Abraham Lincoln

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Abraham Lincoln, 1863. (credit: Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.)

(born Feb. 12, 1809, near Hodgenville, Ky., U.S.died April 15, 1865, Washington, D.C.) 16th president of the U.S. (186165). Born in a Kentucky log cabin, he moved to Indiana in 1816 and to Illinois in 1830. After working as a storekeeper, a rail-splitter, a postmaster, and a surveyor, he enlisted as a volunteer in the Black Hawk War (1832) and was elected captain of his company. He taught himself law and in 1836 passed the bar examination. In 1837 he moved his practice from New Salem to Springfield, Ill. He became a successful circuit-riding lawyer, noted for his shrewdness, common sense, and honesty (earning the nickname Honest Abe). From 1834 to 1840 he served in the Illinois state legislature, and in 1847 he was elected as a Whig to the U.S. House of Representatives. In 1856 he joined the Republican Party, which nominated him as its candidate in the 1858 Senate election. In a series of seven debates with Stephen A. Douglas (the Lincoln-Douglas Debates), he argued against the extension of slavery into the territories. Though morally opposed to slavery, he was not an abolitionist; indeed, he attempted to rebut Douglas's charge that he was a dangerous radical, by reassuring audiences that he did not favour political equality for blacks. Despite his loss in the election, the debates brought him national attention. In the 1860 presidential election, he ran against Douglas again and won by a large margin in the electoral college, though he received only two-fifths of the popular vote. The South opposed his position on slavery in the territories, and before his inauguration seven Southern states had seceeded from the Union. The ensuing American Civil War completely consumed Lincoln's administration. He excelled as a wartime leader, creating a high command for directing all the country's energies and resources toward the war effort and combining statecraft and overall command of the armies with what some have called military genius. However, his abrogation of some civil liberties, especially the writ of habeas corpus, and the closing of several newspapers by his generals disturbed both Democrats and Republicans, including some members of his own cabinet. To unite the North and influence foreign opinion, he issued the Emancipation Proclamation (1863); his Gettysburg Address (1863) further ennobled the war's purpose. The continuing war affected some Northerners' resolve and his reelection was not assured, but strategic battle victories turned the tide, and he easily defeated George B. McClellan in 1864. His platform included passage of the 13th Amendment outlawing slavery (ratified 1865). At his second inaugural, with victory in sight, he spoke of moderation in reconstructing the South and building a harmonious Union. On April 14, five days after the war ended, he was shot and mortally wounded by John Wilkes Booth.

For more information on Abraham Lincoln, visit Britannica.com.

Lincoln, Abraham (1809-65), US President and American civil war leader. His election was the proximate cause of the conflict and his political views shaped it. He was adamant that slavery was not the issue, but rather whether his vision of a unified continental empire would prevail over his opponents' traditional belief in a free association of sovereign states. Fort Sumter controlled the port of Charleston and symbolized his commitment to tariffs and economic autarky, bitterly opposed by the free-trading South. By deliberately provoking hostilities there, he accepted that most of the ‘upper eight’ slave states would secede or, like Kentucky, Missouri, and Maryland, adopt a hostile neutrality because of his policy.

The length, cost, and ferocity of the war can also be attributed largely to him. He defined the conflict as between the USA and traitorous individuals in which the states had no standing, because to do otherwise would admit that the Union was not perpetual and that secession was constitutional. There could be no peace negotiations, no compromise, only unconditional surrender to a lawful police action. Lincoln's position predicated the grinding, exhausting struggle it was to become and from the outset, even when most believed in a prompt outcome, he implemented the ‘Anaconda Plan’ devised by army commander Scott for the slow suffocation of secession by sea and river.

He was an ‘accidental’ president, virtually unknown nationally before 1860 and elected with only 40 per cent of the popular vote because the Democrat Party split. Far from being the unquestioned leader of his own party, he was a compromise candidate, expected to be dominated by powerful cabinet members and congressional leaders. His lack of a personal political base forced many undesirable compromises on him, perhaps the most damaging being the appointment of the corrupt Cameron, owed a favour from the Republican Convention, as his first war secretary. But within a year he had replaced him with the fanatically honest Stanton and by various means he gradually brought the rest to heel.

Lincoln's subsequent achievement must be measured from the baseline that he began his presidency with scant experience of even local government. He lacked personal standing and was contemptuously dubbed ‘the baboon’ by Washington society. Not least, his erratic wife only with charity may be called a liability. He assumed power without even the physical means to enforce his authority, the first troops summoned to garrison the capital being compelled to bypass hostile Maryland. His military experience was confined to a short non-combatant stint with the militia during the Black Hawk war of 1832, and he inherited a tiny pre-war regular army, scattered along the frontier. In addition the senior officers were mainly southern, including Lee who declined an offer to command Union forces and went with Virginia.

His performance as C-in-C was far from perfect, but he handled mobilization much more skilfully than his opposite number Davis. Both sides had their share of political officers, but Lincoln was cursed not only with politically irresistible demands by local politicians to be given command over ‘their’ militias, but also by generals who were convinced they could replace him to advantage. Among the former was Sickles of Gettysburg infamy, probably the only general in history to be appointed after he was found legally insane. Among the latter was McClellan, the officer he appointed to succeed Scott and who later stood against him in the 1864 presidential elections.

This does not acquit him of overestimating his own competence as strategist in early 1862, when he dispersed forces and permitted his armies to be defeated in detail. In mitigation, he was ill-served by field commanders who either lacked the killer instinct or made grandiose plans that unwisely assumed the enemy would do what was expected of them. After he learned his own limitations, much of what his generals regarded as ‘meddling’ was his insistence that they close with the enemy to make the Union's great numerical and industrial superiority felt. Once he found in Grant and Sherman a pair of bulldogs who ignored setbacks and would not let go, his ‘meddling’ diminished.

Overall, it is difficult to fault his performance. After early ‘learning’ errors he made the best of whatever human material was to hand and backed winners wherever he could find them. Above all, he rallied an uncertain Union and made full use of its preponderant financial and industrial resources to settle fundamental issues left unresolved since the birth of the republic. In the process, he created a new nation.

Bibliography

• Donald, David, Lincoln (London, 1995)

— Hugh Bicheno

Born into a poor family in Hardin County, Kentucky, Lincoln moved with his family to Indiana in 1816 and to Illinois in 1830. In 1831, he settled in New Salem, near Springfield; in 1842, he married Mary Todd, daughter of a prominent family. Lincoln pursued the law and politics, both successfully. As a Whig he served in the state legislature (1834–41) and in the House of Representatives (1847–49), where he criticized the Mexican War. The slavery expansion controversy prompted his reentry into public life in 1854, now in the new Republican Party. His national stature was enhanced when he challenged and lost to Stephen A. Douglas for the U.S. Senate in 1858.

In 1860, Lincoln won the Republican presidential nomination because of his reputation for public honesty, his availability, and because his rivals had too many political enemies. Winning popular votes only in the North, Lincoln carried the electoral vote against three opponents (including Douglas) and took office on 4 March 1861. The country was divided by the secession of seven Southern states, whose white population believed that Lincoln's election portended the death of slavery. In his inaugural address, Lincoln tried to reassure his “dissatisfied fellow countrymen” that he would not attack slavery where it existed, but neither would he allow the Union to be destroyed. The Southern capture of Fort Sumter in April 1861 did lead to war, to the secession of additional Southern states, and ultimately to the end of slavery.

Thus, Abraham Lincoln addressed two mortal public issues: war and freedom. He addressed them with a political skill never before demanded of a U.S. president and never matched thereafter. Lincoln understood his limitations and his strengths, at once willing to defer to men of demonstrably greater knowledge or ability yet willing to impose his authority over them. As commander in chief, Lincoln understood that mobilizing an effective military force was similar to forming a political coalition, that political goals were akin to grand strategy. He also promoted professional soldiers, usually West Pointers, to significant commands, but he was chided too for appointing “political generals,” which he believed necessary in order to gain popular support for the war. Some of the most egregious tactical blunders on both sides—from Malvern Hill to Cold Harbor to Franklin—occurred under the command of West Pointers.

During 1862–63, when Lincoln effectively acted as general in chief, he tried to impress upon his generals the need for precise aims and energetic execution of plans. Most notable was his frustration with George B. McClellan, a general of ability who seemed reluctant to engage the enemy even when he held a military advantage, which he always did. When McClellan refused to press Robert E. Lee after the Battle of Antietam, Lincoln removed him from command. He also removed another general given to inertia, Don Carlos Buell, Union commander in Kentucky. Only days later, Lincoln wondered if the problem was “in our case” and not in the generals. Their successors (Ambrose Burnside and William S. Rosecrans) could do no better. Hard facts of terrain, distance, and a determined enemy would dictate military progress or the lack of it.

The Union army did know success, however, notably in the major Battle of Gettysburg (July 1863) and the siege of Vicksburg (which ended with Vicksburg's surrender on 4 July 1863). Yet there was no decisive, or Napoleonic victory, nor could there be, as Lincoln came to understand; there would be only a remorseless and bloody struggle until the Confederate army and the Southern will were broken, as they finally were in 1864–65. Victories in Virginia and Georgia were achieved by veteran armies led by redoubtable soldiers, Grant and Sherman, men of ability and determination, educated by their victories and their defeats. In order to overcome criticism of his wartime policies—the Habeas Corpus Act, the establishment of martial law, censorship of opposition newspapers, and arrests of vocal opponents of the war—and to gain the support of War Democrats, Lincoln led a Union Party in 1864 and named Andrew Johnson of Tennessee as his vice president. The Democrats nominated George B. McClellan, but military success, especially after the Battle of Atlanta in September 1864, assured Lincoln's reelection.

Emancipation is the event most associated with Lincoln next to the preservation of the Union. His enemies, North and South, resisted freedom for the slaves during the Civil War; his public friends thought that he was a reluctant emancipator, too calculating in advancing the great cause. A politician of Lincoln's time and place could not be unaware of the depths of racial animosity in the North, a social bias offset only by an intensity of feeling for the Union; yet this should not obscure the time and thought Lincoln gave to emancipation. He commented favorably on various options: colonization; gradual and compensated emancipation; and in 1862, he proposed an amendment to the Constitution that would abolish slavery. On 22 September 1862, after Antietam, he announced the Emancipation Proclamation, a war measure grounded in his constitutional mandate as commander in chief, to take effect on 1 January 1863. Lincoln's eloquence of advocacy thereafter elevated political rhetoric to levels unequaled before or since. The Union could be saved only through military force, he said, and emancipation was a necessary corollary to military action. Thus were joined the great issues of war and freedom. Lincoln had effected a revolution and said as much in his immortal speech at Gettysburg.

