Abraham Lincoln

president abraham lincoln
sixteenth president of the united states  

interesting facts  
Abraham Lincoln made the short-lived Union Party when he ran for a second term as President.

quotations
"In your hands, my dissatisfied fellow countrymen, and not in mine, is the momentous issue of civil war. The government will not assail you.... You have no oath registered in Heaven to destroy the government, while I shall have the most solemn one to preserve, protect and defend it." - Inaugural Address
"I believe this government cannot endure permanently half slave and half free." - Speech, June 16, 1858.
"With malice towards none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right." - Second Inaugural Address.
"That this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth." - Speech at Gettysburg

biography
Abraham Lincoln's early life is best summarized in his own words: "I was born Feb. 12, 1809, in Hardin County, Kentucky. My parents were both born in Virginia, of undistinguished families--second families, perhaps I should say. My mother, who died in my tenth year, was of a family of the name of Hanks.... My father ... removed from Kentucky to ... Indiana, in my eighth year.... It was a wild region, with many bears and other wild animals still in the woods. There I grew up.... Of course when I came of age I did not know much. Still somehow, I could read, write, and cipher ... but that was all."

When his father could spare him from chores, Lincoln attended an ABC school. Such schools were held in log cabins, and often the teachers were barely more educated than their pupils. According to Lincoln, "no qualification was ever required of a teacher beyond readin', writin', and cipherin', to the Rule of Three." Including a few weeks at a similar school in Kentucky, Lincoln had less than one full year of formal education in his entire life.

Abe's stepmother encouraged his quest for knowledge. At an early age he could read, write, and do simple arithmetic. Books were scarce on the Indiana frontier, but besides the family Bible, which Lincoln knew well, he was able to read the classical authors Aesop, John Bunyan, and Daniel Defoe, as well as William Grimshaw's History of the United States (1820) and Mason Locke Weems's Life and Memorable Actions of George Washington (about 1800). This biography of George Washington made a lasting impression on Lincoln, and he made the ideals of Washington and the founding fathers of the United States his own.

At the age of 19, being 6 ft. 4 in (1.93 m), lean and muscular, Abraham Lincoln found a job ferrying people across the Mississippi River. In 1828, he was hired officially ferrying merchandise instead of people. Soon, Lincoln made extraordinary efforts to attain knowledge while working on a farm, splitting rails for fences, and keeping store at New Salem, Illinois. He was a captain in the Black Hawk War. Lincoln then opened a general store in New Salem with William F. Berry as his partner. But Berry misused the profits, and in a few months the venture failed. Berry died in 1835, leaving Lincoln responsible for debts amounting to $1100. It took him several years to pay them off. After the general store failed, Lincoln was appointed postmaster of New Salem. The appointment came from Jackson's Democratic administration. Lincoln's Whig views were well known, but, as Lincoln explained it, the postmaster's job was "too insignificant to make his politics an objection." As postmaster, Lincoln earned $60 a year plus a percentage of the receipts on postage. He ran an informal post office, often doing favors for friends, such as undercharging them for mailing letters. The job gave him time to read, and he made a habit of reading all the newspapers that came through the office. To augment his income, he became the deputy surveyor of Sangamon County.

In 1834 Lincoln again ran for representative to the Illinois legislature. By then he was known throughout the county, and many Democrats gave him their votes. He was elected in 1834 and reelected in 1836, 1838, and 1840. Meanwhile, Lincoln continued his study of law, and in 1836 he became a licensed attorney. The following year he became a junior partner in John T. Stuart's law firm and moved from New Salem to Springfield. Lincoln was extremely poor and arrived in Springfield on a borrowed horse with all his belongings in two saddlebags. A Springfield storekeeper, Joshua Fry Speed, whom Lincoln later called "my most intimate friend," gave Lincoln free lodging.

