Abraham Lincoln

Lincoln was born on February 12, 1809, in a one-room log cabin with a dirt floor in Hardin County, Kentucky. His father, Thomas, a farmer and carpenter, could barely sign his name; when Abe was seven the family moved to the Indiana frontier. His mother, Nancy Hanks, died when he was nine, and his stepmother, Sarah Bush Johnston, encouraged the boy’s hunger for books, which he read by firelight between farm chores. At nineteen he built a flatboat and floated farm produce down the Mississippi to New Orleans — then dutifully, if resentfully, handed his earnings to his father.

In 1831 Lincoln struck out on his own in New Salem, Illinois. Six feet four inches tall, he clerked in a store, wrestled the town bully, split rails, and charmed neighbors with his jokes. In the Black Hawk War his fellow volunteers elected him captain — an honor he said he valued more than his later nomination for president — though he never saw combat. He lost his first race for the legislature, served as village postmaster for $55 a year, taught himself law, and won a seat in 1834 by shaking hands, telling stories, and visiting nearly every family in the county. He served four terms as a Whig and was licensed as a lawyer in 1837. That year he was one of only six legislators out of eighty-three to oppose a resolution condemning abolitionists.

Elected to Congress in 1846, Lincoln challenged President James Polk’s claim that Mexico had started the war on American soil — a bold attack on a popular president. He then built one of the more successful law practices in Illinois, representing clients from farmers to railroads. The Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 pulled him back into politics, and in 1856 he joined the new Republican Party. Challenging Senator Stephen Douglas in 1858, he opened with the “House Divided” speech: “A house divided against itself cannot stand.” In seven debates followed by the whole country, he called slavery a moral wrong that must not spread; the legislature re-elected Douglas, but Lincoln emerged as a Republican leader.

His election in 1860 led seven Southern states to secede; after Confederate guns took Fort Sumter in April 1861 he called for 75,000 volunteers, and four more states left. Lincoln eventually raised an army and navy of nearly three million men, and he used presidential power as no one before him: he blockaded Southern ports, spent money without congressional approval, and suspended habeas corpus in several areas. Days after the Union victory at Antietam, he announced the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation; on January 1, 1863, it declared enslaved people in the rebelling states free and opened the army and navy to Black men — nearly 200,000 served. His Gettysburg Address that November and his Second Inaugural, pledging “malice towards none,” became two of the greatest speeches in American history.

After years of searching for a winning general, he gave Ulysses S. Grant overall command in 1864. He refused to postpone that year’s election, even expecting to lose; Sherman’s capture of Atlanta helped him win decisively. He then pushed the Thirteenth Amendment through a reluctant House, which passed it 119–56 in January 1865.

Lincoln believed slavery was morally wrong and contrary to the Declaration of Independence’s promise that all men are created equal. Before the war he held that the Constitution did not allow interference with slavery where it already existed, but that it must not be allowed to spread. He saw the Union as permanent, and he justified emergency measures by asking whether it made sense “to lose the nation and yet preserve the Constitution.” His views on race changed. In 1858 he opposed voting rights and full equality for Black Americans while insisting that they were entitled to the Declaration’s natural rights; on April 11, 1865, he publicly endorsed voting rights for Black men.

Critics then and since have attacked Lincoln’s wartime use of power: he made war before Congress met, ordered the arrest and military detention of suspected traitors, and placed areas under martial law where no fighting justified it. The Emancipation Proclamation itself freed no one in the loyal border states or in areas already under Union control. Earlier, in the 1840 campaign, he had attacked a Democratic candidate for once voting to let free Black men vote — an appeal to the racism of Illinois voters. In the spring of 1863, with the war going badly, he was deeply unpopular in the North.

On April 14, 1865, five days after Lee’s surrender, Lincoln was shot in the back of the head at Ford’s Theatre during a comedy, Our American Cousin. The assassin, the actor and Confederate sympathizer John Wilkes Booth, had resolved to kill him after hearing him endorse Black suffrage three days earlier. Lincoln died the next morning. His funeral train carried his body 1,700 miles to Springfield, Illinois, through fourteen cities; a young Theodore Roosevelt watched the procession from a window of his family’s Manhattan home. Almost at once Lincoln was remembered as “Father Abraham” and the Great Emancipator. Historians rank him first among presidents for preserving the Union, vindicating democracy, and ending slavery.