🎩Abraham Lincoln

Sixteenth President · 1861–1865

Abraham Lincoln came to the presidency with less formal education than almost any other man to hold the office, and he led the country through its most devastating war. By the time he was assassinated five days after the Confederate surrender, he had preserved the Union, ended slavery, and redefined American democracy in a ten-sentence speech at Gettysburg.

Frontier Origins

Lincoln was born in a one-room log cabin in Kentucky and grew up in Indiana and Illinois. He had less than a year of formal schooling in total, educating himself by candlelight with books borrowed from neighbors — the Bible, Aesop's Fables, Shakespeare, Pilgrim's Progress. He worked as a flatboatman, store clerk, postmaster, and surveyor before teaching himself law from borrowed volumes and being admitted to the Illinois bar in 1836.

Congress, the Debates, and the Presidency

Lincoln served one term in the U.S. House of Representatives (1847–1849), opposing the Mexican-American War. His return to prominence came in 1858, when he challenged Democratic Senator Stephen Douglas of Illinois in a series of seven Lincoln-Douglas debates focused on the extension of slavery into the western territories. Lincoln lost the Senate race but the national attention launched him toward the new Republican Party's presidential nomination in 1860. His election — on a platform of stopping slavery's expansion, not of abolishing it where it existed — triggered the secession of seven Southern states before he even took the oath of office.

Civil War Commander-in-Chief

Lincoln's presidency was consumed by the Civil War. He suspended habeas corpus, instituted the first federal income tax, ordered the first military draft, and rotated through a long series of commanding generals — McClellan, Pope, Burnside, Hooker, Meade — before finally finding one who would relentlessly pursue Robert E. Lee's army: Ulysses S. Grant. He read war telegrams late into the night in the War Department's telegraph office, and he wrote many of his greatest speeches in his own hand.

Emancipation and Gettysburg

The Emancipation Proclamation, issued January 1, 1863, declared enslaved people in rebelling states "forever free." It did not immediately free most enslaved Americans — Lincoln lacked the authority to end slavery by presidential decree in loyal states — but it reshaped the war into a struggle for human freedom and cleared the way for nearly 200,000 Black soldiers to enlist in the Union army.

Ten months later, at the dedication of the Soldiers' National Cemetery in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, Lincoln delivered a ten-sentence speech that reframed the entire American project. The Gettysburg Address declared that the war was a test of whether a nation "conceived in Liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal" could long endure — and that its survival depended on a "new birth of freedom."

Second Inaugural and Assassination

Re-elected in 1864, Lincoln delivered a Second Inaugural Address on March 4, 1865 that ended with one of the most famous sentences in American history: "With malice toward none, with charity for all... let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds..." Five weeks later, on April 9, 1865, Robert E. Lee surrendered at Appomattox. Five days after that, on April 14, 1865, Lincoln was shot at Ford's Theatre in Washington by the actor John Wilkes Booth. He died the next morning.

Lincoln Trivia

• Lincoln is the only U.S. president ever granted a patent, for a device to lift boats over river shoals.
• At 6 feet 4 inches, he was the tallest president in American history.
• The Lincoln Memorial in Washington was dedicated in 1922. The words of the Gettysburg Address and the Second Inaugural are inscribed on its walls.
• He wore his signature stovepipe hat partly as a portable filing cabinet — he tucked papers and letters inside the band.
• Lincoln signed legislation creating both the Department of Agriculture and the system of land-grant colleges that became the public university system.

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