In his second inaugural address, Lincoln suggested that the Civil War was God's punishment for the great sin of slavery, and that even if it continued “until every drop of blood drawn with the lash, shall be paid by another with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said, ‘the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether,’” Five days after the war ended, Lincoln was shot by John Wilkes Booth while watching a play at Ford's Theatre. He died on Good Friday, 15 April 1865.

[See also Civil War: Military and Diplomatic Course; Civil War: Domestic Course; Commander in Chief, President as.]

Bibliography

• Godfrey R. B. Charnwood, Abraham Lincoln, 1916.
• John G. Nicolay and John Hay, Abraham Lincoln: A History, 1890; rev. ed. 1917.
• James G. Randall, Lincoln the President, 4 vols., 1945–55.
• Roy P. Basler, ed., Abraham Lincoln: Collected Works, 9 vols., 1953–55.
• Mark E. Neely, Abraham Lincoln and the Promise of America, 1993.
• David Herbert Donald, Lincoln, 1995.
• James A. Rawley, Abraham Lincoln and a Nation Worth Fighting For, 1996

(b. Hardin County, Ky., 12 Feb. 1809; d. Washington, D.C. 15 Apr. 1865), lawyer, congressman, and president of the United States, 1861–1865.

As the newly inaugurated president of a divided nation, Abraham Lincoln anticipated working with a generally cooperative Congress. Though still viable, its Democratic ranks had been both diminished in size and deprived of some of its most forceful and experienced legislators owing to the departure of the seceded states' delegations. But of the southern justices of the Supreme Court, only Alabaman John A. Campbell had resigned in 1860. As feared, the chief justice, Marylander Roger B. Taney, did try to lead a bloc hostile to Union war objectives. His circuit opinion in Ex parte Merryman (1861) condemned Lincoln's “arbitrary arrests” of allegedly disloyal civilians as arrogations of Congress's sole authority to declare and wage war. Taney denounced the president's refusal to obey his order to produce the detainee John Merryman as a fatal blow to constitutional government. Like many other lawyers, however, Lincoln believed that the Merryman opinion violated Taney's own political question doctrine counseling judicial restraint, as enunciated in Luther v. Borden (1849), which suggested that in civil strife the elective branches bore responsibility for making basic policy choices.

Merryman convinced no other justices and few lower federal judges. By stressing the obvious dangers to the Union, Lincoln stymied an antiwar bloc on the Court by disseminating the conclusions of legal scholars that previous crises had triggered comparable exercises of the nation's war powers. Lincoln believed that the Constitution was adequate for both peace and war. Most northern lawyers accepted Lincoln's position that erroneous judicial opinions such as Scott v. Sandford (1857) and Merryman were ultimately reversible by political processes.

Nature of the Lincoln Court

While the war ground on, the Court's composition changed. Campbell's resignation in 1860, then Peter Daniel's death in 1860, John McLean's in 1861, and Taney's in 1864, permitted Lincoln to appoint Republicans Noah H. Swayne of Ohio, David Davis of Illinois, and Samuel Miller of Iowa, plus antisecession Democrat Stephen J. Field of California. For the post of chief justice, Lincoln named abolitionist veteran Salmon P. Chase of Ohio, who since 1861 had served effectively as secretary of the treasury. Lincoln believed that these appointees concurred with administration civil‐military policies and long‐term postwar aims.

Lincoln supported statutes such as the 1862 Judicial Reorganization Act and the 1863 Habeas Corpus Act, which enlarged the federal courts' jurisdiction and increased the number of circuits and of justices and judges. These measures increased opportunities for antigovernment decisions and opinions on war governance from the highest bench.

Lincoln's desire for interbranch accord was apparent early in his administration. Meanwhile, the embittered Taney repeatedly violated judicial propriety by preparing opinions‐without‐cases, declaring unconstitutional executive orders and statutes dealing with emancipation, conscription, and state reconstruction. Lincoln ordered federal attorneys to avoid initiating prosecutions involving these policies, but he could not inhibit victims or other opponents from bringing suit. His gamble paid off because most justices also wished to emphasize shared constitutional responsibilities and to avoid confrontation, at least while the war continued.

Prosecution of the War

Despite Taney, throughout the war a narrow Court majority sustained presidential orders and statutes as constitutionally adequate. For example, Justice James M. Wayne's opinion in Ex parte Stevens (1861) implicitly rejected Merryman. Stevens involved a Union soldier who had responded to Lincoln's call for ninety‐day volunteers, then had his enlistment extended to three years by presidential order, an extension that Congress retroactively legitimized. The Court sustained the president's and Congress's actions.

Following a year‐long interval, the Court heard arguments in the Prize Cases (1863). This challenge to Lincoln's proclamations of 1861 and 1862 imposing naval blockades on southern ports raised technical issues about when the Civil War began and basic questions about its legitimacy. The plaintiffs argued that no war, but rather a rebellion, existed. Blockades were appropriate only for formal international wars that only Congress could declare. Military necessities could not, they maintained, transcend the Constitution's provisions governing the declaration and conduct of war. Echoing arguments made earlier in Stevens, the Prize Cases claimants asserted that even if blockades were proper, all seizures of violators' property before Congress confirmed Lincoln's orders were illegal as, implicitly, were other executive initiatives. Government attorneys pleaded the adequacy of the Constitution's provisions for the nation's defense against foreign or domestic fees, the inappropriateness of excessively formal doctrines to the existing crisis, and the political‐question precedent of Luther. By a bare 5‐to‐4 majority, the Court sustained the government, Justice Robert C. Grier holding that the existence of the war was a political reality and that the Confederacy's citizens were technically enemies whose property could be confiscated. For the minority, Justice Samuel Nelson insisted that Lincoln's orders became legitimate only when Congress ratified them.

The justices similarly avoided constitutional confrontation in Ex parte Vallandigham (1864), which raised issues of military arrests and trials of civilians. Vallandigham, a former Ohio Democratic congressman, had encouraged antiwar activists in Ohio. General Ambrose Burnside had him charged with treason in 1863. An army court sentenced Vallandigham to prison for the duration of the war. Determined to make no martyrs, Lincoln commuted the sentence to exile to the Confederacy, from where Vallandigham slipped back into Ohio and resumed antiwar politicking. Lincoln ordered federal attorneys and the army to ignore him. Vallandigham petitioned the Supreme Court to void his earlier military arrest and trial as unlawful. Wayne's terse opinion skirted substantive civil‐military questions, instead holding that the Court lacked jurisdiction over an appeal from a military tribunal (see Military Trials and Martial Law). The Court's majority again declined to hear an appeal on jurisdictional grounds in Roosevelt v. Meyer (1863), implicitly sustaining a wartime statute authorizing the issuance of paper money. By such cautious rulings and by avoiding challenges to executive orders on conscription, confiscation, and emancipation, the Court exercised judicial review yet avoided confrontation with the president and Congress.

Activist Wartime Court

None of this suggests that the Court was supine, however. Instead, the justices vigorously established unprecedented authority over states' public policies and the judgments of states' supreme courts. The outstanding example is Gelpcke v. Dubuque (1864). Iowa municipalities defaulted on bonds issued to attract all rail lines and terminals. Successive elected Iowa supreme courts issued conflicting decisions on the validity of the bonds and of the repudiations. The bondholders appealed to lower federal courts, which by statute and custom deferred to state supreme court rulings on state law. But the federal judges lacked guidance as to which of the multiple and contradictory state decisions prevailed. After federal judges in Iowa sustained repudiation, bondholders appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court. As recently as 1862, in Leffingwell v. Warren, the Court had ruled that the most recent state supreme court judgment construing state law should control. But in Gelpcke, Justice Swayne reverted to an earlier holding that a contract valid by state standards when made could not invalidated by subsequent state laws or state supreme court rulings. Gelpcke increased investors' confidence both in the stability of state bonds and in the role of the federal courts in supervising elected state judges, who allegedly bowed to their constituents' parochial interests. The Supreme Court's reporter, John W. Wallace, extolled the justices for enforcing “high moral duties … upon a whole community, seeking apparently to violate them” (1 Wall. xiv).

Lincoln welcomed the Court's generally co‐operative stance. Election results in 1862 and 1864 suggested that the northern public, including soldiers, believed that the Lincoln administration and the Supreme Court were sustaining constitutionalism and law. Republican congressmen sometimes expressed anti‐Court views. Yet they and Lincoln applauded the Court's reviving credibility after Dred Scott and Merryman. Accordingly, Congress never transformed criticism into constraints on the Court that would have denied its appropriate role in evaluating public policies and protecting private rights.

Emancipation, Citizenship, and Reconstruction

Indeed, Lincoln deferred to the Court as the final legitimizer of one of his most sensitive war power orders, that of 8 December 1863 on the political reconstruction of the Confederate states. In this order, Lincoln reshaped the federal system by imposing standards for readmission and interim governance of the affected states, including the abolition of slavery in new constitutions and the reconstitution of the states' electorates. But Lincoln also feared that the Court might yet reverse his Reconstruction orders, a possibility that spurred Republican efforts to confirm emancipation in what became the Thirteenth Amendment. Lincoln vigorously supported the amendment, seeing in the Constitution thus improved an appropriate guide for the post‐Appomattox Supreme Court and for the reunited nation.

Lincoln believed that the Constitution was adequate for all purposes. His impressive educability and his innate instinct for interracial decency led him, on becoming president, to envisage an improved as well as reunified nation. In 1862 he requested Attorney General Edwin Bates to specify the rights adhering to national citizenship. Bates's reply rested on Justice Bushrod Washington's 1823 circuit opinion in Corfield v. Coryell. He stressed mobility, a right no slave enjoyed. Lincoln's catalog of federal citizens' rights grew much larger after his military emancipation order in 1862 and his 1863 orders to the army to recruit blacks, especially recent slaves.

