Abraham Lincoln

February 12, 1809 – April 15, 1865

16th President who preserved the Union and abolished slavery.

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Abraham Lincoln was born on February 12, 1809, in a one-room log cabin in Hardin County, Kentucky, to a poor, largely illiterate farming family. His mother, Nancy Hanks, died when he was nine. The family moved to Indiana and then to Illinois, and young Lincoln grew up doing hard frontier labor, reading by firelight whenever he could borrow a book. Almost entirely self-educated, he taught himself grammar, law, and the surveying and speaking skills that would carry him out of poverty. As a young man in New Salem and then Springfield, Illinois, Lincoln clerked in a store, served briefly in the Black Hawk War, and won election to the state legislature in 1834. He earned his law license in 1837 and built a successful practice riding the circuit between county courthouses. A devoted member of the Whig Party, he served a single term in the U.S. House of Representatives beginning in 1847, where he criticized the Mexican-American War and left office little known outside Illinois. The fight over slavery in the western territories pulled Lincoln back into politics. He opposed the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, which reopened the question of slavery's spread, and joined the new Republican Party in 1856. On June 16, 1858, accepting the Republican nomination for the U.S. Senate, he delivered his 'House Divided' speech, warning that the nation could not endure permanently half slave and half free. He lost that race to Stephen A. Douglas, but their seven Lincoln-Douglas debates made him a national figure. That reputation carried Lincoln to the presidency. In the four-way election of 1860 he won the White House without carrying a single Southern state. Before his inauguration, seven states seceded and formed the Confederacy; the firing on Fort Sumter in April 1861 began the Civil War. Lincoln framed the struggle first and foremost as a fight to preserve the Union, holding together a fractured coalition of Republicans, War Democrats, and border-state Unionists. Over four grinding years Lincoln grew into a formidable commander in chief, hiring and firing generals until he found Ulysses S. Grant. The Union victory at Antietam in September 1862 gave him the opening he wanted, and on January 1, 1863, his Emancipation Proclamation declared enslaved people in the rebelling states to be free, transforming the war into a struggle for freedom and inviting Black men to fight for the Union. In the aftermath of the Battle of Gettysburg, Lincoln traveled to Pennsylvania in November 1863 to dedicate a soldiers' cemetery. In about 272 words, the Gettysburg Address redefined the war around the promise of the Declaration of Independence and called for 'a new birth of freedom' and a government 'of the people, by the people, for the people.' His plainspoken eloquence made the short speech one of the most important in American history. Re-elected in 1864, Lincoln pressed Congress to pass the Thirteenth Amendment abolishing slavery and urged a generous peace, asking Americans to act 'with malice toward none, with charity for all.' Days after Lee's surrender at Appomattox, on April 14, 1865, he was shot by actor John Wilkes Booth at Ford's Theatre in Washington. He died the next morning, April 15, 1865, the first American president to be assassinated. Lincoln is remembered for preserving the Union, ending slavery, and defining democracy itself in a way that still shapes the nation.

Abraham Lincoln

Further reading