A “government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth,” Abraham Lincoln, said, along with the ideal “that all men are created equal.”
Lincoln, the 16th president of the United States, is regarded as one of America’s greatest heroes due to his role as savior of the Union and freer of slaves. “Those who deny freedom to others, deserve it not for themselves,” he said.
Lincoln’s rise from humble beginnings to achieving the highest office in the land is a remarkable story.
Family
The 16th president was born to Thomas Lincoln and Nancy Hanks Lincoln. Thomas was a strong and determined pioneer who found a moderate level of prosperity and was well respected in the community.
The couple had two other children: Lincoln’s older sister Sarah and younger brother Thomas, who died in infancy.
When young Lincoln was nine years old, his mother died of tremetol (milk sickness) at age 34, on October 5, 1818. The event was devastating to him, and young Lincoln grew more alienated from his father and quietly resented the hard work placed on him at an early age.
In December 1819, just over a year after his mother’s death, Lincoln’s father Thomas married Sarah Bush Johnston, a Kentucky widow with three children of her own. She was a strong and affectionate woman with whom Lincoln quickly bonded.
Early Life and Education
The Lincolns were forced to move from Lincoln’s birthplace of Kentucky to Perry County, Indiana, due to a land dispute in 1817.
In Indiana, the family “squatted” on public land to scrap out a living in a crude shelter, hunting game and farming a small plot. Lincoln’s father was eventually able to buy the land.
Though both his parents were most likely illiterate, Thomas’ new wife Sarah encouraged Lincoln to read. It was while growing into manhood that Lincoln received his formal education — an estimated total of 18 months — a few days or weeks at a time.
Reading material was in short supply in the Indiana wilderness. Neighbors recalled how Lincoln would walk for miles to borrow a book. He undoubtedly read the family Bible and probably other popular books at that time such as Robinson Crusoe, Pilgrim’s Progress and Aesop’s Fables
In March 1830, the family again migrated, this time to Macon County, Illinois. When his father moved the family again to Coles County, 22-year-old Lincoln struck out on his own, making a living in manual labor.
The Young Adult Lincoln
Lincoln was six feet four inches tall, rawboned and lanky, but muscular and physically strong. He spoke with a backwoods twang and walked with a long-striding gait. He was known for his skill in wielding an ax and early on made a living splitting wood for fire and rail fencing.
Young Lincoln eventually migrated to the small community of New Salem, Illinois, where over a period of years he worked as a shopkeeper, postmaster and eventually general store owner. It was there that Lincoln, working with the public, acquired social skills and honed storytelling talent that made him popular with the locals.
When the Black Hawk War broke out in 1832 between the United States and Native Americans, the volunteers in the area elected Lincoln to be their captain. He saw no combat during this time, save for “a good many bloody struggles with the mosquitoes,” but was able to make several important political connections.
Lawyer and Politician
In 1834, Lincoln began his political career and was elected to the Illinois state legislature as a member of the Whig Party.
It was around this time that he decided to become a lawyer, teaching himself the law by reading William Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England. After being admitted to the bar in 1837, he moved to Springfield, Illinois, and began to practice in the John T. Stuart law firm.
In 1844, Lincoln partnered with William Herndon in the practice of law. Though the two had different jurisprudent styles, they developed a close professional and personal relationship.
Lincoln made a good living in his early years as a lawyer, but found that Springfield alone didn’t offer enough work, so to supplement his income, he followed the court as it made its rounds on the circuit to the various county seats in Illinois.
Children and Wife
Lincoln was married to Mary Todd on November 4, 1842. Todd was a high-spirited, well-educated woman from a distinguished Kentucky family.
When the couple became engaged in 1840, many of their friends and family couldn’t understand Mary’s attraction; at times Lincoln questioned it himself. In 1841, the engagement was suddenly broken off, most likely at Lincoln’s initiative.
