Lincoln, Abraham

Full Name: Abraham Lincoln

Nationality: American | Activity: president of United States

Born: 12-02-1809 | Died: 15-04-1865

He was an unusual man in many ways. One minute he would wrestle with his sons or tell a joke and slap his bony knees in laughter. The next minute he might be deep in thought and not notice anything around him. He was gentle and patient, but no one was more determined. He was tall—nearly six feet four inches—very thin, and stooped. He spent less than a year in school, but he never stopped studying. All his life he was a “learner.” Born in a log cabin on the frontier, he made his own way in life and became the president who kept the United States united.

The first of the Lincoln family to come to America was Samuel Lincoln. He had been a weaver's apprentice at Hingham, England. He settled in Hingham, Mass., in 1637. From there the family spread southward to Virginia, where Abraham's father, Thomas Lincoln, was born in 1778.

When Thomas was four years old the family moved to Kentucky. There his father, who was a farmer, was killed by Indians. Thomas grew up in Kentucky. He never went to school, but he learned to be a carpenter. He was a strong, heavy-built man, who sometimes spoke sharply and at other times entertained his friends with jokes and stories.

Some historians have called him shiftless. True, he moved many times in his life, but he worked hard enough at carpentry to buy farms. He did not, however, make much of a living, because most of the land he cleared was too poor for good crops.

In 1806 Thomas married Nancy Hanks. She had been born in Virginia, but little else is known of the Hanks family. Nancy was only a baby when her mother Lucy brought her to Kentucky. When Nancy married Thomas Lincoln she was 22 years old, tall, and slender. Some historians say she could neither read nor write, which was not unusual for pioneer women. Others say that she read the Bible daily.

Thomas and Nancy settled in Elizabethtown in Hardin County, Ky. Their first child, Sarah, was born there. In 1808 Thomas bought a half-cleared farm at Sinking Spring on the Nolin River near Hodgenville. He hopefully moved his family to this first farm—a rolling stretch of thin, poor land on a lonely river.

About sunrise on Feb. 12, 1809, the son of Thomas and Nancy Lincoln was born. They named him Abraham after his grandfather Lincoln. Abraham's birthplace was a one-room log cabin, 16 feet long and 18 feet wide. The logs were chinked with clay and light came dimly through the single window. The floor was earth, packed down hard, and the bed was made of poles and cornhusks. A roaring fire on the hearth and rough bearskin blankets kept Nancy and her son Abraham warm on that cold winter morning.

In the spring of 1811 Thomas Lincoln moved his family to a farm he had bought on Knob Creek, about ten miles northeast of Sinking Spring. In later years Abraham Lincoln said that the Knob Creek farm was the first home he remembered and he loved it. Like all farm boys in those busy days young Abe learned to plant, hoe, husk corn, build hearth fires, carry water, and chop wood.

When he was six years old, Sarah and Abe tramped “up the road a piece,” some two miles each way, to a log schoolhouse. Here he learned to read, write, and “do sums” (arithmetic). He liked writing best of all. Later he said that he practiced writing “anywhere and everywhere that lines could be drawn.” He wrote with charcoal on the back of a wooden shovel and even in dust and snow.

Between chores young Abe climbed the rocky cliffs at Knob Creek, roamed among the dark cool pines and cedar trees in the valley, or waded in the pebbly creek. Sometimes he stood in the hot, dusty clay to watch the covered wagons carrying settlers along the nearby Cumberland Trail. His buckskin breeches were pulled high on his spindly legs and his thin arms stuck out from his rough linen shirt.

There were no close neighbors. Abe got used to being alone. He did not mind because he loved the hills and the quiet hollows and the trees—especially the trees. He learned so well to tell the many kinds that many years later, on his walks around Washington, he would point out their differences. He smilingly told visitors, “I know all about trees in light of being a backwoodsman.”

In December 1816 Thomas took his family across the Ohio River to the backwoods of Indiana. For the last few miles Thomas, probably helped by Abe, had to cut a trail out of the wilderness of trees and tangle of wild grapevines. That winter in Indiana was so cold that people remembered it as the year of “eighteen hundred and froze to death.” The Lincolns settled on Little Pigeon Creek in Spencer County, about 16 miles from the Ohio River.

Young Abe and Sarah helped their father build a “half-faced camp.” This was a shed of poles and bark, with one side left open toward a roaring log fire. They had to keep the fire burning day and night. They needed it for warmth, cooking, and drying their snow-soaked clothes and moccasins.

