Abraham Lincoln

Lincoln was born on February 12, 1809, in a one-room log cabin on his father’s Sinking Spring Farm in what was then Hardin County (today LaRue County), Kentucky, near present-day Hodgenville. His parents were Thomas Lincoln and Nancy Hanks Lincoln, and he had an older sister, Sarah.⁠[1][2]

In 1811 the family moved about ten miles to Knob Creek Farm, where they lived for the next five years. In December 1816, when Lincoln was seven, the family moved to southern Indiana and settled near present-day Gentryville, where his father bought federal land. Lincoln later described himself as “raised to farm work.”⁠[1][2]

On October 5, 1818, his mother, Nancy Hanks Lincoln, died of milk sickness, when Lincoln was nine. On December 2, 1819, Thomas Lincoln remarried in Elizabethtown, Kentucky. His stepmother, Sarah Bush Johnston, encouraged his education, and Lincoln called her his “angel mother.”⁠[2][3][4]

Lincoln had less than a year of formal schooling, acquired mostly “by littles,” and taught himself to read, write and do arithmetic.⁠[4]

His sister Sarah died in childbirth in January 1828. At 19, Lincoln built a flatboat, carried farm produce down the Mississippi River to New Orleans, sold the boat for its timber and gave his earnings to his father. In New Orleans he witnessed a slave auction.⁠[1][3]

In March 1830 Lincoln moved with his family to Illinois and settled in Macon County, just west of Decatur. In the spring of 1831 he left his parents, made a second flatboat trip to New Orleans as an independent operator, and in July of that year settled in New Salem at the age of 22.⁠[2][3][1]

In New Salem he worked as a general store clerk, became part owner of a store that later failed, served as postmaster under an appointment from President Andrew Jackson, and worked as a county deputy surveyor; he also split rails and did small legal work to supplement his pay of $55 a year.⁠[3][2]

On April 21, 1832, during the Black Hawk War, Lincoln enlisted in the Illinois militia and served 51 days without seeing action. He was elected temporary captain of his company and finished his service as a private in the Independent Spy Corps.⁠[2][3]

In August 1832 he ran for the Illinois General Assembly for the first time; he won 277 of the 300 votes cast in New Salem but finished eighth of thirteen candidates countywide and lost.⁠[3][2]

On August 4, 1834, he was first elected to the Illinois General Assembly, representing Sangamon County, and was re-elected on August 1, 1836, August 6, 1838 and August 3, 1840, serving four terms as a Whig until 1841. In 1837 he was one of five of the 83 legislators who opposed a resolution condemning abolitionists.⁠[2][3]

Encouraged by John T. Stuart, Lincoln studied law on his own and argued cases before a local justice of the peace. On September 9, 1836, he received his license to practice law from the Illinois Supreme Court, and in March 1837 he was admitted as an attorney.⁠[1][3][2]

On April 15, 1837, he moved to Springfield and became the junior law partner of John Todd Stuart. From September 23, 1839, he rode the Eighth Judicial Circuit, which he continued until his election as president. On April 14, 1841, his partnership with Stuart ended and he became the law partner of Stephen T. Logan; in 1844 he opened his own practice, with William H. Herndon as junior partner.⁠[2]

In 1839 Lincoln met Mary Todd at a ball; they began courting in 1840, broke off their engagement on January 1, 1841, and later resumed courting in secret. On November 4, 1842, the Rev. Charles Dresser married them at the Edwards home, and the next day they rented a room at the Globe Tavern.⁠[2]

Their first son, Robert Todd Lincoln, was born at the Globe Tavern on August 1, 1843. On January 16, 1844, Lincoln bought the house at Eighth and Jackson Streets in Springfield from Dresser for $1,500, and the family moved in on May 1; it was the only home he ever owned.⁠[2][5]

Their second son, Edward Baker Lincoln, was born at home on March 10, 1846, and died on February 1, 1850, aged three, after about 52 days of illness, probably tuberculosis. Their third son, William Wallace (Willie) Lincoln, was born on December 21, 1850, and their fourth, Thomas (Tad) Lincoln, on April 4, 1853.⁠[2]

Of the four sons, only Robert reached adulthood, and he went on to a career in law, business and government; Tad died at eighteen, several years after his father. Mary Todd Lincoln described her husband as “the kindest man and most loving husband and father in the world.”⁠[6][1]

