Did most former presidents keep their civilian homes before they moved to the White House, or did most sell them?

Most have kept them. Carter had his farm, Reagan had his ranch, Bush pere had Kennebunkport.

Clinton did not own a house when he was elected.

W kept his place in Texas, the Obamas a place in Chicago. Nixon sold his place in New York and bought a house in San Clemente. Ford kept a home in Michigan. The Kennedys had and have still the compound in Hyannis Port.

Eisenhower had his place in Independence MO, which he retired to.

Did Carter have a home off the peanut farm? he sold the peanut farm to prevent conflict of interest.

And some security on their private homes was required, right? I imagine for the ones living it still is.

@BellaB Carter kept his house in Plains, adjacent to his farm. His brother Billy lived nearby.

Good ole Billy Carter – the only presidential sibling to have his own brand of beer (which even he admitted was gawdawful).

Regular 24-hour security teams weren’t protecting the POTUS until Lincoln was elected in 1860. Pinkerton agency was contracted to get him from the Baltimore station to the White House safely upon his arrival by rail from Illinois due to threats upon his life. Up until then, local police security was provided if circumstances were deemed so extraordinary as to require it. The government, in Lincolns case, chose to keep the Pinkertons on because of continued threats.

The Secret Service didn’t begin protecting the president full time until a year after the McKinley assassination in 1901. From the time they were formed in 1865, up to the Mckinley assassnation, their mission was to identify and track down sources of counterfeit money and investigate other financial crimes affecting national security. In the second half of the 19th century, it has been estimated that up to one-third of US currency was counterfeit.

Lincoln had a large horse breeding farm in Kentucky through his wife’s family, the socially elite Todds of Kentucky. He personally owned a two story partial brick house in Springfield, Illinous proportionate to what a successful local lawyer and politician made at that time. But he never took vacations, partly because he was a workaholic and partly because Washington DC was surrounded by hostile troops and sabateurs for most of the War and the railroads leading out in all directions were unreliable and dangerous for the President of the Union to travel.

Mary Todd Lincoln managed to spend a fortune on dresses and decorative items for the White House a few times a year in the best stores during bi-annual, one month stays in NYC, mostly on the Federal dime. These trips required tight securityprovided by the Pinkerton Agency and large military excorts on her trains North out from Washington DC, paid for by the taxpayer. His successor through his assassination six days after the official end of the Civil War..

President Andrew Johnson, the fomer senator from Kentucky before becoming VP—and the only southern senator to stay in Washington during the war years—had a large and very famous horse breeding farm in Greenfield, Tennessee where he vacationed only once during his tumultuous presidency. LOL I believe he was afraid he would lose his job if he stayed away more than a night or two. His wife, however, hated Washington society because, as a southerner, both of them had been shunned throughout the War and afterwards. So she spent very little time in DC and required a seperate protective team with her in while she was on a kind of permanent vacation on the Tennesse property and with her family in Kentucky.

Grant had a house in rural New Jersey. He didn’t have a lot of money. He spent most of his vacations at the Federally owned Congress Hall in Cape May, NJ, which was supposed to be a quite a luxurious place at the time..

Hayes had his Speigel Grove Estate in Ohio.

Cleveland had a mansion in Washington DC and the famous Gray Gables Estate in Massachusettes.

Garfield had a mansion called Lawnfield in Mentor, Ohio.

Harrison made Congress Hall his summer White House, but also had a mansion in Indianapolis.

Chester Arthur had a mansion in NYC.

Taft had an Estate called Woodbury Point near Beverly, Mass that he used as a Summer White House.

McKinley prefered to stay at the Hotel Champlain in Plattsburg, NY when on vacation.
Teddy Roosevelt, of the Snug Harbor, Long Island Roosevelts, had a large family estate called Sagamore Hill in Cove Neck, LI and yet another one “Millionaires Row” along 5th Ave., NYC along with the Astors, Vanderbilts, the Hyde Park Roosevelts and the other NYC “400”. . The land holdings in NYC and Long Island had been in the family since NYC was called New Amsterdam, there were still a few Manhattan Indians living on the open land up near the market town of Haarlem and that branch of the family were farmers-turned-early-NYC-developers.

Wilson, a former Princeton professor, had a places in DC, Princeton and Virginia that he and his wife used as vacation venues.

Coolidge prefered his homestead in Vermont that had been in the family for generations..

Herbert Hoover,a successful engineer with mining interests in the US, Mexico and Australia had homes in all four places, but chose to vacation away from the White House at his small Rapidan Camp and cabin secluded in the nearby forests in Virginia.

Franklin Roosevelt, of the Hyde Park Roosevelts had his massive family Springwood estate up the Hudson about 100 miles north of NYC near Hyde Park. He also had Hudson Valley mansions and farms left to him by the Delano family through his mother. He personally had a vacation compound and large piece of land on Campobello Island, New Brunswick at which the family spent sumers. New Brunswick is technically in a foreign country.