While the family huddled in their lean-to through the freezing winter, Thomas and Abe worked every day building a log cabin. Abe was only eight years old, but very large for his age, and he quickly learned to swing an ax. They cut and hewed logs for a cabin 18 feet by 20, then chinked the logs with clay and grass. Once in a while the boy shot a wild turkey, for the family lived mostly on wild game, with a little corn. He never became much of a hunter, however, as he did not like to shoot to kill. With Sarah he picked berries, nuts, and wild fruits for the family and trudged a mile to a spring for water. All around them was the unbroken wilderness.

In the autumn of 1818 Nancy Hanks Lincoln died of the dread frontier disease called milk sickness—that is, drinking milk from cows that had grazed on the toxic plant called white snakeroot. Sarah, only 11 years old, took over the cooking and cabin chores while Thomas and young Abe cut timber to clear farm land.

After a year the little family was in sorry shape. They needed a woman's help. Thomas rode back to Elizabethtown, Ky., and married a widow, Sarah Bush Johnston, whom he had known since boyhood. He brought her and her three children to the shabby little log cabin in Indiana.

Abe and his sister Sarah quickly learned to love their second mother. She was a big-boned woman, with clear skin, friendly eyes, and a quiet way of getting things done. She cleaned up the untidy cabin. She had Thomas make a wood floor and chairs and build a bed for the feather mattress she had brought from Kentucky. Young Abe and Sarah had never lived in a cabin so homelike. Thomas did better on the farm, too, and the children began to eat and dress better. Sarah Lincoln did all this without any criticism or impatient words. She knew well that the family needed her.

Best of all, she encouraged Abe to study. She was not educated, but she saw how eager he was to learn. In later years he said of her: “She was the best friend I ever had. . . . All that I am, I owe to my angel mother.” Sarah Lincoln told people: “He was the best boy I ever saw. I never gave him a cross word in my life. His mind and mine, what little I had, seemed to run together.”

Sarah made Thomas send the gangling 11-year-old to school. There was no regular teacher. When some man came along who knew a little about the three R's—as the main subjects of reading, writing, and (a)'rithmetic were called—he might teach the boys and girls for a few weeks—usually in the winter when farm work was slack. Whenever “school kept” at Pigeon Creek, Abe hiked four miles each way, his cowhide boots sloshing in the snow. He did not mind this long, uncomfortable hike to and from school because he was glad to be learning. All subjects fascinated him.

In all his life his schooling did not add up to a year, but he made up for it by reading. A cousin, Dennis Hanks, who came to live with the Lincolns, said: “I never seen Abe after he was 12 that he didn't have a book somewheres around.” By the time Abe was 14 he would often read at night by the light of the log fire. His first books were the Bible, Aesop's Fables, and Robinson Crusoe.

When he was 15 years old Abe was so tall and strong that he often worked as a hired hand on other farms. Usually, while he plowed or split fence rails, he kept a borrowed book tucked in his shirt to read while he lunched or rested. He could turn in a good day's work when he had to.

Many neighbors, however, called him lazy, saying he was “always readin' and thinkin'.” Once Abe grinned and told his farm boss, “My father taught me to work, but he never taught me to love it.”

A farmer loaned him The Life of George Washington, by Parson Weems, and Abe left it in the rain. To make up for his carelessness, Abe shucked corn for him for three days. All his life Abraham Lincoln made every effort to do the fair thing.

He could never get enough to read. He said: “The things I want to know are in books. My best friend is the man who'll get me a book I ain't read.” Once he tramped nearly 20 miles to Rockport to borrow one.

After supper Abe often walked down the road to Gentryville to join the “boys” at Gentry's store. His humorous stories, sometimes told in dialect, were popular with the young men lounging against the log counter. He loved to imitate travelers and local characters and would throw back his head with a booming laugh. In his own speech he pronounced words as he had learned them on the Kentucky frontier, such as “cheer” for “chair” and “git” for “get.” That was the way all Southern woodsmen talked.

Between farm chores he helped to run a ferry across the Ohio River to Kentucky. When he was 18 he built his own scow and rowed passengers over the shallows to steamers out in the river.

Always he kept teaching himself new things. He became interested in law. Borrowing a book on the laws of Indiana, he studied it long into the night. He strode miles to the nearest courthouse to hear lawyers try cases. He even crossed into Kentucky to listen in court. Every visit taught him more about the ways of lawyers and furnished him with new stories. Throughout his later life as a lawyer, politician, and statesman he shrewdly drew on this rich fund of stories to make a legal point or to win audiences.