Lincoln won the Whig nomination for Illinois’s Seventh Congressional District; war with Mexico began ten days later, and he said nothing about it during the campaign. On August 3, 1846, he was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives, his only seat in Congress. The family moved to Washington, D.C., in 1847, and he took his seat on December 6 of that year.⁠[3][2]

On December 22, 1847, Lincoln introduced the “Spot Resolutions” in the House, challenging President James K. Polk’s claim that Mexican forces had shed American blood on American soil and asking the president to identify “the spot of soil on which the blood of our citizens was shed.” He also denounced Polk in a House speech, arguing that the war had begun on contested territory.⁠[7][3]

In 1848 he campaigned for the Whig presidential candidate, Zachary Taylor; that year Mary and the boys left Washington, and Lincoln later described his political life there as dull and tasteless. In 1849 he proposed legislation to begin abolishing slavery in the District of Columbia.⁠[3][2]

From 1849 to 1854 Lincoln practiced law in Springfield and became one of the more successful lawyers in Illinois.⁠[3]

On May 30, 1854, the Kansas–Nebraska Act passed, drawing Lincoln back into politics. On November 7 of that year he was re-elected to the Illinois legislature but resigned 20 days later to run for the U.S. Senate; on the ninth ballot he withdrew in favor of Lyman Trumbull, and his Senate bid ended in defeat on February 8, 1855.⁠[2][3]

In 1856 Lincoln joined the new Republican Party, which opposed the expansion of slavery and the Kansas–Nebraska Act. That year he was placed in nomination for vice president at the party’s convention in Philadelphia but was not chosen.⁠[3]

On June 16, 1858, at the close of the Illinois Republican State Convention in Springfield, which had nominated him for the U.S. Senate the day before, Lincoln delivered his “House Divided” speech, aimed at Senator Stephen A. Douglas and at Republicans who might support Douglas. “A house divided against itself cannot stand,” he said, adding that he believed “this government cannot endure, permanently half slave and half free.” He tied the Nebraska doctrine and the Dred Scott decision to a broader effort to spread slavery nationwide.⁠[8]

That year Lincoln and Douglas held seven debates in Illinois: Ottawa (August 21), Freeport (August 27), Jonesboro (September 15), Charleston (September 18), Galesburg (October 7), Quincy (October 13) and Alton (October 15).⁠[9]

After the election of November 2, 1858, the Illinois legislature chose Douglas over Lincoln by 54 votes to 46 in 1859; Lincoln lost the Senate seat, but the campaign made him a national figure.⁠[2][3]

In May 1860 the Republican National Convention met in Chicago. Seward led on the first ballot, 173½ to 102; Lincoln gained 79 votes on the second ballot and won on the third, and on May 18 the convention nominated him for president, with Hannibal Hamlin for vice president.⁠[10][2]

The Democrats split at Charleston and reconvened in Baltimore, where they nominated Stephen Douglas; Southern Democrats nominated John C. Breckinridge, and the Constitutional Union Party nominated John Bell. On October 19, 1860, Lincoln received a letter from Grace Bedell suggesting that he grow a beard.⁠[10][2]

On November 6, 1860, Lincoln was elected the 16th president of the United States with 180 electoral votes, against 72 for Breckinridge, 39 for Bell and 12 for Douglas. He carried every Northern state but one; Bell and Douglas together received nearly 100,000 more popular votes than Lincoln.⁠[2][10]

On December 20, 1860, South Carolina became the first state to secede, and on February 8, 1861, the Confederate States of America was established.⁠[2]

On February 11, 1861, about a thousand people gathered at the Springfield depot; Lincoln gave a brief farewell address from the rear platform of the train and left for Washington, D.C., leaving the home he had occupied for nearly 25 years.⁠[1][2]

On March 4, 1861, Lincoln was inaugurated and delivered his First Inaugural Address, warning the South that the choice of civil war lay in its hands, not his. He considered secession illegal and was willing to use force to defend federal law and the Union.⁠[2][11]

On April 12, 1861, the Civil War began with the Confederate attack on Fort Sumter; the fort surrendered on April 14, and on April 15 Lincoln called for 75,000 volunteers. Four more slave states then joined the Confederacy, while four remained in the Union.⁠[2][11]

Douglas died on June 3, 1861, and Lincoln declared a 30-day mourning period. On July 21 the Confederates won the First Battle of Manassas. On August 28–30, 1862, they won the Second Battle of Manassas; the Battle of Antietam on September 16–18 ended inconclusively but was a strategic victory for the Union.⁠[2]