In his address at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, in late 1863, the president linked the Declaration of Independence to the Constitution. Meanwhile, his administration was embodying equalitarian aspirations in recommended statutes, especially the Homestead, Morrill, and Jurisdiction laws of 1862 and 1863. These federal laws implicitly defined freedom as a cluster of national rights, including widened access to property (especially land), literacy (education), and legal remedies for both private and public wrongs. Having advocated in 1863 that the occupied states both constitutionalize abolition and educate their black residents, Lincoln expanded that idea to all states in 1865. He reported happily the numerous Homestead Act sales to smallholders, including Union Army veterans, among them many black soldiers. In April 1865, with total victory imminent and a new presidential term seemingly ahead, Lincoln defined his final objectives: suffrage for literate blacks and black veterans and state‐supported education for all children, white and black.

The Postwar Era and the Johnson Administration

Lincoln's perception of the Thirteenth Amendment was central to his postwar objectives. Abolition would help him and Congress implement individuals' rights derived from the national Constitution, rights paralleling and not displacing those derived from state citizenship. Lincoln's view of federalism allowed for interstate diversity but required states' laws and customs to be race blind.

People who shared Lincoln's aspirations, like Chief Justice Chase, failed to convince his successor, Andrew Johnson, that the Thirteenth Amendment embraced civil and political rights and extended federal power over private as well as public wrongs. Johnson made no appointments to the Supreme Court, but he filled many lower federal judgeships and other court offices and the entire judiciary of all the southern states with whites, predominantly pardoned ex‐Confederates. Though the Court after 1865 remained dominated by Lincoln's appointees, most justices shared only some of his views on the need for race‐blind equality under state laws as a primary ingredient in federal rights. The Supreme Court began to lose its wartime sense of restraint and of enhanced national purpose.

In the Test Oath (see Test Oaths) and Ex parte Milligan decisions of 1866–1867, the Court, with Chase vainly dissenting, adopted increasingly ahistorical formalist views. The decision in the Slaughterhouse Cases (1873) limited the Thirteenth Amendment to formal abolition. Thereafter, victims of private wrongs, including those connived at by state authorities, enjoyed few practical federal remedies. Another retrograde decision in the pivotal 1873 Court term, Osborn v. Nicholson, validated a prewar contract for the sale of a slave. Another, Bradwell v. Illinois, excluded qualified women who sought access to state‐licensed professions from Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendment protections. Nevertheless, the war‐time Court had built enduring constitutional redoubts against a total return to official racism.

See also Civil War; Race and Racism.

Bibliography

• Herman Belz, Emancipation and Equal Rights: Politics and Constitutionalism in the Civil War Era (1978).
• Harold M. Hyman and William M. Wiecek, Equal Justice under Law: Constitutional Development, 1835–1875 (1982).
• James G. Randall, Constitutional Problems under Lincoln, rev. ed. (1951).
• David M. Silver, Lincoln's Supreme Court (1956)

— Harold M. Hyman

Lincoln, Abraham (1809-65) 16th president of the United States (1861-65), born in Hardin County, Kentucky. In Illinois, where he later settled, Lincoln pursued law and politics (as a Whig), serving in the state legislature (1834-41) and in the U.S. House of Representatives (1847-49), where he spoke out against the Mexican War (1846-48). Prompted by the controversy over the expansion of slavery into the territories, he returned to public life in 1854. In 1858, though he lost the election, he gained national prominence when he challenged Stephen A. Douglas for the U.S. Senate and engaged him in a series of debates that brought the issue to a head. Nominated in 1860 for president on the Republican ticket, Lincoln carried the electoral vote despite winning slightly under 40 percent of the popular vote. Before his inauguration, in March 1861, seven of the ten states that would form the Confederacy had already seceded. One month later, with the Southern capture of Fort Sumter, the Civil War had begun. Lincoln's intention, he said, was to preserve the Union and to stop the spread of slavery, not to attack it where it existed. Lincoln devoted most of his time to his duties as commander in chief, studying military history and strategy and frequently visiting troops at the front. He grew impatient with the failures of Union generals to act with the aggressiveness he believed necessary. Though Confederate successes (First and Second Bull Run, 1861-62) in the first two years of the war gave way to Union victories at Gettysburg and Vicksburg (both 1863), the conflict dragged on. Lincoln came to see that his hoped-for decisive victory that would end the war was not to be; the bloody and remorseless struggle would end only when the will of the South was broken. Weary of war and its costly human sacrifice, Northerners appeared ready in early 1864 to turn Lincoln out of office. But the victory at Atlanta that year, followed by successes in the Shenandoah Valley, restored their faith in the commander in chief and ensured his reelection on the Union ticket. The changes in fortune had come about with Lincoln's appointment of Ulysses S. Grant as general in chief of all Union armies. Grant's strategy of attacking on several fronts at once was to be the key to the Union victory, which was effectively sealed with the surrender of Robert E. Lee and his Army of Northern Virginia at Appomattox in April 1865. Five days later Lincoln was shot, the first president to be assassinated. He died the following morning (April 15). Though Lincoln has been criticized for exceeding his powers in curtailing civil liberties during the war, he remains a figure revered as the preserver of the republic and the destroyer of slavery. Though the Emancipation Proclamation (1863) did not itself end that institution, it set the wheels in motion; and Lincoln himself proposed, but did not live to see enacted, a constitutional amendment to abolish slavery.

See the Introduction, Abbreviations and Pronunciation for further details.

Sixteenth president of the United States and president during the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865) was immortalized by his Emancipation Proclamation, his Gettysburg Address, and two outstanding inaugural addresses.

Abraham Lincoln was born on Feb. 12, 1809, in a log cabin on a farm in Hardin County, Ky. His father had come with his parents from Virginia and had grown to manhood on the Kentucky frontier. He had evidently become moderately successful as a farmer and carpenter, for in 1803 he was able to pay £118 cash for a farm near Elizabethtown. Three years later he married Nancy Hanks, described as "intelligent, deeply religious, kindly, and affectionate," but as "illiterate" as himself. Of her family and background little authentic is known.

Lincoln's Background

The young couple soon moved to the one-room cabin on Nolin Creek where their second child, Abraham, was born. Two years later the family moved to the farm on Knob Creek that Abraham later remembered. There, when there was no pressing work to be done, Abraham walked 2 miles to the schoolhouse, where he learned the rudiments of reading, writing, and arithmetic.

Five years later the elder Lincoln sold his lands and carried his family into the untracked wilderness of Indiana across the Ohio River. It was late fall, and there was time only to pull together a crude three-sided shelter of logs, brush, and leaves. The open side was protected by a blazing fire which had to be replenished at all times. The only water was nearly a mile away. For food the family depended almost entirely on game.

They began building a better home and clearing the land for planting. They were making progress when, in the summer of 1818, a dread disease known as milk sickness struck the region. First it carried off Mrs. Lincoln's uncle and aunt and then Nancy Hanks Lincoln herself. On the shoulders of Abraham's 12-year-old sister, Sarah, fell the burden of caring for the household; the home was soon reduced to near squalor.

The next winter Abraham's father returned to Kentucky and brought back a second wife, Sarah Bush Johnson, a widow with three children. Abraham learned to love her and in later years referred to her as "my angel mother."

As time passed, the region where the Lincolns lived grew in population, and James Gentry's little store became a trading center around which the village of Gentryville grew. There Abraham spent much of his spare time, early showing a marked talent for storytelling and mimicry. He grew tall and strong, and his father often hired him out to work for neighbors. Through this came the chance, with Gentry's son Allen, to take a flatboat of produce down the Ohio and Mississippi rivers to New Orleans - Lincoln's first sight of anything other than frontier simplicity.

Meanwhile Lincoln's father had again moved his family to a new home in Illinois, where he built a cabin on the Sangamon River. This was open prairie country, but the abundant trees along the streams supplied the rails to fence their fields. Young Lincoln, already skilled with his ax, was soon splitting rails, not only for the Lincoln farm but for others as well.

At the end of the first summer in Illinois an attack of fever and ague put the Lincolns again on the move. This time it was to Coles County. Abraham, however, did not go along. He was now of independent age and had agreed with two friends to take a cargo of produce, belonging to one Denton Offutt, downriver to New Orleans. Offutt was so impressed with Lincoln's abilities that he placed him in charge of the mill and store which he had established at New Salem.

Entering Public Life

This was the turning point; the Lincoln of history began to emerge. To the store came people of all kinds to talk and trade and to enjoy the stories and rich human qualities stored up in this unique man. The young roisterers from Clary's Grove found him to be more than a match for their champion wrestlers and became his devoted followers. The members of the New Salem Debating Society welcomed him; and when the Black Hawk War broke out, the volunteers of the region elected Lincoln to be their captain. On his return he announced himself as a candida te for the Illinois Legislature on a "Henry Clay-Whig" platform of internal improvements, better educational facilities, and lower interest rates. He was not elected, but he did receive 277 of the 300 votes cast in the New Salem precinct.

Lincoln next formed a partnership with William Berry and purchased one of the other stores in New Salem. However, on the death of his partner Lincoln found himself responsible for a $1,100 debt. His appointment as New Salem postmaster and the chance to work as deputy surveyor of the country improved his finances. He also was enabled to widen his acquaintances and to win election to the state legislature in 1834. The skill with which Lincoln conducted his campaign so impressed John Todd Stuart, the Whig leader of the county and an outstanding lawyer in Springfield, that he took Lincoln under his care and inspired him to begin the study of law.

Lincoln served four successive terms in the legislature and became floor leader of his party in the lower house. Meanwhile, he mastered the law books he could buy or borrow and in September 1836 passed the bar examinations and was admitted to practice. He played an important part in having the state capital moved from Vandalia to Springfield, and in 1837 he moved there to become Stuart's law partner. Coming into a firm already well established, Lincoln had a secure legal future. He not only practiced in Springfield but rode the Eighth Circuit of some 160 miles through the Sangamon Valley. He did not, however, neglect politics, and in 1846 he was elected to the U.S. Congress.