When Abe was 19 he got his first chance to see something of the “outside world.” James Gentry, the owner of the country store, hired him to take a flatboat of cargo to New Orleans, then a wealthy city of some 40,000 people. With Gentry's son, Allen, Abe cut timber, hewed great planks, and built a flatboat called a “broadhorn.”

New Orleans was 1,000 miles down the twisting Mississippi River. From sunup to sundown the two brawny young men pulled the long oars—about 40 feet long at bow and stern. Often they hurriedly hauled back on the side sweeps to swing the boat from snags, clumsy flatboats, or trim steamers caught in the shifting currents. They lived on board, cooking and sleeping in a rickety lean-to on deck. At night they tied up to a tree or stump on the muddy bank.

In New Orleans Abe saw his first auction of slaves. At that time slavery was lawful in all the United States south of the Ohio River. The tall, thoughtful young man winced at the sight of slave gangs in chains being marched off to plantations. Later he said, “Slavery is a continual torment to me.”

Back from New Orleans, Abe clerked part time at Gentry's country store and helped his father get ready to move to Illinois. The Indiana farm had not been a success. Through the winter the men built wagons and chests and made yokes and harness. In March 1830 they started their 200-mile trek.

Fording rivers and creeks, the heavy wagons often broke through the ice. Lincoln later said: “Once my little dog jumped out of the wagon . . . broke through, and was struggling for life. I could not bear to lose my dog, and I jumped out of the wagon and waded waist deep in ice and water, and got hold of him.”

The family settled on the Sangamon River, some ten miles southwest of Decatur, Ill. Once more Abe helped to clear a farm. With a cousin, John Hanks, he then split 3,000 rails to fence some neighbors' land. He was truly “right handy with an ax.” His feats with an ax on the Illinois prairie led his political supporters to call him, later in life, the “rail splitter.” Even in his last years, as president, he could hold an ax straight out at arm's length—something very few young men could do.

After a winter of cold and illness Thomas Lincoln again moved, about 100 miles southeast into Coles County. This time Abe did not go. He was 21 years old and ready to live his own life. Loving the river, he again took a flatboat to New Orleans, loaded with pork, corn, and live hogs.

On his return he hired out as a clerk in the village store at New Salem, Ill. The tiny settlement stood on a bluff above the Sangamon, about 20 miles northwest of Springfield. Here he lived for six years, from 1831 to 1837. For $15 a month and a sleeping room in the back, he tended store and a gristmill.

Tales sprang up fast about Lincoln in the New Salem days. People spoke about his strict honesty and his giant strength. Some told how he once walked six miles to give back a few pennies to a woman who had overpaid for dry goods. Whenever a settler bought furs, or an oxen yoke, gun, tea, or salt, he knew he would get his money's worth from “honest Abe.” He would also enjoy a laugh at one of Abe's stories.

Lincoln's employer boasted of Abe's strength and wrestling ability so much that a gang of toughs in nearby Clary's Grove challenged him. Men trooped in from the neighboring villages to see the match. The Clary's Grove champion was Jack Armstrong, a thickset, powerful man. He had always thrown all comers. He rushed at Lincoln, trying to hurl him off his feet. Lincoln held Armstrong off in his long arms, then grappled and threw him to the grass where they rolled over and over.

After a panting, grunting tussle Lincoln let go of Armstrong and, according to some stories, said: “Jack, let's quit. I can't throw you. You can't throw me.” Armstrong shook Lincoln's hand, saying he was the “best feller that ever broke into this settlement.” They became good friends.

In matches with other powerful wrestlers Lincoln often simply tossed them over his head. With his great long legs he was the fastest foot racer, and when he had to fight with his fists he did.

When the Black Hawk War broke out in April 1832 Lincoln and the Clary's Grove men enlisted. The war was a series of border raids by Sauk and Fox Indians led by chief Black Hawk. They crossed from Iowa into Illinois and attacked and scalped settlers. (See also American Indians, or Native Americans, “Centuries of Struggle Between Indians and Whites.”)

The Clary's Grove men elected Lincoln captain of their rifle company. The honor pleased him, but he knew nothing about military life. Once he could not think of the order he should give to march his company through a gate in formation. Scratching his head, he finally commanded: “Halt! this company will break ranks for two minutes and form again on the other side of the gate.”