On July 1–3, 1863, Union forces won at Gettysburg, and on July 4 they took Vicksburg. On September 1, 1864, Union forces took Atlanta; on December 21–22 Sherman occupied Savannah and presented it to Lincoln as an early Christmas gift. On April 9, 1865, Lee surrendered to Grant at Appomattox Court House.⁠[2]

Shortly after the war began, Lincoln issued an executive order placing under martial law those who discouraged enlistment or engaged in disloyal acts, which suspended habeas corpus; between 15,000 and 20,000 citizens were arrested.⁠[12]

The war lasted more than four years and killed more than 600,000 Americans. Lincoln’s government raised an army and navy of nearly three million Northern men, and the Union victory ended the argument that state sovereignty overrode federal authority.⁠[13]

On February 20, 1862, Willie died at the White House, aged 11, probably of typhoid fever. Lincoln grieved deeply over his son’s death, and Mary struggled with depression; Lincoln often coped with his anguish through humor and by speaking eloquently about the war.⁠[2][13]

On May 20, 1862, Lincoln signed the Homestead Act, which granted 160 acres to adult citizens, or those intending to become citizens, who headed a family, after a small fee and five years of residence; settlers could also gain ownership after six months by paying $1.25 an acre. About 15,000 claims had been filed by the end of the war.⁠[12]

The same year he signed the Morrill Land Grant Act, sponsored by Senator Justin Smith Morrill of Vermont, which gave the states federal land, about 30,000 acres per senator and representative and roughly 17 million acres in all, to fund colleges of agriculture and the mechanical arts.⁠[12]

Under the Legal Tender Act of 1862 the government issued “greenbacks,” notes not backed by gold or silver but required to be accepted as legal tender for debts. In 1863 Lincoln signed the national banking legislation passed by Congress, which authorized chartered national banks to issue notes backed by U.S. bonds, creating demand for government bonds.⁠[12]

On July 22, 1862, Lincoln informed his cabinet of his plan for emancipation. On September 22, a few days after the Union victory at Antietam, he issued the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, warning that unless the rebel states ended the fighting and returned to the Union by January 1, 1863, “all persons held as slaves within any State, or designated part of a State . . . shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free.”⁠[12][14][15]

On January 1, 1863, Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, declaring that “all persons held as slaves” in the rebellious areas “are, and henceforward shall be free.” It applied only to states and parts of states still in rebellion, leaving out the loyal border states and areas already under Union control. Lincoln framed it as a war measure, so the freedom it promised depended on Union military victory.⁠[15]

The proclamation opened the Union Army and Navy to Black men; by the end of the war almost 200,000 Black soldiers and sailors had served the Union.⁠[15]

On November 19, 1863, at the dedication of the Soldiers’ National Cemetery at Gettysburg, Lincoln spoke after Edward Everett.⁠[16]

In the Nicolay copy, the address opens with “Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth, upon this continent, a new nation, conceived in liberty” and closes with the words “government of the people by the people for the people, shall not perish from the earth.” In it Lincoln presented the war as involving a larger issue, a “new birth of freedom” for the nation.⁠[17][11]

Five manuscript copies of the address are known; the Library of Congress holds two of them, the copies Lincoln gave to his private secretaries John Nicolay and John Hay.⁠[16]

In April 1864 the Senate passed the Thirteenth Amendment abolishing slavery, but the House at first did not. Lincoln pushed for its passage and had it added to the Republican platform for the 1864 presidential election. On January 31, 1865, the House passed it by 119 votes to 56, and on February 1 Lincoln approved the joint resolution sending it to the states.⁠[18][12]

Section 1 of the amendment begins “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude” and bars both anywhere in the United States or under its jurisdiction, except as punishment for a crime of which the party has been duly convicted. The required three-fourths of the states ratified it by December 6, 1865, after Lincoln’s death.⁠[18]

On May 31, 1864, Radical Republicans met in Cleveland and nominated John C. Frémont, though most later returned to Lincoln. In June Lincoln was renominated on the first ballot in Baltimore, and Andrew Johnson, a Union Democrat from Tennessee, replaced Hamlin as his running mate.⁠[10]

The Democrats met in Chicago in August and nominated General George B. McClellan on a platform calling the war a failure; McClellan repudiated it and backed preserving the Union “at all hazards.”⁠[10]