Mary and Lincoln met later at a social function and eventually married in 1842. The couple had four sons – Robert Todd, Edward Baker, William Wallace and Thomas “Tad” – of whom only Robert Todd survived to adulthood.
Before marrying Todd, Lincoln was involved with other potential matches. Around 1837, he purportedly met and became romantically involved with Anne Rutledge. Before they had a chance to be engaged, a wave of typhoid fever came over New Salem and Anne died at age 22.
Her death was said to have left Lincoln severely depressed. However, several historians disagree on the extent of Lincoln’s relationship with Rutledge and his level of sorrow at her death may be more the makings of legend.
About a year after the death of Rutledge, Lincoln courted Mary Owens. The two saw each other for a few months and marriage was considered. But in time, Lincoln called off the match.
“Honest Abe”
Mary Todd Lincoln once wrote to a friend that “Mr. Lincoln . . . is almost monomaniac on the subject of honesty.”
The future president was first called “Honest Abe” when he was working as a young store clerk in New Salem, Ill. According to one story, whenever he realized he had shortchanged a customer by a few pennies, he would close the shop and deliver the correct change-regardless of how far he had to walk.
People recognized his integrity and were soon asking him to act as judge or mediator in various contests, fights, and arguments. According to Robert Rutledge of New Salem, “Lincoln’s judgment was final in all that region of country. People relied implicitly upon his honesty, integrity, and impartiality.”
As a member of the Illinois legislature and later in his law practice, he took advantage of his reputation for honesty and fairness to help broaden his constituency. His good name helped win him four consecutive terms in the legislature.
Speaking of the legal profession, Lincoln admitted there was a “popular belief that lawyers are necessarily dishonest.” His advice to potential lawyers was: “Resolve to be honest at all events; and if in your judgment you cannot be an honest lawyer, resolve to be honest without being a lawyer. Choose some other occupation, rather than one in the choosing of which you do, in advance, consent to be a knave.”
According to Judge David Davis, in whose court Lincoln practiced for many years, “The framework for [Lincoln’s] mental and moral being was honesty, and a wrong cause was poorly defended by him.” Another judge who had worked with Lincoln agreed, saying “Such was the transparent candor and integrity of his nature that he could not well or strongly argue a side or a cause he thought wrong.”
Political Career
Lincoln served a single term in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1847 to 1849. His foray into national politics seemed to be as unremarkable as it was brief. He was the lone Whig from the state of Illinois, showing party loyalty, but finding few political allies.
Lincoln used his term in office to speak out against the Mexican-American War and supported Zachary Taylor for president in 1848. His criticism of the war made him unpopular back home and he decided not to run for second term, but instead returned to Springfield to practice law.
By the 1850s, the railroad industry was moving west and Illinois found itself becoming a major hub for various companies. Lincoln served as a lobbyist for the Illinois Central Railroad as its company attorney.
Success in several court cases brought other business clients as well — banks, insurance companies and manufacturing firms. Lincoln also worked in some criminal trials.
In one case, a witness claimed that he could identify Lincoln’s client who was accused of murder, because of the intense light from a full moon. Lincoln referred to an almanac and proved that the night in question had been too dark for the witness to see anything clearly. His client was acquitted.
Lincoln and Slavery
As a member of the Illinois state legislature in 1834, Lincoln supported the Whig politics of government-sponsored infrastructure and protective tariffs. This political understanding led him to formulate his early views on slavery, not so much as a moral wrong, but as an impediment to economic development.
In 1854, Congress passed the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which repealed the Missouri Compromise, allowing individual states and territories to decide for themselves whether to allow slavery. The law provoked violent opposition in Kansas and Illinois, and it gave rise to the Republican Party.
This awakened Lincoln’s political zeal once again, and his views on slavery moved more toward moral indignation. Lincoln joined the Republican Party in 1856.
In 1857, the Supreme Court issued its controversial Dred Scott decision, declaring African Americans were not citizens and had no inherent rights. Though Lincoln felt African Americans were not equal to whites, he believed America’s founders intended that all men were created with certain inalienable rights.