When Lincoln's term of enlistment ended in 30 days he re-enlisted as a private. In all, he served three months. He never fought in a battle, but he twice saw the horror of bodies scalped by the Indians. His army experience, learned on long marches and in rough camps, taught him sympathy for soldiers' hardships in the field. In later life, when he was commander in chief in the Civil War, he treated soldiers' failings with great understanding.

Just before the outbreak of the Black Hawk War, Lincoln had decided to run for the Illinois legislature. After his war service he again started his campaign. He was 23 years old, lanky and so tall that his cheap linen pants never reached his ankles. His coarse black hair was always mussed and his dark-skinned face was already deeply lined.

In a circular he sent out to voters, he wrote: “I was born and have remained in the most humble walks of life.” While he was speaking at one political rally a fight broke out. Lincoln strode up to the man who had started the brawl, seized him by the neck and seat of the pants, and hurled him out of the crowd.

Lincoln then calmly went back to his speech, saying: “My politics are short and sweet, like the old lady's dance.” In just two or three sentences he told what he would vote for and ended by saying: “If elected I shall be thankful; if not, it will be all the same.” He did not carry the district, but his local popularity gave him nearly every vote in New Salem.

Meanwhile the New Salem store failed. Lincoln was out of work. He thought of learning to be a blacksmith, but another New Salem store was put up for sale. Lincoln, with William Berry as partner, bought it on credit.

Neither one, however, was much interested in tending to business. Lincoln preferred to visit with the few customers or to lean against the door and read. After several months Berry died, leaving Lincoln more than $1,000 in debt. Eventually he paid back every cent, but it took him years.

Failing as a storekeeper, Lincoln again was “hard up.” In May 1833 his friends got him appointed the postmaster of New Salem. The job paid only about $50 a year, but it took little of his time and gave him the chance to read all the incoming newspapers free. He read every issue and was particularly interested in the political news. To earn his board and lodging, he also split rails and worked as a mill hand and hired man. In every spare moment he read or made political talks.

In the autumn of 1833 Lincoln gladly took an appointment as deputy county surveyor. To learn the work, he plunged into books on surveying and mathematics. By studying all day, and sometimes all night, he learned surveying in six weeks. As he rode about the county, laying out roads and towns, he lived with different families and made new friends.

The wife of Jack Armstrong, the Clary's Grove “champion,” said: “Abe would drink milk, eat mush, corn bread and butter, and rock the cradle. . . . He would tell stories, joke people at parties . . . do anything to accommodate anybody.”

In 1834 Lincoln's old friends in New Salem and his new friends throughout Sangamon County elected him to the Illinois General Assembly. They reelected him in 1836, 1838, and 1840. Before his first term began in November 1834 he borrowed 200 dollars to pay the most pressing of his debts and to buy a suit for his new work.

Vandalia was then the capital of Illinois. Lincoln soon became popular in the legislature. One representative said that Lincoln was “raw-boned . . . ungraceful . . . almost uncouth . . . and yet there was a magnetism about the man that made him a universal favorite.” By the time he started his second term he was a skilled politician and a leader of the Whig party in Illinois. A fellow Whig declared: “We followed his lead; but he followed nobody's lead. . . . He was poverty itself, but independent.”

Encouraged by friends in the legislature, he determined to become a lawyer. Between terms he borrowed law books and returned them in New Salem in order to study. Often he walked the 20-mile (32-kilometer) round trip between Springfield and New Salem just to return one law book and to get another. He was doing what he advised a young law student to do years later: “Get the books . . . and study them till you understand them in their principal features. . . . Your own resolution to succeed is more important than any other one thing.” He took some time from his studying to serve as New Salem's postmaster and did some surveying work. On Sept. 9, 1836, he received his law license. In New Salem Lincoln boarded in the log inn kept by James Rutledge. Rutledge's daughter Ann was tall, slim, and blue-eyed, with auburn hair. Legend says that she was Lincoln's sweetheart and that when she died in 1835, at the age of 19, he nearly lost his mind in grief.

The legend apparently grew from a lecture given by William Herndon, Lincoln's last law partner, a year after Lincoln's death. Historians today, however, are not convinced that Ann Rutledge promised to marry Lincoln. At the time of her death, which was most likely from typhoid fever, she was engaged to one of Lincoln's friends, John McNamar.

Two years before Anne's death Lincoln had met in New Salem a visitor from Kentucky. She was Mary Owens, the well-educated daughter of a wealthy farmer. She was slightly older than Lincoln. He escorted her to quiltings, huskings, and other social events, but sometimes forgot to help her cross creeks or climb steep hills. Apparently his absent-mindedness did not suit Mary Owens. When, in the summer of 1837, he proposed to her in a rather indecisive way, she “respectfully declined” to marry him.