As Union victories signaled the end of the war, Lincoln defeated McClellan on November 8, 1864, winning about 55 percent of the popular vote and 22 states and losing only Delaware, Kentucky and New Jersey. His plans for peace were flexible and generous, encouraging Southerners to lay down their arms and rejoin the Union quickly.⁠[2][10][11]

On March 4, 1865, 41 days before his assassination, Lincoln delivered his Second Inaugural Address, whose closing passage reads: “With malice toward none with charity for all with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right.” The speech is engraved on the north interior wall of the Lincoln Memorial.⁠[19]

John Wilkes Booth was a well-known Shakespearean actor, a strong Confederate sympathizer who held white supremacist views and opposed Lincoln’s wartime measures. He was enraged by Lincoln’s speech of April 11, 1865, which discussed voting rights for some African American men.⁠[20]

On the evening of April 14, Good Friday, Lincoln, his wife Mary and their guests Major Henry Rathbone and his fiancée Clara Harris were watching the comedy Our American Cousin at Ford’s Theatre in Washington. At about 10:15 p.m., during Act 3, Scene 2, as the audience laughed, Booth shot Lincoln. Lincoln was not closely guarded: the lone D.C. police officer assigned to him, John Parker, was only to escort him between the White House and the theatre, and his whereabouts during the shooting are unknown.⁠[21][11]

The bullet entered the back left side of Lincoln’s head, passed through his brain and lodged behind one eye; he never regained consciousness. Dr. Charles Leale and Dr. Charles Sabin Taft reached the box soon afterward and, fearing that a carriage ride would kill him, did not take him to a hospital. He was carried across the street to the house of William A. Petersen, a German tailor, and laid in a back bedroom; more than 90 people came through the house that night.⁠[22][23]

Lincoln died in the Petersen House at 7:22 a.m. on April 15, aged 56. Those almost certainly present included his son Robert Todd Lincoln, Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles, his secretary John Hay, Senator Charles Sumner and several physicians; Mary Lincoln had been removed from the room at about 7 a.m. on Stanton’s orders.⁠[24][2]

After the shooting Booth ran across the stage and out a back door to an alley, where he rode away. He was the mastermind of the plot and had sent George Atzerodt to target Vice President Andrew Johnson and Lewis Powell to attack Secretary of State William Seward, with David Herold accompanying Powell. A military court convicted eight conspirators; four, including Mary Surratt, were sentenced to hang, and Surratt became the first woman executed by the federal government.⁠[20]

On April 19, 1865, funeral services were held at the White House, and the funeral procession moved down Pennsylvania Avenue. On April 21 the funeral train left Washington on a 12-day journey to Springfield, arriving on May 3; Lincoln’s body lay in state at the Old State Capitol and was buried at Oak Ridge Cemetery on May 4. Mary left the White House on May 22.⁠[2][22]

Mary Todd Lincoln died in 1882 and Robert Todd Lincoln in 1926. Robert Todd Lincoln Beckwith, the last direct descendant of Abraham Lincoln, died in 1985.⁠[2]

In 1911 Congress created the Lincoln Memorial Commission. Construction began on February 12, 1914; the architect Henry Bacon took the Parthenon as his main inspiration, the sculptor Daniel Chester French created the 19-foot statue of Lincoln, and Jules Guerin painted two interior murals, each 60 feet long.⁠[25]

The memorial is 190 feet long, 120 feet wide and 99 feet tall and is built of Colorado Yule marble.⁠[26]

On May 30, 1922, Presidents Taft, Harding and Coolidge, together with Lincoln’s son Robert, dedicated the memorial. The Gettysburg Address and the Second Inaugural Address are carved into its interior walls.⁠[25]

Lincoln stood six feet four inches tall and was known as “Honest Abe,” the Rail-Splitter and the Great Emancipator. He was a good-natured, sometimes moody storyteller and mimic who made friends easily.⁠[4]

Historians almost unanimously regard Lincoln as “the greatest President in American history,” largely for his wartime leadership and its lasting effect on the nation’s moral and political character; the Gettysburg Address and his second inaugural address of 1865 are counted among the great speeches in American history.⁠[13]

His enduring appeal rests on his rise from humble origins, his dramatic death, his humane personality and his role as savior of the Union and emancipator, as well as his eloquence as a spokesman for democracy. Recent scholarship has examined his political side and especially his racial views.⁠[4]