Short Biography of Abraham Lincoln
On February 12, 1809, Abraham Lincoln was born in a log cabin in Kentucky to parents who could neither read nor write. He attended school intermittently for about a year but educated himself by reading borrowed books. When Lincoln was nine years old, his mother died. His father, a carpenter, and farmer, remarried and relocated his family west, settling in Illinois.
As a young adult, Lincoln worked as a flatboat navigator, storekeeper, soldier, surveyor, and postmaster. He was elected to the Springfield, Illinois, city council at 25. He learned the law there, opened a law practice, and earned the moniker “Honest Abe.”
He served one term in the United States House of Representatives but lost two Senate elections. But his fights with his 1858 senate opponent, Stephen Douglas, regarding human servitude helped him gain the presidential nomination two years later. (Lincoln was a staunch opponent of the spread of slavery in the United States.) Lincoln received more votes than any other candidate in the 1860 presidential election.
A NATION DIVIDED
The Unified States was not united when Lincoln assumed office in 1861. For more than a century, the country had debated the legality of enslaving people and the right of each state to do so. Northerners and Southerners were on the verge of war. When Lincoln became president, he allowed slavery to continue in the southern states but prohibited it from spreading to other states and states that might later join the Union.
Southern leaders objected to this proposal and planned to secede or depart from the country. Eventually, 11 southern states created the Confederate States of America to confront the Union’s remaining 23 northern states. The Civil War formally began on April 12, 1861, when Confederate forces assaulted Fort Sumter in South Carolina.
PRESIDENCY OF WARTIME
As president, Lincoln’s principal priority was to keep the country together. For a long time, it did not appear that he would succeed. During the early years of the war, the South was winning. The war did not turn in favour of the Union until the Battle of Gettysburg in Pennsylvania in July 1863.
Lincoln exhorted Northerners to battle on in addresses such as the Gettysburg Address. He exhorted residents to guarantee “that these dead shall not have perished in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a fresh birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not vanish from the earth” at this renowned dedication of the battlefield cemetery. Earlier that year, in his Emancipation Proclamation address, Lincoln advocated for the abolition of slavery.
Lincoln was re-elected president in 1864 when the war was virtually made. Confederate General Robert E. Lee surrendered to Union General Ulysses S.
PERILOUS FORTUNE
Lincoln’s biggest obligation was to get the Union through the Civil War, yet it was not his sole achievement during his presidency. Together with Congress, he created the Department of Agriculture, advocated for the construction of a transcontinental railroad, approved the Homestead Act, which gave settlers access to land, and drafted the 13th Amendment, which abolished slavery.
TRAGIC FORTUNE
Less than a week after the Civil War ended, the country was in mourning once more. When Lincoln was shot on April 14, 1865, he became the first president to be assassinated.
He and his wife, Mary Todd Lincoln, were seeing a play in Washington, D.C. on the night he was assassinated. Because the entry to their box seats was insufficiently secured, actor John Wilkes Booth was able to enter. By assassinating Lincoln, Booth wanted to resurrect the Confederacy. He then fled the theatre after shooting Lincoln in the back of the head. He wasn’t apprehended for two weeks. He was shot during his eventual capture and died as a result of his injuries.
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