In 1837 Lincoln led the drive to have the capital transferred from Vandalia to Springfield. The legislature did not meet there until 1839, but in April 1837 Lincoln left New Salem to make his home in Springfield. He put his few belongings into saddlebags and rode a borrowed horse to the thriving town on the prairie. (See also Springfield.)

He was 28 years old and so poor that he did not have the 17 dollars needed to buy the furnishings for a bed. Joshua Speed, a storekeeper, recalled that when Lincoln said he could not afford it, “The tone of his voice was so melancholy that I felt for him.” Speed immediately invited Lincoln to share his own lodgings. This kindness was the beginning of a lifelong friendship.

By 1839 Lincoln was established a reputation for himself as a lawyer in Springfield and was taking part in the busy social life of the city. One of the society belles was a young lady named Mary Todd. She had come from her home in Lexington, Ky., to live with her sister and brother-in-law, son of the governor of Illinois. At that time Mary was 21 years old—small, plump, pretty, and unusually well educated—but also temperamental and nervous. Lincoln first met her in the winter of 1839 at a dance. He was immediately attracted to her and said, “Miss Todd, I want to dance with you in the worst way.” Later, she told friends, “And he certainly did!”

Soon Lincoln was spending every free moment with Mary Todd. They both loved literature and poetry, especially Shakespeare and Robert Burns. Lincoln delighted in reciting passages from memory. He had always been, as he said, a “slow learner,” but he never forgot what he learned. He was also pleased that Mary took an interest in politics.

Mary Todd was also being courted by Stephen Douglas, a prominent lawyer, with whom Lincoln was later to debate dramatically (see Douglas, Stephen). Her wealthy, aristocratic family was opposed to Lincoln, who was considered to be “uncouth, full of rough edges.” Mary, as always, knew exactly what she wanted. By the spring she was devoted to Lincoln and told friends, “His heart is as big as his arms are long.” She was also so sure of his remarkable abilities that she predicted he would someday be elected president of the United States.

After a series of temperamental clashes between them, Mary Todd, the Kentucky belle, and Abraham Lincoln, son of the frontier, were married on Nov. 4, 1842. They were living in one room at the Globe Tavern in Springfield when their first child, Robert Todd, was born in 1843. During the next year Lincoln bought a light tan frame house on the edge of town. There Edward, William, and Thomas (Tad) were born in 1846, 1850, and 1853.

The Lincolns' home life was often stormy. Both of them were at fault. An extremely sensitive, high-strung woman who was afflicted with migraine headaches, Mary frequently gave way to rages of uncontrollable temper. Sometimes they may have been justified, for Lincoln had trying habits. Most arose from his enormous power of concentration. When he became interested in a book or a problem, he forgot everything else.

Once when he was pulling his baby sons in a wagon and reading a book as he walked, one of the boys fell out. Lincoln did not notice the child's frightened howls until Mary rushed to pick up her son, then censured the surprised father.

Lincoln went to bed at all hours and got up at all hours. Often he came home two or three hours late to dinner, then was startled to find Mary upset over his tardiness. When he took off his stovepipe hat, his notes and legal papers spilled over the neat parlor floor. (He usually carried his work in his hat, which he called his “walking office.”) If the parlor stove went out when he was lost in thought, he never noticed the cold. For no apparent reason he sank into black, silent moods for hours, and sometimes days, at a time.

When he thought of it, however, he would do anything to please her. Patiently, he let her teach him the social graces. He was extremely careless about his dress and knew that this bothered Mary, who wanted to take pride in him as a rising young lawyer. Every morning before walking slowly to his untidy law office, he stood in the doorway to let her inspect him. His shirt, which she made, must be fresh, his boots polished, his suit and stovepipe hat brushed. In wet weather she made him carry his baggy umbrella; on cold days, his gray shawl.

He knew she was terrified by thunder. No matter how busy he was, he would hurry from his office at the first warning of a storm. Rushing home, he would stay at her side until it ended.

Like Mary, he enjoyed entertaining. He neither drank nor smoked but loved music and people. Although he cared nothing for food and had to be prodded to eat, he liked to have friends in for supper. As he prospered in his law practice, Mary and he gave large dinner parties and became noted as generous and gracious hosts.