Senate Race
Lincoln decided to challenge sitting U.S. Senator Stephen Douglas for his seat. In his nomination acceptance speech, he criticized Douglas, the Supreme Court, and President James Buchanan for promoting slavery and declared “a house divided cannot stand.”
During Lincoln’s 1858 U.S. Senate campaign against Douglas, he participated in seven debates held in different cities across Illinois. The two candidates didn’t disappoint the public, giving stirring debates on issues ranging from states’ rights to western expansion, but the central issue was slavery.
President Lincoln
With his newly enhanced political profile, in 1860, political operatives in Illinois organized a campaign to support Lincoln for the presidency. On May 18, at the Republican National Convention in Chicago, Lincoln surpassed better-known candidates such as William Seward of New York and Salmon P. Chase of Ohio.
Lincoln’s nomination was due in part to his moderate views on slavery, his support for improving the national infrastructure, and the protective tariff.
In the general election, Lincoln faced his friend and rival, Stephen Douglas, this time besting him in a four-way race that included John C. Breckinridge of the Northern Democrats and John Bell of the Constitution Party.
Lincoln received not quite 40 percent of the popular vote, but carried 180 of 303 Electoral College votes, thus winning the U.S. presidency.
Civil War
Before Lincoln’s inauguration in March 1861, seven Southern states had seceded from the Union, and by April the U.S. military installation Fort Sumter was under siege in Charleston Harbor, South Carolina.
In the early morning hours of April 12, 1861, the guns stationed to protect the harbor blazed toward the fort signaling the start of the U.S. Civil War, America’s costliest and bloodiest war.
Lincoln responded to the crisis wielding powers as no other president before him: He distributed $2 million from the Treasury for war material without an appropriation from Congress; he called for 75,000 volunteers into military service without a declaration of war; and he suspended the writ of habeas corpus, arresting and imprisoning suspected Confederate States sympathizers without a warrant.
Crushing the rebellion would be difficult under any circumstances, but the Civil War, after decades of white-hot partisan politics, was especially onerous. From all directions, Lincoln faced disparagement and defiance. He was often at odds with his generals, his Cabinet, his party and a majority of the American people.
Emancipation Proclamation
On January 1, 1863, Lincoln delivered the Emancipation Proclamation, reshaping the cause of the Civil War from saving the Union to abolishing slavery.
The Union Army’s first year and a half of battlefield defeats made it difficult to keep up morale and support strong for a reunification of the nation. And the Union victory at Antietam on September 22, 1862, while by no means conclusive, was hopeful, giving Lincoln the confidence to officially change the goals of the war.
Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation stated that all individuals who were held as slaves in rebellious states “henceforward shall be free.” The action was more symbolic than effective because the North didn’t control any states in rebellion and the proclamation didn’t apply to Border States, Tennessee or some Louisiana parishes.
Gettysburg Address
On November 19, 1863, Lincoln delivered what would become his most famous speech and one of the most important speeches in American history, the Gettysburg Address.
Addressing a crowd of around 15,000 people, Lincoln delivered his 272-word speech at one of the bloodiest battlefields of the Civil War, the Gettysburg National Cemetery in Pennsylvania.
The Civil War, Lincoln said, was the ultimate test of the preservation of the Union created in 1776, and the people who died at Gettysburg fought to uphold this cause.
Lincoln evoked the Declaration of Independence, saying it was up to the living to ensure that the “government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth,” and this Union was “dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.”
A common interpretation was that the President was expanding the cause of the Civil War from simply reunifying the Union to also fighting for equality and abolishing slavery.
Civil War Ends
Following Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation in 1863, the war effort gradually improved for the North, though more by attrition than by brilliant military victories.
