CANDLELIT CHRONICLES: HISTORIC HAUNTS

December 26, 2012

DAY 37 - DECEMBER 26 PROMPT: "What is the worst event in history to ever have taken place, in your opinion? Could something like this possibly happen again?





I realize that many people will go for the tragedy In terms of quantity dead and injured: the World Trade Center, the Holocaust, genocide in Rwanda and Bosnia.





I’m choosing the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln, April 14 1865. Maybe this is not the worst in the perspective of many: but in my perspective, this is the President who eradicated slavery (if only we could set him against human trafficking) and who worked himself to the bone to hold together a nation of disparate ideals and idoscyncracies awand greeds. Lincoln was a man of farsight and of great insight, probably the single President with the highest moral integrity and strength of character. I can’t think of another President who could compare. Oh, and add to that: Lincoln was a devoted father and husband, never unfaithful; and of how many Presidents in the 20th century could we say that?





Additionally, the “success” of the assassination of Abraham Lincoln created in U.S. political culture the notion that Presidents could be efficiently removed, not by the political and legal process of impeachment, but by death: murder. So followed the assassinations of Presidents Garfield and McKinley, then in 1963, JFK. Other Presidents have suffered  from assassination attempts, even been injured: Teddy Roosevelt, Ronald Reagan. Failed attempts include:


•          Andrew Jackson


•           Abraham Lincoln


•          Theodore Roosevelt


•          Herbert Hoover


•           Franklin D. Roosevelt


•          Harry S. Truman


•          John F. Kennedy


•           Richard Nixon


•          Gerald Ford


•          Jimmy Carter


•          Ronald Reagan


•          George H. W. Bush


•           Bill Clinton


•          George W. Bush


•          Barack Obama


•          Some of these Presidents were the target of multiple attempts.


And 2 Presidential deaths have been rumoured to be the result of assassination: Zachary Taylor and Warren G. Harding (in both cases, some historians have suspected actual poisoning).


Looked at from the perspective of the closing of 2012, Presidential assassination seems to be pretty popular among dissidents (no, I do not mean ONLY “foreign terrorists,” but American-born as well). And it all started with Lincoln’s era. Sad.