Abraham Lincoln was the sixteenth President of the United States. Tall, thin, and awkward, Lincoln was nevertheless strong and agile, and he excelled as a wrestler and as an ax-man. His gruff face was homely and gaunt, with sunken cheeks, big ears, and a mole on the left side of his chin. His hair was thick, black, and untamed. His dress was casual, and he usually wore a black stovepipe hat, which he used as a briefcase to carry around important letters and legal documents. With a bold sense of humor that delighted in the tasteless and obscene, Lincoln had a reputation as a gifted joke and story teller. Though it was the custom to drink heavily during this period of time, especially on the frontier where he was raised, Lincoln practiced temperance. He did not belong to a church and remained for the most part skeptical of organized religion, but he did use the Bible as a guide for his decisions, a copy of which he kept on his desk as President. Abraham Lincoln was extremely superstitious: once, upon gazing in a mirror and seeing two images of himself, he interpreted it as a sign that he would be elected to two terms as President, but that he would not live to see the end of his second term. Though a brilliant orator and word smith, he made it a point to address the public relatively infrequently during his years in office for fear of accidentally saying something he would later regret. Abraham Lincoln had an introspective nature that was prone to periods of profound self loathing and fits of depression, during which time his behavior would border on antisocial. Politically, Lincoln was not an abolitionist, but an anti-expansionist. Though he later came to see slavery as immoral, his objections to it were largely due to the damage the issue had wrought on the Union. His Emancipation Proclamation freed only the slaves in the Confederate states, which were not under his jurisdiction at the time of its issuance.
Abraham Lincoln was born on February 12, 1809 on a typical frontier farm near Hodgenville, Kentucky. He was the second child of three born to Nancy and Thomas Lincoln. Abraham had an older sister and a younger brother who died in infancy. Thomas Lincoln was a frontier farmer of modest means who supplemented his income by doing carpentry work. In 1817 the family moved to a farm near Gentryville in Spencer County, Indiana, Nancy Lincoln died soon after the move. In 1819 Thomas Lincoln married Sarah Bush Johnston, who brought to the Lincoln family her three children by a previous marriage. Abraham attended formal schools sporadically. He was intellectually curious and spent a good deal of his time reading the family Bible and other books which he had borrowed from friends and neighbors. As a teenager, Abraham worked as a grocery clerk, ferry boat rower, and farm hand. When he was nineteen, he took a job as a flatboat deckhand on a trip down the Mississippi River to New Orleans. Upon Abraham's return from New Orleans in 1830, his family moved to Decatur, Illinois. Abraham only lived with his family in their new home a few months before striking out on his own. He settled in New Salem, Illinois where he found work as a mill-hand. When the Black Hawk War broke out in 1832, Abraham joined the local militia and was commissioned with the rank of captain. His company did not see any action and returned to New Salem after a couple of months. Abraham Lincoln ran for a seat in the state legislature as a Whig late in 1832, but was defeated. With a friend, Lincoln secured the credit to purchase a general store in town. When the store failed a year later, Lincoln was left with the sole responsibility of paying off the debt, a task that would take him seventeen years to complete. In the wake of his business failure, Lincoln took a job in the local post office and supplemented his income by working as a surveyor.
In 1834 Abraham Lincoln won a seat on the state legislature as a Whig. He borrowed books from his new friends in government and began to study law. Abraham Lincoln passed the Illinois bar in 1836; that same year he was re-elected to the Illinois state legislature.
While the state legislature was in recess in 1837, Lincoln moved to Springfield, Illinois to practice law. He was re-elected to the state legislature in 1838 and again in 1840. During these years he served as floor leader for the Whig Party.
On November 4, 1842 Abraham Lincoln married Mary Todd. They had four sons. Robert, the oldest and only one to live beyond the age of twenty-one, served as Secretary of War under Presidents Garfield and Arthur and as minister to Great Britain under President Benjamin Harrison.
Abraham Lincoln won a seat in the United States House of Representatives in 1846. In the House, Lincoln became a harsh critic of "Mr. Polk's war" with Mexico. When President Polk asked Congress for a declaration of war that would cite Mexico as the aggressor, Senator Lincoln demanded that the President provide proof of an unprovoked Mexican attack by showing Congress the exact spot where American blood had been shed. Lincoln's passionate arguments against the war became known as the "Spot Resolutions." While in the House, Lincoln also fought against the extension of slavery into the western territories. In campaigning for his seat in the House, Lincoln had promised that he would only serve one term. He kept his promise and returned to Springfield to practice law after his term had run out.
Lincoln again ran for the Senate in 1854, but backed out when he realized that his candidacy was splitting the anti-slavery vote.
In 1856 Abraham Lincoln joined the newly-formed Republican Party. He campaigned for John C. Fremont, who lost the election to Democrat James Buchanan.