In these years Lincoln had become engaged to Mary Todd, a cultured and well-educated Kentucky woman who was visiting relatives in Springfield. After a rather stormy courtship, they were married on November 2, 1842. The part which Mary played in Lincoln's life is still a matter of controversy.

National Politics

Lincoln's election to Congress came just as the war with Mexico began. Like many Whigs, he doubted the justice of the war, but since it was popular in Illinois he kept quiet.

When Congress convened in December 1847, Lincoln, the only Whig from Illinois, voted for the Wilmot Proviso whenever it came up. When William A. Richardson, Illinois Democrat, presented resolutions declaring the war just and necessary and Mexico the aggressor, Lincoln countered with resolutions declaring that Mexico, not the United States, had jurisdiction over "the spot" where blood was first shed. These resolutions, together with one to abolish slavery in the District of Columbia, brought sharp criticism from the people back in Illinois. Lincoln was "not a patriot." He had not correctly represented his state. Although the Whigs won the presidency in 1848, Lincoln could not even control the patronage in his own district. His political career seemed to be ended. His only reward for party service was an offer of the governorship of far-off Oregon, which he refused. He could only return to the practice of law.

War on the Horizon

During the next 12 years, while Lincoln rebuilt his legal practice, the nation was drifting steadily toward sectional confrontation. Victory in the Mexican war, having added vast western territory to the United States, had raised anew the issue of slavery in the territories. To southerners it involved the security and rights of slavery everywhere; to Northerners it was a matter of morals and democratic obligations. Tempers flared and the crisis developed. Only the frantic efforts of Henry Clay and Daniel Webster brought about the Compromise of 1850 as a temporary truce. The basic issues, however, were not eliminated. Four years later Stephen A. Douglas, by his bill to organize the Kansas-Nebraska Territory according to "squatter sovereignty" and "with all questions pertaining to slavery … left to the decision of the people," reopened the whole bitter struggle.

Douglas's bill, plus the repeal of the Missouri Compromise, brought Lincoln back into politics. He had always viewed slavery as a "moral, social and political wrong" and looked forward to its eventual abolition. Although willing to let it alone for the present in the states where it existed, he would not see it extended one inch. Douglas's popular sovereignty doctrine, he thought, revealed an indifference to the moral issue and ignored the growing Northern determination to rid the nation of slavery. So when Douglas returned to Illinois to defend his position, Lincoln seized every opportunity to point out the weakness in it.

Republican Leader

Lincoln's failure to receive the nomination as senator in 1855 convinced him that the Whig party was dead, and by summer 1856 he became openly identified with the new Republicans. At their state convention that year he delivered what many have considered his greatest speech. It was an appeal aimed at welding all anti-Nebraska men into a vigorous and successful party. Thus, Lincoln had made himself the outstanding leader of the new party. At the party's first national convention in Philadelphia, he received 110 votes for vice president on the first ballot. Though he was not chosen, he had been recognized as an important national figure.

Violence in Kansas and the Supreme Court decision in the Dred Scott case soon centered national attention on Illinois. There Douglas, who had broken sharply with the new administration over acceptance of the proslavery Lecompton Constitution, had returned to wage his fight for reelection to the Senate. It would be an uphill struggle, with the fate of the national Democratic party in the balance. It would not be like earlier elections, for Illinois had grown rapidly and the population majority had shifted from the southern part of the state to the central and northern areas. In these growing areas the new Republican party had gained a large majority and offered, in Abraham Lincoln, a rival candida te of proven ability. Some Republicans in the East thought that Douglas should not be opposed, because of his stand on Kansas; but Lincoln thought differently. He had delivered his now famous "house divided" speech, and he pressed Douglas for a joint discussion of issues. Out of this came the Lincoln-Douglas debates, in which Lincoln proved his ability to hold his own against the "Little Giant." In the end Douglas was reelected, but Lincoln had gained national attention. Invitations for speeches pored in from all over the country. His speech at Cooper Institute in New York attracted wide attention and gave him a new standing in the East.

When the Republican National Convention met to choose its presidential candida te for 1860, Lincoln was the first or second choice of most delegations. As a result, when serious objections were raised against other first choices, many turned to Lincoln. That he stood well in the states which the Republicans had lost in 1856 also helped; the bargains and promises which Lincoln's managers made did the rest. He was nominated on the third ballot. The split in the Democratic party and the formation of the Constitutional Union party made Lincoln's election certain. He would be a minority, sectional president. Seven Southern states reacted by seceding from the Union and forming the Confederate States of America.

Sixteenth President

In the critical months before taking office, Lincoln selected his Cabinet. It was a strange group, chosen with the aim of representing all elements in the party. The skill with which Lincoln taught each of his men that he was their master and secured maximum service from them is one of the marks of his greatness.

In his inaugural address he clarified his position on the national situation. Secession, he said, was anarchy. The Union could not legally be broken apart. He would not interfere with slavery in the states, but he would "hold, occupy, and possess" all Federal property and places. Firmness and conciliation would go together.

The first test came when Secretary of State William H. Seward secretly conferred with Southerners regarding the evacuation of Ft. Sumter in Charleston harbor. Lincoln firmly but kindly put Seward in his place and refused to yield even though it meant the outbreak of the Civil War.

A second test came when Col. John C. Frémont, in command at St. Louis, invoked martial law and announced the confiscation of the property of all persons who had taken up arms against the government and the freeing of their slaves. Lincoln quickly rescinded the orders and, when Frémont resisted, removed him from command.

Civil War

From this time on, Lincoln's life was shaped by the problems and fortunes of civil war. As president, he was the head of all administration agencies and commander in chief of the armies. On him the criticisms for inefficiency in administration and failure in battle fell first. Radicals in Congress were soon demanding a reorganization of his Cabinet and a new set of generals to lead his armies. He let the dissatisfied congressmen air their views and in the end withdraw in confusion. To the critics of Gen. George McClellan, he pointed to the army this general had created, relieved him when he failed, but brought him back to serve until better men had been developed. Meanwhile Lincoln himself studied military books. He correctly evaluated Gen. Ulysses S. Grant and Gen. William T. Sherman and the importance of the western campaign.

As to slavery, Lincoln waited until after the victory at Antietam, when it would have real meaning as a war measure, to issue his Emancipation Proclamation. Later, at Gettysburg, he gave the war its universal meaning as a struggle to preserve a nation "conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal."

As the war dragged on, Lincoln's critics began to question his chances for reelection. Salmon P. Chase in the Cabinet and Radicals in Congress plotted to crowd him aside, and only the loyalty of the people and final military success secured his reelection. His second inaugural address was brief. It lacked bitterness toward the South and urged his people "to bind up the nation's wounds." "With malice toward none; with charity for all," Americans could achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace.

Lincoln had already taken steps in that direction. As the Federal Army had conquered Southern territory, he had set up military governments and soon had governments in Tennessee, Louisiana, Arkansas, and Virginia. When Congress opposed this, he applied the "pocket veto" to its bill. He had never learned to hate. He was interested only in a restored Union. He did insist on ending slavery in the reconstructed states, and there are some indications that he favored votes for capable Negroes. What the final outcome might have been, history does not know, for on the night of April 14, 1865, an assassin's bullet ended his life. Then, as Edwin Stanton said, he belonged to the ages.

Further Reading

Lincoln's writings are gathered in The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln (8 vols., 1953), edited by Roy P. Basler and others. The Lincoln Reader (1947), edited by Paul M. Angle, is one of many anthologies of selected writings. Lincoln and His America, 1809-1865: The Words of Abraham Lincoln (1970), arranged by David Flowden and the editors of Viking Press, is a handsome book that gives a portrait of Lincoln's entire life through his own words and includes hundreds of photographs.

The literature on Lincoln is enormous and still growing. A useful bibliography is Paul M. Angle, A Shelf of Lincoln Books: A Critical, Selective Bibliography of Lincolniana (1946). One of the most popular biographies is Carl Sandburg's sprawling study, Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years (2 vols., 1926) and Abraham Lincoln: The War Years (4 vols., 1939), all condensed into one volume in 1954. Among the many good biographies are older works: W. H. Herndon and J. W. Weik, Herndon's Lincoln (3 vols., 1889); the classic work of John G. Nicolay and John Hay, Abraham Lincoln: A History (10 vols., 1890), condensed into an excellent one-volume edition in 1966; Lord Charnwood, Abraham Lincoln (2 vols., 1925); and Albert J. Beveridge, Abraham Lincoln, 1809-1858 (2 vols., 1928). Edgar Lee Masters, Lincoln the Man (1931), portrays Lincoln unfavorably. More recent biographies are Benjamin P. Thomas, Abraham Lincoln (1952); Stefan Lorant, The Life of Abraham Lincoln (1954); Reinhard Henry Luthin, The Real Abraham Lincoln (1960); and Edward J. Kempf, Abraham Lincoln's Philosophy of Common Sense: An Analytical Biography of a Great Mind (3 vols., 1965).

Interpretative studies of Lincoln's life include Roy P. Basler, The Lincoln Legend: A Study in Changing Conceptions (1935), which analyzes the creation of a national legend about Lincoln; David Herbert Donald, Lincoln Reconsidered: Essays on the Civil War Era (1956); Richard N. Current, The Lincoln Nobody Knows (1958); and David D. Anderson, Abraham Lincoln (1970), which examines Lincoln's personal and political life through the development of his thought and prose.

There are numerous studies of specific aspects of Lincoln's career and influence. Among them are T. Harry Williams, Lincoln and the Radicals (1941) and Lincoln and the Generals (1952); David M. Potter, Lincoln and His Party in the Secession Crisis (1942; with a new preface, 1962); Reinhard Henry Luthin and Harry J. Carman, Lincoln and Patronage (1943); Jay Monaghan, Diplomat in Carpet Slippers (1945); Burton J. Hendrick, Lincoln's War Cabinet (1946); James G. Randall, Lincoln and the South (1946), Lincoln the President (4 vols., 1946-1955), Lincoln the Liberal Statesman (1947), and Mr. Lincoln (1957); William Best HesseHine, Lincoln and the War Governors (1948); Donald W. Riddle, Lincoln Runs for Congress (1948); Don E. Fehrenbacher, Prelude to Greatness: Lincoln in the 1850s (1962); Benjamin Quarles, Lincoln and the Negro (1962); Paul Simon, Lincoln's Preparation for Greatness: The Illinois Legislative Years (1965); Dean Sprague, Freedom under Lincoln (1965); and Richard Allen Heckman, Lincoln vs. Douglas: The Great Debates (1967), which attempts to diminish the exaggerated importance of the debates and place them in a better perspective. A critique of special interest is Benjamin P. Thomas, Portrait for Posterity: Lincoln and His Biographers (1947). The 1860 and 1864 presidential elections are detailed in Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., History of American Presidential Elections (4 vols., 1971).

