With Oscar attention paid to "Lincoln," people might wonder how much of a connection there is between the revered president and the state of Minnesota — aside from the valiant contributions of the 1st Minnesota Regiment at Gettysburg, of course.
Well ...
Lake Calhoun was named after John Calhoun, a segregationist vice president. He died years before Abraham Lincoln came to office, but one of the most popular pictures of Lincoln turns out to be his head on Calhoun's body, more than a century before Photoshop — a program used by many Minnesotans — was invented.
So there's that.
Looking for more, we turned to Michael Paulsen, a law professor at the University of St. Thomas. You know anything about this Lincoln fellow?
"I've taught a seminar on Lincoln and the Constitution since the mid-1990s," he says. "The really interesting constitutional issues weren't the late 20th century but the mid-19th — secession, slavery, power to control slavery, war powers — all of the really interesting stuff was aired and to some extent settled around the time of Lincoln."
Paulsen's working on a book on the subject. You might learn something:
"The Emancipation Proclamation was justified in his eyes as a war powers measure. He didn't have the authority to free slaves because he wanted to, but it was a convention of war that you could seize the resources of the enemy. So that which was regarded as property of the enemy forces was subject to capture and conversion to Union purposes. He seized upon that as the legal basis for emancipation."
