicting economic forces in the Nation, especially between capital and labor, guaranteeing justice to each and dispensing favors to none. He won the Nobel Peace Prize for mediating the Russo-Japanese War. -
William Howard Taft
President McKinley sent him to the Philippines in 1900 as chief civil administrator. President Roosevelt made him Secretary of War, and by 1907 had decided that Taft should be his successor. In 1912, when the Republicans renominated Taft, Roosevelt bolted the party to lead the Progressives, thus guaranteeing the election of Woodrow Wilson. -
Woodrow Wilson
Wilson advanced rapidly as a conservative young professor of political science and became president of Princeton in 1902. He was nominated for President at the 1912 Democratic Convention and campaigned on a program called the New Freedom. But after the election Wilson concluded that America could not remain neutral in the World War. On April 2,1917, he asked Congress for a declaration of war on Germany. -
Calvin Coolidge
As President, Coolidge demonstrated his determination to preserve the old moral and economic precepts amid the material prosperity which many Americans were enjoying. He rapidly became popular. In 1924, as the beneficiary of what was becoming known as "Coolidge prosperity," he polled more than 54 percent of the popular vote. Coolidge was both the most negative and remote of Presidents, and the most accessible.