But by 1864, the Confederate armies had eluded major defeat and Lincoln was convinced he’d be a one-term president. His nemesis, George B. McClellan, the former commander of the Army of the Potomac, challenged him for the presidency, but the contest wasn’t even close. Lincoln received 55 percent of the popular vote and 212 of 243 Electoral votes.
On April 9, 1865, General Robert E. Lee, commander of the Army of Virginia, surrendered his forces to Union General Ulysses S. Grant. The Civil War was for all intents and purposes over.
Reconstruction has already began during the Civil War as early as 1863 in areas firmly under Union military control, and Lincoln favored a policy of quick reunification with a minimum of retribution.
He was confronted by a radical group of Republicans in the Senate and House that wanted complete allegiance and repentance from former Confederates. Before a political debate had any chance to firmly develop, Lincoln was assassinated.
Assassination
On April 15, 1865, at 7:22 a.m. precisely, Lincoln died from a bullet wound inflicted the night before by John Wilkes Booth, an actor and Confederate sympathizer. The president’s death came only six days after Confederate General Robert E. Lee surrendered his massive army at Appomattox Court House, effectively ending the American Civil War.
Booth, who remained in the North during the war despite his Confederate sympathies, initially plotted to capture President Lincoln and take him to Richmond, the Confederate capital. However, on March 20, 1865, the day of the planned kidnapping, the president failed to appear at the spot where Booth and his six fellow conspirators lay in wait. Two weeks later, Richmond fell to Union forces. In April, with Confederate armies near collapse across the South, Booth hatched a desperate plan to save the Confederacy.
Learning that Lincoln was to attend Laura Keene’s acclaimed performance in Our American Cousin at Ford’s Theater on April 14, Booth plotted the simultaneous assassination of Lincoln, Vice President Andrew Johnson, and Secretary of State William H. Seward. By murdering the president and two of his possible successors, Booth and his conspirators hoped to throw the U.S. government into a paralyzing disarray.
On the evening of April 14, conspirator Lewis T. Powell burst into Secretary of State Seward’s home, seriously wounding him and three others, while George A. Atzerodt, assigned to Vice President Johnson, lost his nerve and fled. Meanwhile, just after 10 p.m., Booth entered Lincoln’s private box unnoticed and shot the president with a single bullet in the back of his head. Slashing an army officer who rushed at him, Booth jumped to the stage and shouted “Sic semper tyrannis! [Thus always to tyrants]–the South is avenged!” Although Booth had broken his left leg jumping from Lincoln’s box, he succeeded in escaping Washington.
The president, mortally wounded, was carried to a cheap lodging house opposite Ford’s Theater. An hour after dawn the next morning, Abraham Lincoln died, becoming the first president to be assassinated. His body was taken to the White House, where it lay until April 18, at which point it was carried to the Capitol rotunda to lay in state on a catafalque. On April 21, Lincoln’s body was taken to the railroad station and boarded on a train that conveyed it to Springfield, Illinois, his home before becoming president. Tens of thousands of Americans lined the train’s railroad route and paid their respects to their fallen leader during the train’s solemn progression through the North. Lincoln was buried on May 4, 1865, at Oak Ridge Cemetery, near Springfield.
Booth, pursued by the army and secret service forces, was finally cornered in a barn near Bowling Green, Virginia, and died from a bullet wound as the barn was burned to the ground. Of the eight other persons eventually charged with the conspiracy, four were hanged.
Legacy
Lincoln is frequently cited by historians and average citizens alike as America’s greatest president. An aggressively activist commander-in-chief, Lincoln used every power at his disposal to assure victory in the Civil War and end slavery in the United States.
Some scholars doubt that the Union would have been preserved had another person of lesser character been in the White House. According to historian Michael Burlingame, “No president in American history ever faced a greater crisis and no president ever accomplished as much.”
Lincoln’s philosophy was perhaps best summed up in this Second Inaugural Address, when he stated, “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 peace among ourselves and with all nations.” – Compiled from Biography.com / greatamericanhistory.net/
