Abraham Lincoln

About this figure

Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865) was born in a log cabin in Hardin County, Kentucky, to a farming family that moved first to Indiana and then to Illinois while he was growing up. He had almost no formal schooling, later describing his education as "defective," and taught himself largely through borrowed books. As a young man he worked as a farmhand, split rails, clerked in a store, ran a failed general store of his own, served as postmaster of New Salem, Illinois, and worked as a deputy surveyor, all while turning himself into a lawyer by reading law on his own. He briefly served in the Illinois militia during the Black Hawk War of 1832, seeing no combat, and was elected captain by the men under him, an honor he said pleased him more than any later in life.

Admitted to the bar in 1836, he settled in Springfield and built a substantial law practice, riding the circuit courts of central Illinois for years. He served four terms in the Illinois state legislature as a Whig starting in 1834, and won a single term in the U.S. House of Representatives (1847-1849), where he opposed the Mexican-American War as unjustly provoked. He married Mary Todd in 1842; of their four sons, only Robert survived to adulthood. After leaving Congress he returned to law, but the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, which opened the possibility of slavery spreading into new territories, drew him back into politics as an increasingly forceful opponent of slavery's expansion. He helped build the new Republican Party in Illinois and in 1858 challenged the incumbent Stephen Douglas for the U.S. Senate, opening the campaign with the "House Divided" speech, warning that the nation could not remain permanently half slave and half free. The seven Lincoln-Douglas debates that followed drew national attention to his arguments even though the legislature returned Douglas to the Senate.

An 1860 address at New York's Cooper Institute helped establish Lincoln as a serious national figure, and later that year the Republican convention nominated him for president; he won the general election in November 1860 against a divided opposition. Several Southern states seceded before his inauguration in March 1861, and the Civil War began in April with the Confederate attack on Fort Sumter. As president, Lincoln directed the Union war effort through a long succession of difficult campaigns and changes of command, issued a preliminary Emancipation Proclamation in September 1862, and made it final on January 1, 1863, declaring enslaved people in Confederate-held territory free and reframing the war's purpose around ending slavery. He delivered the Gettysburg Address on November 19, 1863, a brief dedication of a Union cemetery that became one of the most quoted speeches in American history, and won reelection in 1864. His second inaugural address, in March 1865, closed with a call for reconciliation "with malice toward none, with charity for all."

Confederate forces under Robert E. Lee surrendered at Appomattox on April 9, 1865. Five days later, on the evening of April 14, Lincoln was shot by John Wilkes Booth while watching a play at Ford's Theatre in Washington, and he died early the next morning, the first American president to be assassinated.

Written by Epoch Voices. Not the figure’s own words.