Meanwhile, Lincoln is said to have fallen in love with Ann Rutledge. However, she died in 1835 and Lincoln is said to have been "plunged in despair". But Lincoln in his later years never referred to Ann Rutledge, and authorities are unanimous in agreeing that the Lincoln-Rutledge romance is a myth. In 1836, less than 18 months after Ann Rutledge's death, Lincoln proposed to Mary Owens. Turning him down, she later said "I thought Mr. Lincoln was deficient in those little links which make up the chain of a woman's happiness." In 1840, Lincoln met a cultured, high-strung Kentucky woman named Mary Todd, who was staying with a married sister in Springfield. After a long courtship, they were married on November 4, 1842. A week later, Lincoln wrote a fellow lawyer, "Nothing new here, except my marrying, which to me, is a matter of profound wonder." They had four boys, only one of whom lived to maturity.

In 1856 Lincoln publicly identified himself as a Republican, and in May he attended the Republican state convention at Bloomington. The moderate antislavery resolutions of this convention were acceptable to Lincoln. He signified his approval of the new party by giving the main address at the convention. This speech, considered by many to be his most compelling, has been lost. At the Republican national convention, John C. Frémont was nominated for president. The Illinois delegation proposed Lincoln for vice president, but, although he received 110 convention votes, the nomination went to William C. Dayton of New Jersey. Lincoln campaigned for the Republican ticket in Illinois and in Michigan, but Frémont lost Illinois, as well as the election, to his Democratic opponent, James Buchanan.

In 1858 Lincoln ran against Stephen A. Douglas for Senator. He lost the election, but in debating with Douglas he gained a national reputation that won him the Republican nomination for President in 1860. Abraham Lincoln ran against a split Democratic Party over the issue or slavery. The Democratic convention nominated Stephen Douglas for president, and this so incensed the Southern delegates that many of them walked out. Later they held a separate convention and nominated John C. Breckinridge of Kentucky. A fourth party, the Constitutional Union Party, nominated John Bell of Tennessee on a brief platform calling only for the preservation of the Union.

With the Democratic Party split, Lincoln's victory was virtually assured. He received 180 electoral votes, a majority. Breckinridge, who carried the entire Deep South, was second with 72. Bell received 39 and Douglas 12. However, Lincoln won only 40 percent of the popular vote. Of the total votes cast, he won 1,865,593, Douglas 1,382,713, Breckinridge 848,356, and Bell 592,906. Lincoln failed to win a single electoral vote in ten Southern states.

Abraham Lincoln entered his Presidency in a disunited United States. In the beginning, Lincoln practiced exactly what Buchanan did. He adopted the wait-and-see-what-happens plan in which he did little about the seceding states. He believed that it was physically impossible to secede from the Union. However, the shooting on Fort Sumter changed Lincoln's view. Lincoln reacted promptly. Using the language and authority of a militia act of 1795, he declared that in seven states the federal laws were being opposed "by combinations too powerful to be suppressed by the ordinary course of judicial proceedings." To quell this insurrection he asked the loyal states to provide 75,000 militia for three months' service. He also called a special session of Congress to convene on July 4. The Civil War had begun. The Civil War had begun.

As President, he built the Republican Party into a strong national organization. Further, he rallied most of the northern Democrats to the Union cause.

On January 1, 1863, he issued the Emancipation Proclamation that declared forever free those slaves within the Confederacy. Lincoln never let the world forget that the Civil War involved an even larger issue. This he stated most movingly in dedicating the military cemetery at Gettysburg: "that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain--that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom--and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth."

Lincoln won re-election in 1864, as Union military triumphs heralded an end to the war. In his planning for peace, the President was flexible and generous, encouraging Southerners to lay down their arms and join speedily in reunion.

The spirit that guided him was clearly that of his Second Inaugural Address, now inscribed on one wall of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D. C.: "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 finishthe work we are in; to bind up the nation's wounds.... " On Good Friday, April 14, 1865, Lincoln was assassinated at Ford's Theatre in Washington by John Wilkes Booth, an actor, who somehow thought he was helping the South. The opposite was the result, for with Lincoln's death, the possibility of peace with magnanimity died.