Eleanor, his wife and fifth cousin from the Snug Harbor faction, brought her Long Island property and NYC commercial and private real estate into the marriage, including NYC business district buildings through her mother’s side of the family, the Livingstons.

Franklin and Eleanor each had high end apartment get-aways in the city. Eleanor also had the Val-Kill “cottage” about two miles from Springwood up the Hudson. This “cottage” had two large livingrooms, seven bedrooms, two diningrooms, a library, a den, five bathrooms, a dormitory for the servants, stables out back and sat on about twenty acres given to her by her husband in order that she could build a place of her own, part of the 800 acre Springwood estate—all of it rich farmland, prime real estate.

The Campobello property, the Val-Kill cottage, the Springwood mansion and the two favored apartments in the city all required secret service protection often simultaneously while the kids would be at one place and the parents at two others. Both factions of the family owned whole blocks of NYC.

Every president since Roosevelt has had the luxurious mountain top Camp David available to them for weekends and vacations where horseback riding through forests is the prefered recreation. It is surrounded by a military facility and all staff are either members of the US Navy or Marine corp.

The Trumans had a small piece of farmland in Misouri, but chose to vacation at the Naval base in Key West, Florida while he was president where he had more luxurious digs, communications, better security and could pursue his love for deep sea fishing on a captain’s launch and expert naval personnel at no cost to himself. The fact is, Truman was one of the least monied and propertied presidents the US has ever had, rivalling the Grants. Not even Bess brought much to the table through her family. And they took some heat for that in the Washington social circle.

The Eisenhowers had a large farm in nearby Gettysburg, PA, where the Secret Service added three guard posts.

The Kennedy’s had their compound on the Nantucket Sound in Hyannisport, Cape Cod and their Palm Beach, Florida estate in Florida. Jacqueline’s father, Jack Bouvier, was big in commercial real estate in downtown Philadelphia and she had access to Bouvier owned hotels and homes there. Her family also had a Virginia horse farm that Jackie could take the kids to.

LBJ had the famous LBJ ranch along the Padernales River in Texas. He spent over 500 days there during his presidency and it became known alternatively as either the Western White House, or the Texas White House.

George Bush, Jr., had his ranch in Texas and his family’s estate in Kennebunkport, Maine. Father and sons also met on Gasparilla Island off the west coast of Florida every autumn for a week or two for the annual Tarpon run, a special, large, inedible fighting fish unique to those warm Gulf waters, also known as the Silver King. The family was in the process of gathering there on Sept. 11th 2001. That’s why George was in Sarasota that day.

The point of this is that Donald Trump isn’t the first POTUS by far to cause challenging and expensive duty for the Secret Service, nor will he be the last. Many presidential spouses have chosen not to live in DC and take their kids elsewhere to family country estates and private schools in what they considered to be healthier environments for themselves and their children.

Personally, I think this uproar about the possibility that our First Lady will stay in New York permanently is unfair and even ridiculous when one considers the plethora of faults Trump has and the danger of having such a man as president. We have much bigger and much more important things to be worrying about. For example, this man is going to start fucking with the banking system next week by removing regulatory measures that were initially put into place during the Great Depression in order to preven anotherdebacle like it, then revoked in the 1990s by Republican senators, then put back into place by the Obama admin. after the 2008 financial bubble burst causing the failure of some of our nation’s oldest investment institutions and resultant massive bailouts. But guys like Trump made big money while the rest of us lost jobs, homes and healthcare—for bloody fucking years. You can still get an excellent, unbelievable deal on a relatively new four bedroom home in Southwest Florida at way under their local 2008 prices and at 1970’s prices for the Boston area and New York State.. But good luck on finding a decent job down there to pay for it. The place has been dead since 2008.

I, personally, am more worried about the value of the dollar abroad in the next year than I am about how Melania conducts her private life. And you all should be too. In my case, my private life may be affected by her husband’s wrecklessness, and god forbid, if the dollar spends any less than it does today, I might have to move back there and live with that nutcase bastard on every form of media known to man 24/7 like the rest of you poor sons of bitches. I got out for a reason, and I dn;t want to go back.

Hell, Melania may be the sanest, most well-adjusted adult in that whole family. If she wants to live in Trump Tower with her son on the floor below hers, fine. If I was married to that guy, I’d want to live elsewhere and raise my child away from him as well. And no bloody complaints form the population would keep me from doing that.

If you think about it, Trump was never home much for any great length of time before his presidency. Now, due to tradition, this family of three is being pressured to live together fulltime for at least the next four years. a prospect that they probably never counted on. Melania may be able to tolerate him a few hours a week, but full time under the eyes of the world press? Forget it. I don’t even think his groveling staff could tolerate that.
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LOL. That has to be the longest thing I’ve ever written on Fluther. Wow, what a rant. I apologise. But I’m not taking a word of it back. And I feel a little better now.

