"Lincoln was visibly nervous.  He was wearing a new black suit and sporting a neatly clipped beard. . .
"Lincoln unrolled the manuscript of his inaugural address.  He put on his steel-rimmed spectacles and faced the sunlit crowd below.  Thousands of people jammed the broad square in front of the Capital, waiting to hear the new president speak.
"Four months had passed since Lincoln's election in November.  During that time, seven Southern states had left the Union, and four more were about to join them.  In February, Senator Jefferson Davis of Mississippi had been sworn in as president of the Confederate States of America.  Now, with the Union collapsing, the defiant South was preparing for war.
"Congressional leaders had tried to find a compromise plan that would hold the Union together.  But the Southerners would not budge from their demands."

~ excerpt from Chapter five, Lincoln, A Photobiography, by Russell Freedman.Clarion Books, 1987.

On Monday, January 21, 2013, The 44th President of the United States of America, Barack Obama, will place his hand on the Lincoln bible and be sworn in at his second inauguration.

For a complete list of U.S. presidents, including Name, Term, Vice-Pres., Party, Congress, House Majority & Senate Majority:
http://australianpolitics.com/united-states-of-america/president/list-of-presidents-of-the-united-states

One of Lincoln's critics, abolitionist writer and editor Frederick Douglass, had grown up a slave.  He had won his freedom by escaping to the North.  "Early in the war, impatient with Lincoln's cautious leadership, Douglass called him 'preeminently the white man's president, entirely devoted to the welfare of white men.'
"Later Douglass changed his mind and came to admire Lincoln.  Several years after the war, he said this about the sixteenth president:
'His greatest mission was to accomplish two things:  first, to save his country from dismemberment and ruin; and, second, to free his country from the great crime of slavery...taking him for all in all, measuring the tremendous magnitude of the work before him, considering the necessary means to ends, and surveying the end from the beginning, infinite wisdom has seldom sent any man into the world better fitted for his mission than Abraham Lincoln."

Note:  Some of our readers may find the following website of interest:  www.nationalmall.org