(1809-65) US politician. He expressed his democratic ideals most famously at the dedication of a cemetery at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, site of the battle of the Civil War where the Confederate armies had been turned back from their northernmost point. Lincoln stated that ‘the world will little note, nor long remember, what we say here’, but expressed the hope that ‘government of the people, by the people, and for the people, shall not perish from the earth’. Lincoln's magnificent oratory may conceal more than it reveals. In particular he was not a principled opponent of slavery, but rather a principled defender of the Union. He was also a master of manipulation, being one of the most effective hammerers of the wedge between Northern and Southern Democrats, which led to the splintering of the Democrats in the 1860 presidential election and to Lincoln's election on under 40 per cent of the popular vote.

• Born: Feb. 12, 1809, near Hodgenville, Ky.
• Political party: Whig (in Congress); Republican
• Education: sporadic schooling in lower grades
• Military service: Illinois volunteer regiment, 1832
• Previous government service: postmaster, New Salem, Ill., 1833–36; Illinois General Assembly, 1834–41; U.S. House of Representatives, 1847–49
• Elected President, 1860; served, 1861–65
• Died: Apr. 15, 1865, Washington, D.C.

Using military force to defeat the Southern secessionists and win the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln acted in accordance with his oath of office to preserve the Union. In doing so, he used emergency powers that no previous President had exercised. His twin policies, emancipation of slaves and reconciliation of North and South, were his greatest legacies to a war-torn nation.

Lincoln was born in a log cabin in Kentucky. He was the first President born outside the original 13 states that formed the Union. When he was seven, his family moved to another log cabin in Indiana, where his father cleared and farmed 160 acres. His mother died when he was nine and his father married Sarah Bush John-ston, whose three children moved into the log cabin with Lincoln and his sister, Sarah. After his farm chores young Abe educated himself by lantern light, borrowing books from neighbors and nearby towns. He grew to his full size of six feet, four inches and gained a reputation not only as a scholar but also as a wrestler and axeman.

At age 22 Lincoln struck out on his own and settled in New Salem, Illinois. He worked as a storekeeper and was a captain in a campaign against the Black Hawk Indians, but he saw no action and his store failed. He then worked as a surveyor and postmaster. He lost a contest for the state legislature in 1832 (“The only time I have ever been beaten by the people,” he later said), but he was elected two years later on the Whig ticket. He also studied law and was admitted to the bar in 1836. Lincoln became a successful lawyer in Springfield, and his clients included the Illinois Central Railroad and other corporations. In 1839 he met Mary Todd, and they married in 1842.

Lincoln entered national politics in 1846, when he was elected as a Whig to the U.S. House of Representatives. He introduced a bill to end slavery in the nation' capital, but it was never brought to a vote. His support for the Wilmot Proviso (a bill to outlaw slavery in territories acquired from Mexico), his opposition to the Mexican-American War (he voted for a resolution in Congress that described it as “a war unconstitutionally and unjustly begun by the President”), and his campaigning for Zachary Taylor in the election of 1848 were unpopular positions in Illinois, and he declined to seek reelection.

In various speeches in 1854, Lincoln opposed the Kansas-Nebraska Bill sponsored by Senator Stephen A. Douglas. The bill provided for a popular vote on the question of slavery in each of the territories. In two debates with Douglas, Lincoln argued that the Missouri Compromise of 1820, which forbade slavery north of Missouri's southern boundary, should be retained. He argued that only in free states could poor white workers improve their circumstances, because there they would not be competing against slave labor.

Lincoln failed in a bid to obtain a Senate seat in 1855, but the following year he helped organize the Republican party and nearly won its Vice Presidential nomination. In 1858 Lincoln challenged Douglas for his Senate seat. “A house divided against itself cannot stand,” he told the Illinois Republican party convention in his acceptance speech, adding “I believe this Government cannot endure permanently half slave and half free.” In a second series of Lincoln-Douglas debates held around the state, Lincoln hammered at Douglas for ignoring the moral dimension of the slavery question, calling slavery a “moral, social and political evil.” Lincoln lost the election but gained a national reputation.

In February 1860 Lincoln delivered an antislavery speech in New York City and was applauded by his audience and by New York newspapers, which made him a contender for the Republican Presiential nomination. In May, he won the nomination by defeating the favorite, William H. Seward, on the third ballot, after his campaign managers promised cabinet positions to politicians from Ohio, Indiana, and Pennsylvania.

The Whigs nominated John Bell, the Northern Democrats nominated Stephen A. Douglas, and the Southern Democrats bolted from their party to nominate John C. Breckinridge. Lincoln, along with Vice Presidential nominee Hannibal Hamlin, was elected with a 39.8 percent plurality of the popular vote but a large majority in the electoral college. He said farewell to his friends in Springfield and took a train east. Because of a plot against his life, he left his train in Philadelphia and arrived without notice in Washington, D.C., on February 23, 1861. By that time seven states of the lower South had already left the Union, and a peace convention in Richmond, Virginia, was trying to forge a compromise under the auspices of former President John Tyler. Lincoln gave the delegates to the convention no encouragement, however.

Lincoln took the oath of office on March 4, 1861. “We must not be enemies,” he pleaded with Southern leaders in his inaugural address. He reminded them that no state had a right to leave the Union “upon its own mere motion” and warned that he had taken an oath of office to enforce federal laws. “In your hands, my dissatisfied fellow-countrymen, and not in mine, is the momentous issue of civil war.” He rejected the Crittenden Compromise, which would have permitted slavery in the Western states below the Mason-Dixon line. Lincoln would allow slavery to continue where it already was but would hear nothing of extending it across the lower states to the West.

After his inauguration Lincoln informed the governor of South Carolina that he would resupply the federal garrison at Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor with ammunition, food, and medicine, but would send no reinforcements or weapons. On April 12, 1861, the South Carolina government responded by opening fire on Fort Sumter, and two days later its commander surrendered. Congress was not in session, and Lincoln did not call it into emergency session. Instead, relying on his own Presidential powers, on April 15 he proclaimed a blockade of Southern ports, called on the states for 75,000 volunteers to join the army and enforce federal laws, suspended the privilege of the writ of habeas corpus (so that he could arrest and hold people without taking them to court), rounded up thousands of Confederate sympathizers in the border states, and spent funds from the U.S. Treasury without obtaining congressional appropriations. Then, on July 4, Lincoln called Congress into session and informed the legislators of what he had done. Within the month Congress retroactively ratified his actions.

For several years the war went badly for the North. In July the First Battle at Bull Run in Virginia was a defeat for Union forces, with more than 3,500 dead and wounded. A campaign to capture Richmond bogged down. The South won victories at Fredericksburg and at the Second Battle of Bull Run. The Union instituted a draft to replace troops fallen in battle. In New York City draft riots showed strong antiwar sentiment among many Northerners. But eventually the war effort succeeded. In 1862 Union forces led by Generals Ulysses S. Grant and Don C. Buell began to win victories along the Mississippi River, and Admiral David Farragut captured New Orleans. On January 1, 1863, Lincoln issued a Proclamation of Emancipation that freed slaves in states in secession. As Union forces advanced into enemy territory, former slaves became a decisive source of manpower for the Union forces.

In 1863 the fortunes of war turned toward the North. On July 3, Union forces defeated more than 90,000 troops led by Robert E. Lee at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. The following day Grant divided the Confederacy with the capture of Vicksburg, Mississippi. President Lincoln named him commander of the Union armies early in 1864, and he faced off against Lee in Virginia, taking huge losses but steadily moving forward. Meanwhile, General William Tecumseh Sherman began a successful march from Tennessee into Georgia, eventually seizing and burning Atlanta.

The election of 1864 would decide whether or not the war would continue. Lincoln received the Republican nomination and chose the military governor of Tennessee, Andrew Johnson, a Democrat, to run with him on a coalition Unionist ticket. Democrats challenged Lincoln's exertion of Presidential power, called for a halt to hostilities and the return of slave-holding states to the Union, and nominated General George B. McClellan, whom Lincoln had relieved of command. Successes in the field, especially the capture of the last port on the Gulf of Mexico at Mobile Bay by Admiral Farragut, led many voters to believe the war would soon be over. Lincoln won 55 percent of the popular vote and almost all the electoral votes in the election.

Lincoln's second inaugural address stressed a policy of reconciliation toward the South: “With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan—to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting piece among ourselves and with all nations.” In 1864 he had vetoed the Wade-Davis Reconstruction bill passed by Congress because he opposed its harsh terms. Louisiana, Arkansas, Tennessee, and Virginia reestablished state governments and petitioned Congress for recognition but were denied. On April 11, two days after Robert E. Lee surrendered his army to Grant, Lincoln again called for the former Confederate states to be readmitted to the Union on lenient terms.

On the evening of April 14, while attending a performance of Our American Cousin at Ford's Theatre in Washington, Lincoln was shot by John Wilkes Booth, an actor and Southern sympathizer, and died the next morning. As his body was taken back to Springfield, mourners lined the 1,700-mile route to pay their respects to the Great Emancipator.

See also Amnesty, Presidential; Assassinations, Presidential; Buchanan, James; Emancipation Proclamations; Gettysburg Address; Grant, Ulysses S.; Hamlin, Hannibal; Johnson, Andrew; War powers

Sources

• Richard N. Current, The Lincoln Nobody Knows (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1980).
• David Herbert Donald, Lincoln Reconsidered (New York: Vintage, 1961).
• Philip B. Kunhardt, Jr., et al. Lincoln: An Illustrated Biography (New York: Knopf, 1992).
• James M. McPherson, Abraham Lincoln and the Second American Revolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991).
• Mark E. Neely, The Abraham Lincoln Encyclopedia (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1982)

(1809-1865), sixteenth president of the United States. Lincoln summarized his early life as "the short and simple annals of the poor." He was born in a Kentucky log cabin, the son of a typical pioneer family. Never prosperous, the family moved several times, and he grew up in Kentucky and Indiana. He later reckoned that his total schooling did not exceed one year, but being unusually ambitious he pursued self-improvement through reading and longed for a better life. Lincoln's identification with the Whig party and its program to promote economic opportunity grew out of his hard lot as a youth.

