DC has seen many famous people..............Walt Whitman, from New York, and an novelist and poet, served as a civil war nurse, here in DC in what is now the Nat. Portrait gallery.............was the patent office and is the 3rd built Fed. building in Dc.....................

Reared in a poor family on the western frontier, Lincoln was a self-educated lawyer in Illinois, a Whig Party leader, state legislator during the 1830s. Lincoln was elected to Congress in 1846, where he promoted rapid modernization of the economy through banks, tariffs, and railroads. He had originally agreed not to run for a second term and his opposition to the Mexican–American War was unpopular among the voters. He returned to Springfield and concentrated on his successful law practice throughout central Illinois. He returned to politics in 1854, and was a leader in building up the new Republican Party, which had a statewide majority. After a series of highly publicized debates in 1858, during which Lincoln spoke out against the expansion of slavery, he lost the U.S. Senate race to his archrival, Democrat Stephen A. Douglas.

In 1860 Lincoln secured the Republican Party presidential nomination as a moderate from a swing state. With very little support in the slave states, Lincoln swept the North and was elected president in 1860. His election prompted seven southern slave states to form the Confederacy before he took the office. No compromise or reconciliation was found regarding slavery and secession.