Abraham Lincoln remains one of the most important figures in American history for his presidential leadership during the crisis of the Civil War.
Born in 1807 in slaveholding Kentucky, Lincoln moved at the age of eight to the free state of Indiana. Extraordinarily talented and ambitious, Lincoln was largely self-educated. He later wrote about his early life, ""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 ...."
In 1830, Lincoln moved to Illinois and entered state politics. He eventually won a seat in the state legislature, serving as a member of the Whig Party. In 1836, Lincoln became a lawyer and eventually moved to Springfield to pursue his practice. From 1847-49, Lincoln served a single term in the United States Congress, during which time he opposed the American war with Mexico.
Although Lincoln left politics in the late 1840s to pursue his legal practice, he reentered public life in 1854 because of his outrage at the Kansas Nebraska Act, which among other things repealed the anti-slavery provisions of the Missouri Compromise. From 1856 until 1860, Lincoln became an increasingly prominent political figure in the new Republican Party. In 1858, he gained national attention when he ran for the US Senate from Illinois against the Democratic incumbent Stephen A. Douglas. Although he lost the race, Lincoln repeatedly stressed his belief that slavery was a great moral wrong and chastised Douglas for his moral indifference.
Lincoln's strong showing in his debates with Douglas made him a leading candidate for the Republican presidential nomination in 1860. Nominated on the third ballot that spring, Lincoln went onto victory in November against a bitterly divided Democratic Party. As president-elect, however, Lincoln watched helplessly as seven southern states seceded from the Union rather than submit to a government led by a Republican president. In his inaugural address, Lincoln warned the South to not destroy the Union: "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."
After Confederate batteries fired upon and forced the surrender of US troops at Fort Sumter, Lincoln called for 75,000 volunteers to take up arms to put the rebellion down. This proclamation led four more southern states to withdraw from the Union. Most all Americans, including Lincoln, expected the conflict to be brief and relatively bloodless. These illusions were shattered by the disastrous northern defeat at the first battle of Bull Run in July 1861, which caused 5,000 casualties.
As the war lengthened as well as increased in size and scope, slavery increasingly became an issue the President had to confront. Although he initially struggled to keep the slavery out of the mix of Union war aims, it proved impossible. Tens of thousands of run-away slaves crowding into Union military camps, pressure from abolitionist Republicans in Congress, and a stalemated war-effort convinced Lincoln on January 1, 1863 to issue the Emancipation Proclamation. This presidential edict freed those slaves in the rebelling Confederacy and made the end of bondage a fundamental Union war aim. Later that year at the dedication of the National Cemetery at Gettysburg, Lincoln movingly asserted his larger goals in the war: "...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."
In 1864, as Union armies in the eastern and western theaters made significant, though costly, progress against Confederate forces, Lincoln won reelection against the former general and Democratic nominee George McClellan. The following year at his second inauguration, Lincoln famously urged his fellow countrymen to be magnanimous as the war came to a close, "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 his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations."
On April 14, 1865, just five days after Robert E. Lee surrendered his Confederate army to Ulysses S. Grant, the President was fatally shot at Ford's Theater in Washington, D.C. by the actor and southern sympathizer John Wilkes Booth. Lincoln quickly became a martyr both to freedom and to the Union he had helped to save. His death, however, tragically ended any opportunity for a magnanimous end to the Civil War.
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