Mary and Abe Lincoln were blindly devoted to their four sons. They thought the boys could do no wrong, but the children were hopelessly spoiled and annoyed the whole neighborhood. On Sundays, while Mary was at church, Lincoln took the youngsters to his law office. While he worked unheedingly on his papers, they raced, wrestled, spilled ink, and overturned furniture until Lincoln's law partner, Herndon, told friends, “I'd like to wring their necks!” He never complained to Lincoln, however.

At home Lincoln gave them boisterous “romps,” or read aloud to them while they climbed over him, thumping him enthusiastically. In the yard they chased around him while he curried the horse or milked the cow. When he went to market to help Mary, grocery basket in hand, they trailed along swinging from his long arms or riding his shoulders. Often the noisy procession stopped while he and the boys and neighbor children held hopping contests. Springing with his great long legs, Lincoln “in three hops could get 40 feet on a dead level.”

In 1847 Lincoln went to Washington, D.C., as a representative from Illinois. The Mexican War was on (see Mexican War). Lincoln opposed it. His antiwar speeches displeased his political supporters. He knew they would not reelect him.

At the end of his term in 1849 he returned to Springfield. He sought an appointment as commissioner in the General Land Office in Washington, but failed to get it. Later that year he was offered the governorship of the Oregon Territory. He refused, convinced that he was now a failure in politics.

Returning to the law, he again rode the circuit, which kept him away from home nearly six months of each year. He missed his family but loved the easy comradeship of fellow lawyers staying in country inns and delighted in the sharp give-and-take in court. Wherever he went he could make the jury and courtroom weep or split their sides with laughter. Even more important to his success was his reputation for honesty. Honest Abe would not take a case unless he believed in his client's innocence or rights. He became an outstanding lawyer.

During this period he successfully handled important cases for the Rock Island Railroad and the Illinois Central Railroad. His most famous case, perhaps, was his victorious defense of “Duff” Armstrong, who was accused of murder. Duff was the son of Jack Armstrong, Lincoln's old wrestling foe. The accusing witness said he had seen Duff bludgeon and kill a man with a “slung shot” one night in the “bright moonlight.” Lincoln opened an almanac and showed it recorded that the moon on that night had set long before the scuffle.

The threat of slavery being extended brought Lincoln back into politics in 1854. He did not suggest interfering with slavery in states where it was already lawful. The Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, however, enabled the people of each new territory to vote on whether the territory would be slave or free, thus threatening to extend slavery (see Kansas-Nebraska Act). Lincoln began a series of speeches protesting the act.

In 1856 he helped to organize the Illinois branch of the new Republican party, a political party formed by people who wanted to stop the spread of slavery (see political parties). He became the leading Republican in Illinois. When the Republicans nominated John C. Frémont for the presidency of the United States, Lincoln received 110 votes for nomination as vice-president (see Frémont, John Charles). This brought Lincoln to the attention of the nation.

The Republicans lost, but in 1858 Lincoln won the Republican nomination for senator from Illinois. Addressing the state convention at Springfield, he gave the first of his memorable speeches.

His huge hands tensely gripping the speaker's stand, he declared slowly and firmly: “A house divided against itself cannot stand. I believe this government cannot endure permanently, half slave and half free. I do not expect the Union to be dissolved—I do not expect the house to fall—but I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing, or all the other.”

Lincoln's opponent in the senatorial election was Stephen A. Douglas, a Democrat and Lincoln's old-time acquaintance in Springfield. Douglas was running for reelection and had supported the Kansas-Nebraska Act. Lincoln challenged him to a series of debates on the slavery issue (see Lincoln-Douglas Debates). Although he overwhelmed Douglas in the debates, Lincoln lost the election. The debates, however, enlarged the public interest in Lincoln and began earning him a national reputation.

Realizing his country-wide fame, Lincoln's friends sought the Republican nomination for president for him in 1860. He himself worked tirelessly to win support. He now knew what he wanted—to be president of the United States in its time of crisis. He was determined to preserve the Union.

At the Republican national convention in Chicago in 1860 he was nominated on the third ballot. When the news was telegraphed to Springfield, Lincoln was sitting in a newspaper office. As jubilant friends congratulated him, he unfolded his thin legs, stood, and said, “Well, gentlemen, there is a little woman at our house who is probably more interested in this dispatch than I. If you'll excuse me, I'll take it up and let her see it.”

The Democratic party was split, with the North nominating Stephen A. Douglas, and Southern Democrats naming John C. Breckinridge. Throughout the furious campaign Lincoln stayed quietly in Springfield, directing party leaders from a makeshift little office in the Capitol. He even carried his own mail back and forth from the post office. To avoid stirring up controversy and perhaps splitting the Republicans, he did not make a single political speech.