When he came of age, Lincoln moved to New Salem, Illinois, where he held a variety of jobs, served in the legislature, and studied law. After receiving his attorney's license, he moved to the new capital of Springfield. He retired from the legislature after four terms, served one term in Congress (1847-1849), and then devoted himself to his legal practice and became an important and prosperous attorney.

The repeal of the Missouri Compromise in 1854 rekindled Lincoln's political ambition. He spoke eloquently against the expansion of slavery in the West, became a leader of the new Republican party, and gained national attention in 1858 from his debates with Stephen A. Douglas. In 1860, aided by the facts that he came from a doubtful state, had a reputation as a moderate on the slavery question, and was acceptable to both the Germans and the nativists, he won the Republican presidential nomination and was elected.

Shortly after Lincoln entered office the Civil War began. Taking a broad view of the president's war powers, he proclaimed a blockade, suspended the writ of habeas corpus for disloyal activity, spent money without congressional authorization, and controlled the war effort. On most legislative matters he yielded to Congress, but he carefully preserved his independence on questions that he considered executive responsibility. Despite his military inexperience, he displayed a shrewd grasp of military strategy, recognizing from the beginning the importance of the western theater and the necessity of taking advantage of the Union's superior resources. It took him several years, however, to find competent generals to implement this strategy.

On the issue of emancipation, Lincoln moved cautiously, insisting that his main priority was to save the Union. As the war continued, however, he became convinced that undermining slavery would weaken the Confederacy, and on January 1, 1863, he issued the Emancipation Proclamation. The proclamation applied only to areas under Confederate control, and its legal impact was uncertain, but it redefined the nature of the war and was of great symbolic significance.

Nevertheless, Lincoln seemed certain to be defeated in 1864. His record on civil liberties provoked protests, public opinion remained divided over emancipation, even Republicans lacked confidence in him, and most important, no end to the war was in sight. Sherman's capture of Atlanta in September, however, revived northern spirits and Lincoln was easily reelected. A few months later, in the hour of the Union's victory, he was cut down by an assassin's bullet.

Lincoln is justly considered our greatest president. He was a masterful politician, sensitive to and yet constantly shaping public opinion, skilled at balancing competing considerations, and extraordinarily adept at getting rival groups to work together toward a common goal. His leadership qualities were demonstrated in his brilliant handling of the border slave states at the beginning of the fighting, in his defeat of a congressional attempt to reorganize his cabinet in 1862, and in his defusing of the peace issue in the 1864 campaign when he maneuvered the Confederacy into rejecting negotiations. Never losing sight of the larger aims of the war, he remained flexible in his approach to problems, as evidenced by his evolving policies on emancipation and Reconstruction. Nevertheless, the toll of the war was visible in his haggard face: he stoically endured more than any other president personal slights, public ridicule, and criticism beyond the bounds of all decency, had his hopes dashed by one humiliating military defeat after another, and suffered deep personal anguish over the mounting casualty lists. Yet he never faltered in his resolve to persevere to victory.

Uncorrupted by power, Lincoln enunciated the nation's loftiest ideals during its darkest moment. The Gettysburg Address ranks as the supreme statement of the meaning of the war, and his second inaugural is testimony to his humane spirit. For the American people, his life from log cabin to White House epitomizes the American experience, and he has become the national symbol of democracy.

Bibliography:

Stephen B. Oates, With Malice toward None: The Life of Abraham Lincoln (1977); James G. Randall, Lincoln the President, 4 vols. (1945-1955; vol. 4 completed by Richard N. Current).

Author:

William E. Gienapp

See also Elections: 1860 , 1864; Lincoln-Douglas Debates; Republican Party; Slavery; Whig Party. For events during Lincoln's administration, see Civil War; Confederate States of America; Copperheads; Draft Riots; Emancipation Proclamation and Thirteenth Amendment; Gettysburg Address; Homestead Act; Morrill Land Grant Act; Secession; Wade-Davis Bill.

Juneteenth

From our Archives: Today's Highlights, June 19, 2006

Early Life

Born on Feb. 12, 1809, in a log cabin in backwoods Hardin co., Ky. (now Larue co.), he grew up on newly broken pioneer farms of the frontier. His father, Thomas Lincoln, was a migratory carpenter and farmer, nearly always poverty-stricken. Little is known of his mother, Nancy Hanks, who died in 1818, not long after the family had settled in the wilds of what is now Spencer co., Ind. Thomas Lincoln soon afterward married Sarah Bush Johnston, a widow; she was a kind and affectionate stepmother to the boy. Abraham had almost no formal schooling-the scattered weeks of school attendance in Kentucky and Indiana amounted to less than a year; but he taught himself, reading and rereading a small stock of books. His first glimpse of the wider world came in a voyage downriver to New Orleans on a flatboat in 1828, but little is known of that journey. In 1830 the Lincolns moved once more, this time to Macon co., Ill.

After another visit to New Orleans, the young Lincoln settled in 1831 in the village of New Salem, Ill., not far from Springfield. There he began by working in a store and managing a mill. By this time a tall (6 ft 4 in./190 cm), rawboned young man, he won much popularity among the inhabitants of the frontier town by his great strength and his flair for storytelling, but most of all by his strength of character. His sincerity and capability won respect that was strengthened by his ability to hold his own in the roughest society. He was chosen captain of a volunteer company gathered for the Black Hawk War (1832), but the company did not see battle.

Returning to New Salem, Lincoln was a partner in a grocery store that failed, leaving him with a heavy burden of debt. He became a surveyor for a time, was village postmaster, and did various odd jobs, including rail splitting. All the while he sought to improve his education and studied law. The story of a brief love affair with Ann Rutledge, which supposedly occurred at this time, is now discredited.

Early Political Career

In 1834, Lincoln was elected to the state legislature, in which he served four successive terms (until 1841) and achieved prominence as a Whig. In 1836 he obtained his license as an attorney, and the next year he moved to Springfield, where he became a law partner of John T. Stuart. Lincoln's practice steadily increased. That first partnership was succeeded by others, with Stephen T. Logan and then with William H. Herndon, who was later to be Lincoln's biographer. Lincoln displayed great ability in law, a ready grasp of argument, and sincerity, color, and lucidity of speech.

In 1842 he married Mary Todd (see Lincoln, Mary Todd) after a troubled courtship. He continued his interest in politics and entered on the national scene by serving one term in Congress (1847-49). He remained obscure, however, and his attacks as a Whig on the motives behind the Mexican War (though he voted for war supplies) seemed unpatriotic to his constituents, so he lost popularity at home. Lincoln worked hard for the election of the Whig candidate, Zachary Taylor, in 1848, but when he was not rewarded with the office he desired-Commissioner of the General Land Office-he decided to retire from politics and return to the practice of law.

Slavery and the Lincoln-Douglas Debates

The prairie lawyer emerged again into politics in 1854, when he was caught up in the rising quarrel over slavery. He stoutly opposed the policy of Stephen A. Douglas and particularly the Kansas-Nebraska Act. In a speech at Springfield, repeated at Peoria, he attacked the compromises concerning the question of slavery in the territories and invoked the democratic ideals contained in the Declaration of Independence. In 1855 he sought to become a Senator but failed.

He had already realized that his sentiments were leading him away from the Whigs and toward the new Republican party, and in 1856 he became a Republican. He quickly came to the fore in the party as a moderate opponent of slavery who could win both the abolitionists and the conservative free-staters, and at the Republican national convention of 1856 he was prominent as a possible vice presidential candidate. Two years later he was nominated by the Republican party to oppose Douglas in the Illinois senatorial race.

Accepting the nomination (in a speech delivered at Springfield on June 16), Lincoln gave a ringing declaration in support of the Union: "A house divided against itself cannot stand." The campaign that followed was impressive. Lincoln challenged Douglas to a series of debates (seven were held), in which he delivered masterful addresses for the Union and for the democratic idea. He was not an abolitionist, but he regarded slavery as an injustice and an evil, and uncompromisingly opposed its extension.

Presidency

Though Douglas won the senatorial election, Lincoln had made his mark by the debates; he was now a potential presidential candidate. His first appearance in the East was in Feb., 1860, when he spoke at Cooper Union in New York City. He gained a large following in the antislavery states, but his nomination for President by the Republican convention in Chicago (May, 1860) was as much due to the opposition to William H. Seward, the leading contender, as to Lincoln's own appeal. He was nominated on the third ballot. In the election the Democratic party split; Lincoln was opposed by Douglas (Northern Democrat), John C. Breckinridge (Southern Democrat), and John Bell (Constitutional Unionist). Lincoln was elected with a minority of the popular vote.

To the South, Lincoln's election was the signal for secession. All compromise plans, such as that proposed by John J. Crittenden, failed, and by the time of Lincoln's inauguration seven states had seceded. The new President, determined to preserve the Union at all costs, condemned secession but promised that he would not initiate the use of force. After a slight delay, however, he did order the provisioning of Fort Sumter, and the South chose to regard this as an act of war. On Apr. 12, 1861, Fort Sumter was fired upon, and the Civil War began.

Although various criticisms have been leveled against him, it is generally agreed that Lincoln attacked the vast problems of the war with vigor and surpassing skill. He immediately issued a summons to the militia (an act that precipitated the secession of four more Southern states), ordered a blockade of Confederate ports, and suspended habeas corpus. The last action provoked much criticism, but Lincoln adhered to it, ignoring a circuit court ruling against him in the Merryman Case (see Merryman, ex parte). In the course of the war, Lincoln further extended his executive powers, but in general he exercised those powers with restraint. He was beset not only by the difficulties of the war, but by opposition from men on his own side. His cabinet was rent by internal jealousies and hatred; radical abolitionists condemned him as too mild; conservatives were gloomy over the prospects of success in the war.

