Abraham
Lincoln
Abraham Lincoln, sixteenth President of the United
States, was born near Hodgenville, Kentucky on February
12, 1809. His family moved to Indiana when he was
seven and he grew up on the edge of the frontier.
He had little formal education, but was an incessant
reader when not working on his father's farm. In 1828,
at the age of nineteen, he accompanied a produce-laden
flatboat down the Mississippi River to New Orleans,
Louisiana--his first visit to a large city. Two years
later, the Lincoln family moved to Illinois. Lincoln
worked in a grocery store for several years with a
short hiatus in 1832 when he volunteered to fight
in the Black Hawk War. At the same time, he studied
law and campaigned for a seat on the Illinois State
Legislature. Although not elected in his first attempt,
Lincoln persevered and won the position in 1834, serving
as a Whig.
 Abraham
Lincoln met Mary Todd in Springfield, Illinois where
he was practicing as a lawyer. They were married in
1842 over her family's objections and had four sons,
though only one lived to adulthood. Lincoln focused
on his law practice in the early 1850s after one term
in Congress from 1847 to 1849. He joined the new Republican
party--and the ongoing argument over sectionalism--in
1856. A series of heated debates in 1858 with Stephen
A. Douglas, the sponsor of the 1854 Kansas-Nebraska
Act, over slavery and its place in the United States
forged Lincoln into a prominent figure in national
politics. Lincoln's anti-slavery platform made him
extremely unpopular with Southerners and his nomination
for President in 1860 dismayed them. When he won the
election on November 6, 1860, talk of secession, bandied
about since the 1820s, took on a serious new tone.
The Civil War was not caused by Lincoln's election,
but the election was one of the primary reasons the
war broke out the following year.
Lincoln's decision to fight rather than to let the
Southern states secede was not based on his feelings
towards slavery. Rather, he felt it was his sacred
duty as President of the United States to preserve
the Union at all costs. He did not issue his famous
Emancipation Proclamation until January 1, 1863 after
the Union victory at the Battle of Antietam. The Emancipation
Proclamation, which was based on the President's right
to seize the property of those in rebellion against
the State, only freed slaves in areas of the Confederacy
where Lincoln's forces had no control. Nevertheless,
it changed the tenor of the war, making it, from the
Northern point of view, a fight both to preserve the
Union and to end slavery.
In addition to its main focus on the Civil War,
the Lincoln administration also put into effect a
number of peaceful pieces of legislation that would
change the character of the nation after the war was
over. The Morrill Act of 1862 established the basis
of the state university system in this country, while
the Homestead Act, also 1862, encouraged settlement
of the West by offering 160 acres of free land to
settlers.
In 1864, Lincoln ran again for President although
it was within his power, because of the war, to suspend
the election, and despite the fact that he feared
he would not win. Nevertheless, he was re-elected,
and his inauguration speech, March 4, 1865, set the
tone he intended to take when the war finally ended.
His one goal, he said, was "lasting peace among ourselves."
He called for "malice towards none" and "charity for
all." The war all but ended only a month later.
On April 14, 1865, while attending a play at Ford's
Theatre in Washington, D.C., Abraham Lincoln was shot
by Confederate sympathizer, John Wilkes Booth. He
died the following day, and with him the hope of reconstructing
the nation without bitterness.
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