His strategy won. Lincoln was elected 16th president of the United States. He had 1,865,593 votes, Douglas had 1,382,713, and Breckinridge, 848,356. “Honest Abe, the rail splitter” was the first Republican to become president.

Alarm spread through the Southern states. They thought a Republican president would not respect their rights or property. They felt that secession was their only hope. Secession began Dec. 20, 1860, when South Carolina withdrew from the Union (see Confederate States of America).

As the time of Lincoln's inauguration approached, threats to kill him increased. They failed to frighten him, but no man was more aware of the danger of his position in a time of crisis. Saying farewell to friends at the Springfield railway station, he said prophetically: “I now leave, not knowing when, or whether ever, I may return, with a task before me greater than that which rested on Washington.” The authorities were so fearful of a rumored assassination plot in Baltimore that they persuaded Lincoln to leave his special train at Philadelphia. He rode into Washington in a heavily guarded sleeping car.

In his inaugural address Lincoln assured the South that he would respect its rights, that there was no need of war. He said: “I have no purpose . . . to interfere with the institution of slavery in states where it exists. . . . In your hands, my dissatisfied fellow countrymen, and not in mine, is the momentous issue of civil war. . . . We must not be enemies.”

Less than six weeks later, on April 12, 1861, the Civil War began (see American Civil War). Abraham Lincoln shouldered the giant task of bringing the rebel states back into the national family and preserving the Union. He wrote: “My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and it is not either to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave, I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it. . . . I have here stated my purpose according to my view of official duty; and I intend no modification of my oft-expressed personal wish that all men everywhere could be free.”

Lincoln was a strong president. At first his deliberate thinking and extraordinary patience deceived his Cabinet into thinking him uncertain. Several Cabinet members had strong political ambitions and feuded with each other. However, they all could serve the nation well, and so Lincoln patiently smoothed their differences and held them together with his great tact. He wanted their help, not their praise.

Profiting by his experience as a lawyer, he looked at every side of a question before deciding on an answer. “His mind acts slowly,” said a friend, “but when it moves, it moves forward.” When Lincoln reached a decision, he pressed his lips together firmly; then no one could change his mind. His Cabinet soon discovered this. Once every Cabinet member opposed Lincoln's plan. He smiled, said “Aye” for his own vote, and calmly announced, “The aye has it.”

For months he had trouble finding capable generals to lead the Union forces. As with his Cabinet, he gave Gen. George B. McClellan and others every chance to prove themselves (see McClellan, George B.). When McClellan continued to delay attacking the Confederate forces, Lincoln said wryly, “He's got the slows.” He kept urging McClellan to advance.

Instead, McClellan childishly ignored Lincoln, his commander in chief. When Lincoln's secretary protested against McClellan's attitude, Lincoln answered quietly, “I'd hold his horse for him if only he would bring us success.”

Soon Lincoln felt that he himself must take action. He read all he could on military science and made frequent inspection trips of forces in the field. Sometimes he took Mary Lincoln and his youngest son, Tad, with him to help boost the morale of the troops. Until he found competent generals, he directed much of the strategy for the Army and the Navy. He made blunders but, on the whole, he was a successful commander in chief.

When he found a capable general, such as Ulysses S. Grant, he supported him steadfastly despite great criticism (see Grant, Ulysses S.). For the greater part of the war most of the newspapers and people bitterly criticized Lincoln's policies. He never took the time to defend himself, convinced that he was doing what was right for the Union.

The bitter, tragic war surrounded Lincoln even in his home, the White House. Rifle companies patrolled the grounds and set up barracks in even the stately East Room. Every day secretaries brought him dispatches from the field, and his lonely mind tried to find solutions to the problems. Often he was at his desk before seven o'clock in the morning, working till Tad awakened. The lad then came down to Lincoln's office and they read the Bible together—Tad sitting in his father's lap.

Day after day office seekers crowded up to Lincoln's desk. He was trying to win a war, trying to save the Union, yet had to spend hours making or refusing appointments to political office. The greatest strain was reading and hearing petitions for clemency for soldiers sentenced to death for desertion or failing their duty. One time, near exhaustion, he said sadly, “I've had more cases of life and death to settle in four years than all the other men who sat in this chair put together. No man knows the distress of my mind.” When a mother, wife, or sister stood before him pleading a soldier's case, Lincoln felt the pain himself. His deep-set gray eyes darkened and “sorrow seemed to flow from him.” Whenever he could find the slightest excuse, he ordered a pardon for the soldier.