I read that since the Secret Service has to guard the children, one of the adult sons just did a trip abroad (Central or South America I believe it was) to promote the Trump brand. Cost to taxpayers: about 100 grand. I’ll try to find a link.

I also saw a meme on FB yesterday that said if Michelle Obama wanted to stay in Chicago to raise her kids, white people in America would never stand for that. That’s true. Now for Melania it’s ok.

@Espiritus_Corvus

Were those threats on Lincoln’s life from pro-slavery elements?

Billy Carter was great fun. He used to come to a belly flop contest in my hometown. I’m still not sure how he even heard about it in pre-internet days. It’s not like anyone in the US had ever heard of a small city in Eastern Ontario.

Trump’s personal penthouse
Mar-A-Lago
Seven Springs
The Kluge Estate
Beverly Hills abode

Trump owns all of those, and those are only the ones we know of. Will SS security be needed at ALL of them?

@Brian1946 Well, most of the threats were anonymous, so nobody really knows. But Lincoln and the Republicn Party made it very clear that their main platform was anti-slavery, so most historians believe that the threats came from pro-slavers.

There were a lot of personal fortunes at stake if the slave-based economy in the South were to be disrupted. The pro-slavery cause was a personal thing with many wealthy families, even though they themselves would agree that what was called the “Peculiar Institution” was immoral and un-Christian according to their own scripture.

This pitted wife against husband in many prominent Southern families. But even wealthy women were essentially voiceless in the South, even though wealth is power. They had no voting power, their only influence for change was that which they had upon their husbands and male family members. But since a man’s main duty was to provide for their families as best as possible, these complaints were ignored as women’s fancies.

While their husbands and older brothers were still alive, they had no direct control of family wealth and even when they became widowed, they were at the mercy of their husbands’ estate lawyers—by law and, most importantly, by tradition. In this respect, things weren’t much different in the North. Even so, many southern wives were involved in weekly abolitionist meetings disguised as quilting clubs, sewing bees, knitting circles, book clubs, etc., that were actually political action committees. It’s an interesting history. This comes under the subject of Women’s Studies in our higher institutions.

Some important southern historians like Shelby Foote have estimated that there were more abolitionists in the South than in the North. I personally think the wives’ main complaint—which was unspoken—was the fear that their husbands were climbing into the sack with their slaves, the evidence of which was the large mullato population in the South. But this was never mentioned in private, in polite company and in very few newspapers. When articles were written about this, it was usually by some outraged preacher and not without serious repercussions against him and the newspaper.

By the 1850s, slavery had become a real conundrum among the educated in the South, but there was no way either side was going to let any Yankee or Washington City politician tell them how to conduct their society, their businesses, or their private lives—and most Americans, in both the North and the South, had to agree that government had no business in any of these things.

But slavery as a done deal when Lincoln got assassinated.

^^ My post was written in the context of @Brian1946‘s question concerning the threats against Lincoln after his first presidential election in 1860. But pro-slavery sentiment didn’t end with the “Peace” of 1865. It took more than four generations before the South accepted the harsh terms of the North and there was violence concerning this, in the form of lynchings and stalwart state government disobedience right through the 1960s.

I cite when Alabama governor George Wallace refused to obey the decisions of the Supreme Court concerning desegregation laws. On June 11th, 1963, U.S. Attorney General Robert Kennedy had to personally go down there and supervise the enforcement. When the Alabama National Guard balked at this, the president and the Attorney General’s brother, JFK, signed an order to Federalize the Alabama State National Guard, but Wallace finally stood down and obeyed.

The harsh treatment under post-war martial law and ten years of Reconstruction policy—policies that had been discussed with Lincoln and which he is on record as being totally against—pretty caused Southern vehemence to last well over 100 years. Behind this anger was a desire to return to ante-bellum society, slavery of the blacks and the pre-war days in general when the Southern economy was good.

Slavery was continued—and I am not exagerating—in the form of grossly underpaid blacks in the South and the typical servant’s dependency on their white employers “charity” in the form of maids taking home left over food, second hand clothes and toys for their children, laborers being given broken tools to refurbish as their own—things that these servants couldn’t afford on their pay. And then there were the Jim Crow laws to keep these people silent and in line, and there masters protected.

Slavery was hardly a “done deal” in the South after the War and in many rural areas out of the light of the press, this type of life continues.

I understand, but I’ve often wondered what good it did to assassinate Lincoln. I mean, abolition was the law. Killing him wasn’t going to change that.

I dunno. How do you explain that kind of anger and fanatacism? For Wilkes I think it was a mix of clouded thinking due to alcoholism and revenge.

They’re delusional. They think everyone hated Lincoln, or JFK, the way they do and that they’ll be heroes if they assassinate them.