In the midst of all this strife, Lincoln continued his course, sometimes almost alone, with wisdom and patience. The progress of battle went against the North at first. Lincoln himself made some bad military decisions (e.g., in ordering the direct advance into Virginia that resulted in the Union defeat at the first battle of Bull Run), and he ran through a succession of commanders in chief before he found Ulysses S. Grant. In the early stages of the war Lincoln revoked orders by John C. Frémont and David Hunter freeing the slaves in their military departments. However, the Union victory at Antietam gave him a position of strength from which to issue his own Emancipation Proclamation.

The restoration and preservation of the Union were still the main tenets of Lincoln's war aims. The sorrows of war and its rigorous necessity afflicted him; he expressed both in one of the noblest public speeches ever made, the Gettysburg Address, made at the dedication of the soldiers' cemetery at Gettysburg in 1863. For a time Lincoln was threatened by the desertion of the Republican leaders as well as by a strong opposition party in the presidential election that loomed ahead in the dark days of 1864; but a turn for the better took place before the election, a turn brought about to some extent by a change of military fortune after Grant became commander and particularly after William T. Sherman took Atlanta.

Lincoln was reelected over George B. McClellan by a great majority. His second inaugural address, delivered when the war was drawing to its close, was a plea for the new country that would arise from the ashes of the South. His own view was one of forgiveness, as shown in his memorable phrase "With malice toward none; with charity for all." He lived to see the end of the war, but he was to have no chance to implement his plans for Reconstruction. On the night of Apr. 14, 1865, when attending a performance at Ford's Theater, he was shot by the actor John Wilkes Booth. The next morning Lincoln died. His death was an occasion for grief even among those who had been his opponents, and many considered him a martyr.

The Lincoln Legend

As time passed Lincoln became more and more the object of adulation; a full-blown "Lincoln legend" appeared. Yet, even if his faults and mistakes are acknowledged, he stands out as a statesman of noble vision, great humanity, and remarkable political skill. It is not surprising that the Illinois "rail-splitter" is regarded as a foremost symbol of American democracy. Paintings, sculptures, and architectural works memorializing Lincoln are legion; the most famous shrines are his home and tomb in Springfield, Ill., and the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C.

Bibliography

Innumerable biographies, novels, poems, plays, and essays have been devoted to Lincoln. His collected works were edited by R. P. Basler (9 vol., 1953). See also D. C. Mearns, ed., The Lincoln Papers (1948). The standard older bibliography is J. Monaghan, Lincoln Bibliography, 1839-1939 (2 vol., 1943-45); others are P. M. Angle, A Shelf of Lincoln Books (1946); V. Searcher, Lincoln Today (1969); E. W. Matthews, Lincoln as a Lawyer (1991).

One of the most important early biographies was W. H. Herndon and J. W. Weid, Herndon's Life of Lincoln (3 vol., 1889; ed. by P. M. Angle, 1930, repr. 1965). J. G. Nicolay and J. Hay wrote Abraham Lincoln: A History (10 vol., 1890; abbr. ed. 1966). Probably the most popular biographies are C. Sandburg, Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years (1926) and Abraham Lincoln: The War Years (4 vol., 1939); a one-volume condensation was first published in 1954. See also The Lincoln Reader (1947, repr. 1964; ed. by P. M. Angle) and biographies by A. J. Beveridge (2 vol., 1928; repr. 1971), B. P. Thomas (1952, repr. 1968), S. Lorant (1954, repr. 1961), R. H. Luthin (1960), P. B. Kunhardt, Jr., et al. (1992), S. B. Oates (1984 and 1994); D. H. Donald (1995), A. C. Guelzo (2000), R. Carwardine (2006), M. Burlingame (2 vol., 2008), and R. C. White, Jr. (2009). Almost the only work portraying Lincoln in a completely unfavorable light is E. L. Masters, Lincoln the Man (1931).

Preeminent among the special studies on Lincoln are those of J. G. Randall. See also T. H. Williams, Lincoln and the Radicals (1941, repr. 1965); H. J. Carman and R. H. Luthin, Lincoln and the Patronage (1943, repr. 1964); F. H. Meserve and C. Sandburg, The Photographs of Abraham Lincoln (1944); J. Monaghan, Diplomat in Carpet Slippers (1945, repr. 1962); B. J. Hendrick, Lincoln's War Cabinet (1946, repr. 1965); B. P. Thomas, Portrait for Posterity: Lincoln and His Biographers (1947); W. B. Hesseltine, Lincoln and the War Governors (1948); The Living Lincoln (ed. by P. M. Angle and E. S. Miers, 1955); D. H. Donald, Lincoln Reconsidered (2d ed. 1961, repr. 1989) and "We Are Lincoln Men" (2003); D. E. Fehrenbacher, Prelude to Greatness (1962, repr. 1970) and The Leadership of Abraham Lincoln (1970); W. H. Townsend, Lincoln and the Bluegrass (1989); G. Wills, Lincoln at Gettysburg (1992); J. T. Glatthaar, Partners in Command (1994); M. E. Neely, Jr., The Last Best Hope of Earth (1994) and Lincoln and the Triumph of the Nation (2011); P. S. Paludan, The Presidency of Abraham Lincoln (1994); M. D. Peterson, Lincoln in American Memory (1994); D. L. Wilson, Honor's Voice: The Transformation of Abraham Lincoln (1998) and Lincoln's Sword: The Presidency and the Power of Words (2006); J. Morris, Lincoln (2000); W. L. Miller, Lincoln's Virtues (2002); R. C. White, Jr., Lincoln's Greatest Speech: The Second Inaugural (2002); M. Lind, What Lincoln Believed (2005); D. K. Goodwin, Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln (2005); D. M. Epstein, The Lincolns (2008); A. C. Guelzo, Lincoln and Douglas (2008); F. Kaplan, Lincoln: The Biography of a Writer (2008); P. B. Kunhardt 3d et al., Looking for Lincoln: The Making of an American Icon (2008), J. M. McPherson, Tried By War: Abraham Lincoln as Commander in Chief (2008); C. B. Flood, 1864: Lincoln at the Gates of History (2009); H. L. Gates, Jr., and D. Yacovone, ed., Lincoln on Race and Slavery (2009); E. Foner, The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery (2010); C. L. Symonds, Lincoln and His Admirals (2010).

Sixteenth president of the United States, who, it has been claimed, was influenced in his decision to free the slaves by Spiritualist experiences. Immediately after his election to the presidency, an article was published in the Cleveland Plaindealer based on statements of medium J. B. Conklin, who identified Lincoln as a sympathizer with Spiritualism. Conklin said Lincoln was the unknown individual who frequently attended his séances in New York, asked mental questions, and departed as unnoticed as he had arrived. When the article was shown to Lincoln, he reportedly did not contradict it but said: "The only falsehood in the statement is that the half of it has been told. This article does not begin to tell the wonderful things I have witnessed."

In a letter to Horace Greeley in August 1862, Lincoln stated: "My paramount object is to save the union, and not either to save or destroy slavery." The antislavery proclamation was dated a month later, September 1862, and was issued in January 1863. The change in Lincoln's attitude was at least in part brought about by the influences of Senator Thomas Richmond, by his experiences through the mediums J. B. Conklin, Mrs. Cranston Laurie, Mrs. Miller, Nettie Colburn (later known under her married name Henrietta Maynard), and by Dr. Farnsworth's predictions. Senator Richmond, one of the leading businessmen of Chicago, had a controlling interest in the grain and shipping industries. While chairman of the committee on banks and corporations, he became a personal friend of Lincoln. In his book, God Dealing with Slavery (1870), Richmond reproduced the letters which, under psychic influence, he sent to the president.

Col. S. P. Kase claimed in the Spiritual Scientist that "for four succeeding Sundays Mr. Conklin, the test medium, was a guest at the presidential mansion. The result of these interviews was the President's proposition to his cabinet to issue the proclamation." Col. Kase also narrated President Lincoln's visit, in the company of his wife, in Mrs. Laurie's house. Laurie was a well-known medium. The colonel's daughter, Mrs. Miller, produced strong physical phenomena.

Colburn was another guest. She later became famous as an inspirational speaker, but then she was scarcely out of her teens. She passed into trance, approached the president with closed eyes, and addressed him for a full hour and a half. The sum total of her address was: "This civil war will never cease. The shout of victory will never ring through the North, till you issue a proclamation that shall set free the enslaved millions of your unhappy country."

In the same séance President Lincoln witnessed powerful physical manifestations. The piano on which the medium was playing rose four inches from the floor in spite of the efforts of Col. Kase, Judge Wattles, and the two soldiers who accompanied the president to weigh it down.

In 1891 Colburn (then Mrs. Maynard) published the book Was Abraham Lincoln a Spiritualist? in which she described her very first meeting with President Lincoln. In 1862 in Washington, Mrs. Lincoln had a sitting with her and was so much impressed that she asked her to come and see the president. According to Maynard's account in her book, she delivered a trance address in which the President: "was charged with the utmost solemnity and force of manner not to abate the terms of its [Emancipation Proclamation] issue and not to delay its enforcement as a law beyond the opening of the year; and he was assured that it was to be the crowning event of his administration and his life; and that while he was being counselled by strong parties to defer the enforcement of it, hoping to supplant it by other measures and to delay action, he must in no wise heed such counsel, but stand firm to his convictions and fearlessly perform the work and fulfill the mission for which he had been raised by an overruling Providence. Those present declared that they lost sight of the timid girl in the majesty of the utterance, the strength and force of the language, and the importance of that which was conveyed, and seemed to realise that some strong masculine spirit force was giving speech to almost divine commands. I shall never forget the scene around me when I regained consciousness. I was standing in front of Mr. Lincoln, and he was sitting back in his chair, with his arms folded upon his breast, looking intently at me. I stepped back, naturally confused at the situation—not remembering at once where I was; and glancing around the group where perfect silence reigned. It took me a moment to remember my whereabouts. A gentleman present then said in a low tone: 'Mr. President, did you notice anything peculiar in the method of address?' Mr. Lincoln raised himself, as if shaking off his spell. He glanced quickly at the full-length portrait of Daniel Webster that hung above the piano, and replied: 'Yes, and it is very singular, very!' with a marked emphasis."