No one felt the tragedy of the war more than he. When Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of Uncle Tom's Cabin, met him, he said tiredly, “Whichever way the conflict ends, I have the impression that I shan't last long after it's over.”

What little relaxation he got came from his sense of humor, occasional walks and horseback rides, and his companionship with Tad. Frequently he startled his Cabinet with humorous stories, explaining, “I have to get away from myself and this tiredness in me.” His beloved Tad, the impish youngster with a lisp, could always make his father smile. Nearly every night he stayed in his father's office until he fell asleep. Lincoln then carried him up to bed.

During 1862 Lincoln struggled with the problem of freeing the slaves. He knew that the slavery question must be settled if the United States, founded on the principles of liberty and equal rights for all, were to survive as a nation. He realized that the Union must be preserved, as a free nation—if democratic government was to succeed in the world.

With all the foresight he could muster, he worked out a plan to free the slaves. His Cabinet approved issuing the proclamation after the next Union victory. The summer passed with no victory. Then on Sept. 17, 1862, the Union's forces stopped the advancing Confederate armies at Antietam.

On Sept. 22, 1862, President Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, one of the most important messages in the history of the world (see Emancipation Proclamation). He signed it Jan. 1, 1863.

In July 1863 the Union armies threw back the Confederate forces at Gettysburg. This was the only battle on Northern soil (see Gettysburg, Battle of).

On Nov. 19, 1863, the battlefield was dedicated as a national cemetery. The chief speaker was Edward Everett, a noted orator. As an afterthought, President Lincoln was invited “to make a few appropriate remarks.” He worked and reworked his speech, seeking to make it as perfect as possible.

The crowd listened for two hours to Everett's extravagant oratory. Lincoln then rose slowly, put on his glasses, glanced at a slip of paper, then spoke gravely in his clear, high-pitched voice. In a little less than three minutes he finished his Gettysburg Address. He thought it a failure, as did most of the newspapers. Only a few recognized it as one of the noblest speeches ever made by any man. Everett wrote to him: “I should be glad if I could flatter myself that I came as near the central idea of the occasion in two hours as you did in two minutes.”

By November 1864 Lincoln was nearly exhausted by the burden of the war and grief at the death of his son Willie in the White House. Wherever he turned he read or heard criticism of himself and his generals. He prepared a memorandum for his Cabinet, forecasting his defeat in the coming election. The people, however, at last rallied to him and reelected him.

When he gave his inaugural address March 4, 1865, the end of the war was in sight. He looked forward to welcoming the Southern states back into the Union and to making their readjustment as easy as possible. He expressed that thought in these words: “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 orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.”

Little more than a month later, on April 9, 1865, Gen. Robert E. Lee surrendered his Confederate army to Gen. U.S. Grant. On April 11 the Stars and Stripes of the United States were raised over Fort Sumter, where the war had begun.

To celebrate the end of the war, Lincoln took Mary and two guests to Ford's Theatre on the night of April 14. During the third act of the play, Our American Cousin, John Wilkes Booth, a young actor who was proslavery and a Confederate sympathizer, crept into the presidential box and shot Lincoln in the head. Booth then leapt onto the stage, and, brandishing a dagger, he escaped. He was shot and killed on April 26 in a Virginia tobacco barn when soldiers and detectives surrounded and set fire to it.

Soldiers carried the unconscious president across the street to the nearest residence, a boardinghouse. There, stretched diagonally on a bed too small for his long body, he died without regaining consciousness at 7:22 in the morning. It was April 15, 1865—28 years to the day since he had left New Salem. As the Great Emancipator died, Secretary of War Stanton said softly, “Now he belongs to the ages.” A funeral train carried the president's body back home to Springfield, Ill., where he lies buried in Oak Ridge Cemetery.

Only after his death did the world begin to idealize Lincoln as a great leader. Over the course of the years since his death, historians and the general public alike have realized an almost mythic Lincoln as a superb statesman, a firm idealist who would not be swayed from the right course of action, a man of kindly and brave patience, and a believer in what he called the “family of man.” There were many people, however, who did not feel this way. During and following the Civil War, many Southerners believed Lincoln to be the destroyer of their way of life. Today, some historians and critics still feel this way, believing that Lincoln was a strong opponent of states' rights and that the Civil War may not have been necessary.

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Source: Encyclopedia Britannica