Abraham Lincoln

Introduction

Abraham Lincoln occupies a singular position in the history of the United States and in the broader story of democratic governance. The sixteenth president of the United States guided the nation through its greatest internal crisis, the Civil War, while simultaneously presiding over the abolition of slavery through the Emancipation Proclamation and the Thirteenth Amendment. He was assassinated in April of 1865, just days after the Confederate surrender effectively ended the war, becoming in death as powerful a symbol as he had been in life. His story is one of extraordinary self-making: born in poverty in a log cabin on the Kentucky frontier, with less than a year of formal schooling, he taught himself law, entered politics, and rose to the highest office in the land through a combination of fierce intelligence, political skill, moral seriousness, and an instinctive feel for the popular will of his time.

Lincoln's presidency transformed the American republic. He preserved the Union at the cost of more than six hundred thousand lives. He ended an institution that had defined Southern society and economy for two centuries and had corrupted American democracy since the founding. He redefined the meaning of the republic's founding documents, arguing in the Gettysburg Address and elsewhere that the Declaration of Independence's promise that all men are created equal was the true foundation of American government, and that the war was being fought to make that promise real. In doing so he gave the United States a new birth of freedom, as he himself described it, that would shape the country's self-understanding for generations.

Yet Lincoln was also a complex, sometimes contradictory figure. He was not an abolitionist in the radical sense — he spent most of his political career opposing the extension of slavery into new territories rather than demanding its immediate abolition in the states where it existed. He held racial views that were, by modern standards, deeply flawed, and he expressed doubts about racial equality even as he fought to end slavery. His suspension of habeas corpus, his suppression of antiwar newspapers, and his use of executive power in ways that alarmed contemporary constitutional lawyers raise questions about the boundaries of presidential authority in wartime that have never been fully resolved. Understanding Lincoln requires engaging with both his genuine greatness and his real limitations.

This biography traces Lincoln's life from his birth in Kentucky through his frontier childhood in Indiana and Illinois, his self-education and entry into law, his early political career in the Illinois legislature, his single term in Congress, his years in the political wilderness during the 1850s, his emergence as a national figure through the Lincoln-Douglas debates, his election as president, his conduct of the Civil War, his evolving views on slavery and reconstruction, and his assassination at the moment of triumph. It is the story of a man who grew in moral stature with the demands placed upon him, who became, in the judgment of most historians and most Americans, the greatest president the country has ever had.

Frontier Childhood in Kentucky

Abraham Lincoln was born on the twelfth of February in the year 1809, in a one-room log cabin on Sinking Spring Farm near Hodgenville, in Hardin County, Kentucky. His father, Thomas Lincoln, was a farmer and carpenter of modest means who had himself been born in Virginia and moved to Kentucky as a child. His mother, Nancy Hanks Lincoln, was a woman of uncertain origins whose illegitimacy was a source of shame that Lincoln, in later life, referred to only obliquely. Both parents were illiterate or nearly so, though Thomas Lincoln could sign his name and read a little. They were members of a Baptist congregation, the Little Mount Separate Baptist Church, whose theology emphasized predestination and the sovereignty of God's will.