Early life
Abraham Lincoln was born on 12 February 1809 in a log cabin on Sinking Spring Farm in Hardin County (now LaRue County), Kentucky. His parents, Thomas and Nancy Hanks Lincoln, were small-scale subsistence farmers of modest means. The family moved north to Indiana in 1816 and again to Illinois in 1830, following the standard westward migration pattern of the antebellum American frontier.
Lincoln had approximately twelve months of formal schooling in his entire life. He educated himself extensively in his late teens and twenties — Shakespeare, the King James Bible, the works of Robert Burns, Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England, Euclid — and gradually built a substantial self-taught legal practice in central Illinois from the mid-1830s onward. He served four terms in the Illinois state legislature and one term in the U.S. House of Representatives (1847–1849) before retiring from politics in the early 1850s.
Political career
Lincoln returned to politics in 1854 in response to the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which had repealed the 1820 Missouri Compromise’s restriction on the geographic expansion of slavery. He joined the newly forming Republican Party in 1856 and contested the 1858 Illinois Senate election against the Democratic incumbent Stephen A. Douglas. The Lincoln-Douglas debates of 1858 — seven public debates held across Illinois — established Lincoln as a national Republican figure even though he lost the senatorial election.
The 1860 Republican National Convention at Chicago nominated Lincoln as the party’s presidential candidate. He won the four-way 1860 general election with approximately 40% of the popular vote and an Electoral College majority based entirely on northern and western states; he was not on the ballot in ten of the fifteen slave states. South Carolina seceded from the Union six weeks after his election, beginning the secession crisis that produced the Civil War.
The wartime presidency
Lincoln’s four wartime years as president were the most consequential single American executive tenure of the 19th century. The principal achievements:
Preservation of the Union as a military project. Lincoln progressively built a Union military force of approximately 2 million men, replaced underperforming generals (McClellan, Pope, Burnside, Hooker, Meade in sequence) until he found commanders capable of winning the war (Grant in the east, Sherman in the west), and managed the political coalition that sustained domestic support through four years of unprecedented military casualties.
The Emancipation Proclamation. Issued as a preliminary executive order on 22 September 1862 (five days after the tactical-draw battle of Antietam allowed Lincoln to act from a position of political strength) and as a final order effective 1 January 1863, the Proclamation declared all slaves in territories still in rebellion against the United States to be “thenceforward, and forever free.” It did not free a single slave at the moment of issue (it applied only to areas the Union army did not control); it transformed the war’s stated political purpose from preservation of the Union into the abolition of slavery and converted the Union army into the legal-military instrument of emancipation as it advanced.
The Gettysburg Address. Delivered at the dedication of the Soldiers’ National Cemetery at Gettysburg on 19 November 1863, the 272-word speech is the most famous statement of the political-philosophical purpose of the Union cause. Its closing — that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth — is one of the most quoted political formulations in American political tradition.
The 13th Amendment. Lincoln spent substantial political capital in 1864–1865 to secure congressional passage of the constitutional amendment that would formally abolish slavery. The amendment passed the House on 31 January 1865 and was ratified by the required state legislatures by 6 December 1865.
Re-election
The 1864 presidential election was held during the war. Lincoln, nominated by a coalition Republican-War Democrat ticket called the National Union Party (with the southern unionist Andrew Johnson as his vice-presidential candidate), defeated his former general George B. McClellan, who ran as a Democrat on a platform of negotiated peace with the Confederacy. The decisive event of the election was Sherman’s capture of Atlanta on 2 September 1864, which produced sufficient demonstration of Union military success to ensure Lincoln’s victory. He won approximately 55% of the popular vote and a substantial Electoral College majority.
His Second Inaugural Address (4 March 1865) — delivered with Confederate surrender clearly imminent — articulated the conciliatory political vision that would have guided his Reconstruction policy: “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.”
Assassination
Lincoln attended a performance of the comedy Our American Cousin at Ford’s Theatre in Washington on the evening of 14 April 1865. John Wilkes Booth — a well-known stage actor, Confederate sympathizer, and member of a small conspiracy that had also targeted the vice-president and the secretary of state — entered the presidential box at approximately 10:15 PM and shot Lincoln in the back of the head with a .44 caliber Deringer pistol. Booth escaped from the theatre by leaping onto the stage and breaking a leg in the process. Lincoln was carried to a boarding house across the street and died at 7:22 AM on 15 April 1865 without regaining consciousness. He was 56.
He was the first American president to be assassinated. Booth was killed twelve days later in a federal raid on a Virginia farm. Four other conspirators were hanged on 7 July 1865.
Legacy
Lincoln’s posthumous reputation is the most secure of any 19th-century American political figure. The Lincoln Memorial in Washington (dedicated 1922) is among the most-visited national monuments in the United States. The historiographical consensus places him with George Washington and Franklin D. Roosevelt at the top of any ranking of American presidents.
The political-constitutional consequences of his presidency — the preservation of the federal Union, the abolition of slavery through the 13th Amendment, the post-war constitutional reorganization through the 14th and 15th Amendments — are the foundation of the modern American political order. The political-rhetorical inheritance — the Gettysburg Address, the Emancipation Proclamation, the Second Inaugural — is the foundational corpus of American civic discourse on questions of liberty, equality, and democratic government.