Abraham Lincoln came to national prominence during his bid for the Senate as a Republican in 1858. Lincoln's opponent, Stephen A. Douglas, had been the leader of the Democratic Party before that party's split over the ratification of Kansas' constitution the previous year. Lincoln challenged Douglas to a series of seven debates on the issue of slavery. Though Lincoln ultimately lost the election, he held his own against Douglas and impressed many people with his ideas. The debates had been well attended and well publicized, and Lincoln became a contender for the Republican nomination to the Presidency in the coming election. Lincoln embarked on an equally well attended and well publicized, two-year speaking tour of the United States. He finished his tour in Chicago, at the Republican National Convention, where he beat out William Seward for the nomination for President.
The election of 1860 was split four ways. The split in the Democratic party counted for two candidates, Stephen A. Douglas for the northern Democrats and Vice President John C. Breckenridge for the southern Democrats. The remnants of the Whig party who did not become Republicans joined together with the American, or "Know Nothing" Party, to form the Constitutional Union Party, and nominated John Bell for their candidate. Abraham Lincoln was the Republican candidate. Lincoln won the election with barely forty percent of the popular vote. His election triggered the secession of South Carolina. Soon after, six other states seceded from the Union and joined South Carolina in forming a provisional government, the Confederate States of America, with Jefferson Davis as its president.
See Andrew Johnson: Andrew Johnson served as Lincoln's Vice President, and, upon Lincoln's assassination, took his seat as the country's 17th President.
In his inaugural address Lincoln declared that he had no intention of interfering with slavery where it already existed. He went on to say that he to and seek a peaceful solution to the crisis, but would fight if necessary to defend the Union.
On April 12, 1861 rebel forces attacked the federal troops occupying Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor, South Carolina. President Lincoln called out the United States Militia to squash the rebellion. Four more states seceded in protest of the President's using force against the rebel states. The Civil War was underway.
For three months after the attack on Fort Sumter, President Lincoln refused to call Congress to session. During that time he doubled the size of the Union forces, set up a blockade of southern trade, suspended the writ of habeus corpus, and spent federal funds, all without the approval of Congress. Congress finally met on July 4, 1861 and ratified most of President Lincoln's steps towards war.
President Lincoln's strategy in the war was to advance Union troops on all fronts simultaneously. He also had his generals focus primarily on destroying the rebel forces rather than taking territory. The Union forces were largely successful in the West under General Ulysses S. Grant, but lost in the East to the Confederate troops under General Robert E. Lee.
President Lincoln wrote the Emancipation Proclamation to free slaves in the rebelling states. So that the document would have some kind of credibility, he waited until after a major Union victory to issue it. The Union victory at the Battle of Antietam in September of 1862 provided the credibility that Lincoln sought. The Emancipation Proclamation was issued on January 1, 1863.
The Battle of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania in July of 1863, was a turning point of the war in the Union's favor. The Confederacy was now on the defensive. The victory, however, had come at a great cost to both sides. President Lincoln's now famous Gettysburg Address was delivered on November 19, 1863 during the dedication ceremony of the Gettysburg Field war cemetery. Early in 1864, President Lincoln commissioned General Ulysses S. Grant with the command of the whole of the Union Army.
President Lincoln secured the nomination of the Republican party with little effort in 1864; his re-election, however, was by no means an easy one. Lincoln ran against the Democrat candidate, George B. McClellan, a former general of the Union forces whom Lincoln had replaced in 1862 for being too cautious. The recent battles in Virginia had proved extremely costly for the Union, it appeared that the tide of the war was turning in favor of the Confederacy, and Lincoln's popularity was turning with it. But in September of 1864, when Union General William T. Sherman took the city of Atlanta, Georgia, and General Grant took Petersburg, Virginia, President Lincoln regained the support of the people and won the election of 1864 by a landslide.
In his second inaugural address on March 4, 1865, President Lincoln promised not to punish the Confederate States, but to negotiate a peace that would be beneficial to both sides. He promised to pursue a swift and lenient course in the reconstruction effort of the Southern states.
Union forces continued to hammer Lee's forces back through Georgia. On April 9, 1865 General Lee surrendered to General Grant at Appomattox Court House in Virginia, ending the Civil War.
Aside from the Union victory in the Civil War, President Lincoln's years in office produced the first issuance of paper money by the federal government. The first federal income tax was implemented in 1861 to help pay for the war effort. The first transcontinental telegraph was sent in 1861. The Homestead Act 1862 was an attempt to settle the West by issuing free land grants. The Land Grant Act of 1862 encouraged the establishment of universities with a gift of free land. And in 1863, free mail service was enjoyed for the first time, but only in major cities.
On April 14, 1865 President Lincoln was at the Ford's Theater in Washington D.C., watching a production of "Our American Cousin," when he was shot in the back of the head by John Wilkes Booth, an actor and southern loyalist. President Lincoln was carried to a house across the street from the theater, where he was treated by a doctor. President Abraham Lincoln died on the morning of April 15, 1865.
