Abraham Lincoln
Abraham Lincoln Personal and Political Biography
Abraham Lincoln (February 12, 1809 – April 15, 1865), was the sixteenth President of the United States. Lincoln successfully led his country through its greatest internal crisis, the American Civil War, only to be assassinated as the war was coming to an end. Before becoming the first Republican elected to the Presidency, Lincoln was a lawyer, an Illinois state legislator, a member of the United States House of Representatives, and an unsuccessful candidate for election to the United States Senate.
As an outspoken opponent of the expansion of slavery in the United States, Abraham Lincoln won the Republican Party nomination in 1860 and was elected president later that year. During his time in office, he contributed to the effort to preserve the United States by leading the defeat of the secessionist Confederate States of America in the American Civil War. He introduced measures that resulted in the abolition of slavery, issuing his Emancipation Proclamation in 1863 and promoting the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which passed Congress before Lincoln’s death and was ratified by the states later in 1865.
Abraham Lincoln Supporting War Efforts
Abraham Lincoln closely supervised the victorious war effort, especially the selection of top generals, including Ulysses S. Grant. Historians have concluded that he handled the factions of the Republican Party well, bringing leaders of each faction into his cabinet and forcing them to cooperate. Abraham Lincoln successfully defused a war scare with the United Kingdom in 1861. Under his leadership, the Union took control of the border slave states at the start of the war. Additionally, Lincoln managed his own reelection in the 1864 presidential election.
Abraham Lincoln’s Birth Home
Abraham Lincoln Childhood and Education
Abraham Lincoln was born on February 12, 1809, to Thomas Lincoln and Nancy Hanks, two uneducated farmers, in a one-room log cabin on the 348-acre, Sinking Spring Farm, located in southeast Hardin County, Kentucky (now part of LaRue County). Thus making him the first president born outside the original Thirteen Colonies. Lincoln’s ancestor Samuel Lincoln Hingham, arrived in Massachusetts in the 17th century, but his descendants had gradually moved west, from Pennsylvania to Virginia and then westward to the frontier.
For some time, Thomas Lincoln, Abraham’s father, was a respected and relatively affluent citizen of the Kentucky backcountry. He had purchased the Sinking Spring Farm in December 1808 for $200 cash and assumption of a debt. The family belonged to a Hardshell Baptist church, although Abraham himself never joined their church, or any other church for that matter.
In 1816, the Lincoln family was forced to make a new start in Perry County (now in Spencer County), Indiana. He later noted that this move was “partly on account of slavery,” and partly because of difficulties with land deeds in Kentucky: Unlike land in the Northwest Territory, Kentucky never had a proper U.S. survey, and farmers often had difficulties proving title to their property.
When Lincoln was nine, his mother, then 34 years old, died of milk sickness. Soon afterwards, his father remarried to Sarah Bush Johnston. Lincoln was affectionate toward his stepmother, whom he would call “Mother” for the rest of his life, but he was distant from his father.
In 1830, after more economic and land-title difficulties in Indiana, the family settled on public land in Macon County, Illinois. The following winter was desolate and especially brutal, and the family considered moving back to Indiana. The following year, when his father relocated the family to a new homestead in Coles County, Illinois, 22-year-old Lincoln struck out on his own, canoeing down the Sangamon River to the village of New Salem in Sangamon County. Later that year, hired by New Salem businessman Denton Offutt and accompanied by friends, he took goods from New Salem to New Orleans via flatboat on the Sangamon, Illinois and Mississippi rivers.
Lincoln’s formal education consisted of about 18 months of schooling, but he was largely self-educated and an avid reader. He was also a talented local wrestler and skilled with an axe. Lincoln avoided hunting and fishing because he did not like killing animals, even for food. At 6 foot 4 inches (1.93 m), he was unusually tall, as well as strong.
Abraham Lincoln early Political Career and Military Service
Lincoln’s home in Springfield
Abraham Lincoln began his political career in 1832, at age 23, with an unsuccessful campaign for the Illinois General Assembly, as a member of the Whig Party. The centerpiece of his platform was the undertaking of navigational improvements on the Sangamon River. He believed that this would attract steamboat traffic, which would allow the sparsely populated, poorer areas along the river to flourish.
He was elected captain of an Illinois militia company drawn from New Salem during the Black Hawk War, and later wrote that he had not had “any such success in life which gave him so much satisfaction.” For several months, Abraham Lincoln ran a small store in New Salem. In 1834, he won election to the state legislature, and, after coming across the Commentaries on the Laws of England, began to teach himself law. Admitted to the bar in 1837, he moved to Springfield, Illinois, that same year and began to practice law with John T. Stuart. With a reputation as a formidable adversary during cross-examinations and in his closing arguments, Abraham Lincoln became an able and successful lawyer. Abraham Lincoln served four successive terms in the Illinois House of Representatives as a representative from Sangamon County, and became a leader of the Illinois Whig party. In 1837, he made his first protest against slavery in the Illinois House, stating that the institution was “founded on both injustice and bad policy.” It was also in this same year that Lincoln met Joshua Fry Speed, who would become a close friend.
Abraham Lincoln’s Tomb
Lincoln wrote a series of anonymous letters, published in 1842 in the Sangamon Journal, mocking State Auditor and prominent Democrat James Shields. Two years later, Lincoln entered law practice with William Herndon, a fellow Whig. In 1854, both men joined the fledgling Republican Party. Following Lincoln’s death, Herndon began collecting stories about Lincoln and published them in Herndon’s Lincoln.
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