Unlike its Mercury division, Ford Motor Company's Lincoln brand was originally a separate company, founded in 1917 by Henry Martyn Leland, the founder of Cadillac. The life of Henry Leland is a tragic tales of broken promises and dashed hopes, the story a great man brought down by the pettiness and venality of a new era that no longer had any place for great men.
At the dawn of the 20th century, Henry Martyn Leland was already 56 years old, well into an exceptionally vigorous middle age. A farmer's son from Vermont, Leland became an apprentice machinist the summer before the Civil War. At the age of 21, he cast his first vote for Abraham Lincoln in the 1864 presidential election, and he remained an admirer of Lincoln's for the rest of his life.
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