On Mr. Some's inquiry whether there had been any pressure brought to bear upon the president to defer the enforcement of the proclamation, Lincoln admitted, "It is taking all my nerve and strength to withstand such a pressure."

Sources:

Berger, Arthur S., and Joyce Berger. The Encyclopedia of Parapsychology and Psychical Research. New York: Paragon House, 1991.

Britten, Emma Hardinge. Nineteenth-Century Miracles. London & Manchester, 1883.

Fleckles, Elliott V. Willie Speaks Out: The Psychic World of Abraham Lincoln. St. Paul, Minn.: Llewellyn Publications, 1974.

Maynard, Nettie Colburn. Was Abraham Lincoln A Spiritualist? Philadelphia: R. C. Hartrampft, 1891. Reprint, London: Psychic Book Club, 1956.

Shirley, Ralph. Short Life of Abraham Lincoln. London: 1919.

A political leader of the nineteenth century; the leader of the Union during the Civil War, and one of the most revered presidents, who served from 1861 to 1865. Lincoln, who worked for a time splitting wood into fence rails, was a lawyer by profession and largely self-taught; there is a familiar image of him studying by firelight in the log cabin in Kentucky in which he was born and raised. First a Whig, he joined the Republican party and was its nominee for the Senate from Illinois in 1858. Lincoln rose to national prominence in a famous series of debates with his opponent in the 1858 election, Stephen A. Douglas (see Lincoln-Douglas debates). He was elected president in 1860. Lincoln was an exceptionally active commander in chief of the army and navy in the Civil War, which broke out the month after his inauguration. During the war, he issued the Emancipation Proclamation, delivered the Gettysburg Address, and approved the Homestead Act. In his second inaugural address (see Lincoln's second inaugural address), delivered in 1865 as the war was ending, he pleaded for restraint and “charity for all” in the aftermath of the war. He never was able to carry out his program of Reconstruction, however, because a supporter of the Confederacy, the actor John Wilkes Booth, assassinated him a few days after the southern states surrendered.

Abraham Lincoln was the sixteenth president of the United States, serving from 1861 until his assassination in April 1865. Lincoln and his supporters preserved the Union by defeating the South in the Civil War.

Lincoln was born February 12, 1809, near Knob Creek, Kentucky. In 1816 his family moved to a farm in Indiana, where he spent the rest of his childhood. He attended school for less than a year and gained most of his education by reading books. In 1828 and 1831, he made flatboat trips down the Mississippi River to take produce to New Orleans. On these trips he was first exposed to the institution of slavery.

In 1830 his family moved to Decatur, Illinois. He left his family in 1831 and moved to New Salem, Illinois, where he worked at various jobs and continued his self-education. He began to study law, then was sidetracked by political ambitions.

In 1832 he ran for the state legislature as a member of the Whig party. He aligned himself with the views of Whig party leader Henry Clay, who served as a U.S. senator from Kentucky. Like Clay, Lincoln promised to use the power of the government to improve the life of the people he represented. During the 1832 campaign, the Black Hawk War erupted in southern Illinois. Lincoln enlisted in the local militia and was elected captain. Though he served for eighty days, he never saw battle. His service in the military distracted him from his campaign for the legislature, and he lost his first election.

In 1834 he was elected to the state legislature. He was reelected in 1836, 1838, and 1840. John T. Stuart, a fellow legislator and also a lawyer, was impressed with Lincoln's intellectual and oratorical abilities and encouraged him to practice law. In the fall of 1836, Lincoln was admitted to the Illinois bar, and in 1837 he became Stuart's law partner in Springfield, Illinois. In 1841 the pair dissolved their partnership and Lincoln began a new partnership with Stephen T. Logan. By 1844 that arrangement had dissolved and Lincoln took William H. Herndon as a partner. Lincoln was a hardworking attorney who over the years represented railroad companies and other business entities. By the 1850s he had argued many times before the Illinois Supreme Court and various federal courts.

However, his interest in politics continued. In 1847 he was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives as a member of the Whig party. His one brief term in this office was detrimental to his career, for his opposition to the Mexican War and his stand on several other issues were received unfavorably by his constituents.

He did not seek reelection in 1848, choosing instead to work on the presidential campaign of Zachary Taylor. After Taylor's victory Lincoln was severely disappointed when he failed to receive a prominent presidential appointment. He abandoned politics and devoted his energies to his law practice in Springfield.

Events involving slavery soon drew Lincoln back into the political arena. The passage in 1854 of the Kansas-Nebraska Act infuriated Lincoln. Senator Stephen A. Douglas, of Illinois, a Democrat and rival of Lincoln's, had drafted this legislation, which revoked the Missouri Compromise of 1820. The repeal meant that the settlers of Kansas and Nebraska could allow slavery to exist if they so wished. This was intolerable to Lincoln and many antislavery Whigs and Democrats. Lincoln took to the political stump again, railing against slavery and the congressional actions that had placed the issue at the forefront of national policy.

The Whig party fell apart over the slavery question. In 1856 Lincoln joined others opposed to slavery from both the Whig and Democrat parties, in the newly formed Republican party. He quickly rose to prominence. The Republicans chose him as their candidate in the 1858 senatorial race against Douglas. The campaign was marked by a series of seven brilliant debates between the two contenders. Lincoln advocated loyalty to the Union, regarded slavery as unjust, and was opposed to any further expansion of slavery. He opened his campaign by declaring, "‘A house divided against itself cannot stand.' I believe this government cannot endure permanently half slave and half free." Lincoln lost the election owing to an unfavorable apportionment of legislative seats in Illinois. (At that time U.S. senators were elected by a vote of the state legislature.) Though Republicans garnered larger numbers of votes, Douglas was reelected.

Despite the Senate loss, Lincoln's national reputation was enhanced by his firm antislavery position. He was urged to run for president in 1860. At the Republican National Convention in Chicago in May 1860, Lincoln defeated William H. Seward for the nomination. A split in the Democratic party led to the fielding of two Democratic candidates, John C. Breckenridge and Douglas. This split enabled Lincoln easily to defeat his rivals, including John Bell, head of the Constitutional Union party. He would be easily reelected in 1864.

By the time Lincoln took his oath of office in March 1861, seven Southern states had seceded from the Union and had established the Confederate States of America. Jefferson Davis was elected president of the new government. Lincoln wished to find a solution short of war that would preserve the Union, but there were few options. When Lincoln allowed supplies to be sent to Fort Sumter, a Union base on an island outside Charleston, South Carolina, the new Confederate government seized the opportunity to interpret this as an act of war. On April 12, 1861, Fort Sumter was attacked by Confederate forces, and the Civil War began.

Lincoln's initial actions against this act of aggression included drafting men for military service, approving a blockade of the Southern states, and suspending the writ of habeas corpus. His troop request led to the secession of Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Arkansas. Suspending habeas corpus effectively curtailed civil liberties, as persons who were suspected of being Southern sympathizers could be held in custody indefinitely. All these actions were taken by executive order, in Lincoln's capacity as commander in chief, because Congress was not in session at the time.

During the early stages of the war, the North suffered great losses, particularly at Bull Run. A succession of Union generals failed to achieve military success. Not until General Ulysses S. Grant emerged in 1863 as a strong and successful military leader did the Union army begin to achieve substantial victories. In 1864 Lincoln named Grant the commander of the Union army. In April 1865 General Robert E. Lee surrendered his Confederate army to Grant at Appomattox, Virginia, signaling the end of the war.

Lincoln fought the Civil War to preserve the Union, not to end slavery. Though he was personally opposed to slavery, he had been elected on a platform that pledged to allow slavery to remain where it already existed. However, wartime pressures drove Lincoln toward emancipation of the slaves. Military leaders argued that an enslaved labor force in the South allowed the Confederate states to place more soldiers on the front lines. By the summer of 1862, Lincoln had prepared an emancipation proclamation, but he did not want to issue it until the Union army had better fortune on the battlefield. Otherwise the proclamation might be seen as a sign of weakness.

The Union army's victory at Antietam encouraged the president to issue on September 22, 1862, a preliminary proclamation that slavery was to be abolished in areas occupied by the Confederacy effective January 1, 1863. The wording of the Emancipation Proclamation on that date made clear that slavery was still to be tolerated in the border states and areas occupied by Union troops, so as not to jeopardize the war effort. Lincoln was uncertain that the U.S. Supreme Court would uphold the constitutionality of his action, so he lobbied Congress to adopt the Thirteenth Amendment, which totally abolished slavery.

Lincoln's writing and speaking skills played a vital part in maintaining the resolve of the Northern states during the war and in preparing the nation for the aftermath of the war. In 1863, at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, Lincoln delivered his poignant Gettysburg Address at the dedication of a national cemetery for soldiers who had died at the bloody battleground. The speech summarized the tragic and human aspects of Gettysburg and distilled Lincoln's resolve to protect the Union. At his second inauguration, in March 1865, Lincoln reached out to the South as the end of the war approached. He proclaimed, "With malice toward none; with charity for all."

Even before the war ended, Lincoln began to formulate a plan for Reconstruction, which included the restoration of Southern state governments and the amnesty of Confederate officials who vowed loyalty to the Union. These proposals met fierce opposition in Congress, as the Radical Republicans sought harsher treatment for the South and its supporters.

The war ended on April 9, 1865, but Lincoln did not have a chance to fight for his Reconstruction proposals. He was shot in the head on April 14 by John Wilkes Booth during the performance of a play at Ford's Theatre, in Washington, D.C. He died the next day. After lying in state in the Capitol, his body was returned to Springfield for burial.

Quotes:

"No man is good enough to govern another man without that other's consent."

"As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master. This expresses my idea of democracy."

"You can fool some of the people all the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you cannot fool all of the people all the time."

"If you once forfeit the confidence of your fellow citizens, you can never regain their respect and esteem. You may fool all of the people some of the time; you can even fool some of the people all the time; but you can't fool all of the people all of the time."

"Determine that the thing can and shall be done, and then we shall find the way."

"How many legs does a dog have if you call the tail a leg? Four. Calling a tail a leg doesn't make it a leg."

See more famous quotes by Abraham Lincoln