Abraham Lincoln Biography

"The Peacemakers" a painting by George P. A. Healy. Seated aboard the Union steamer River Queen are Maj. Gen. William T. Sherman, Lt. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant, President Abraham Lincoln, and Rear Adm. David D. Porter. The four men met to discuss peace terms to follow the war.

Abraham Lincoln was born in a log cabin in Hardin County, Kentucky on February 12, 1809.  His mother died when he was nine years old.  Lincoln was largely self-educated.  He loved to read, but disliked the physical labor of frontier life.
 
In his early twenties, Lincoln pursued a variety of livelihoods.  He was a partner in a general store, a captain in the Illinois Militia, a failed candidate for Illinois General Assembly, a postmaster, and a surveyor.  Eventually, he began teaching himself law.  Before being admitted to the bar in 1836, he ran a second time for state legislature in 1834.  This time he was successful.
 
Lincoln later ran for a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives.  Once again, he was defeated on his first try, but succeeded in his second campaign.  After a two-year term, he returned to practicing law as the national debate over slavery heated up.  Lincoln opposed slavery and decided to act on that political will by attempting to unseat U.S. Senator Stephen Douglas of Illinois.  It was at this point Lincoln delivered his famous House Divided Speech and the two candidates sparred in heavyweight debates.  Again, Lincoln was defeated, but the campaign had gained him national notoriety. 
 
In 1860, he was nominated as the Republican candidate for the presidency and beat a field of opponents that included his rival Stephen Douglas, thus becoming the sixteenth President of the United States.  Before his inauguration, however, seven Southern states had seceded from the Union as the nation lurched toward civil war.
 
At the outset of the American Civil War, Lincoln and his Union Army’s purpose was to reunify the nation.  However, defeats came swiftly to the Union Army as Lincoln scrambled to replace civilian and military leadership.  After the terribly bloody Union victory at Antietam, Lincoln used the opportunity to issue the Emancipation Proclamation that freed slaves in the Confederate states.  The Union purpose was no longer only to preserve the Union, but also to abolish slavery.
 
In 1864, Lincoln was reelected in a landslide victory and inaugurated in March 1865.  One month later the Confederate General Robert E. Lee surrendered to Union General Ulysses S. Grant.  After four years of bloodshed, the war had finally ended.  The Union had been preserved, slavery abolished, and four million slaves were freed.  Victory, however, came at an enormous price.  More soldiers died in the American Civil War than the number of American military deaths suffered in the future two world wars combined.
 
Even before the end of the war, Lincoln had begun considering how best to welcome the conquered southern states back into the Union.  He would not, however, face the challenges of Reconstruction.  Lincoln was assassinated on April 14, 1865, by a Confederate sympathizer John Wilkes Booth at Ford's Theater in Washington, D.C.

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His Hand and Pen (narration from the above video)

A nation in the dark depths of war and blight
A president’s gaze pierces the shadowy night
And whosoever in his day would have thought
This frontier rail splitter such salvation could have brought

But as a youth he knew something special stirred inside
So in his copy book to himself he did confide
“Abraham Lincoln his hand and pen
He will be good but God knows when”

Determined to persevere but humble in his fate
For he was destined not just to be good but great
Through his steadying hand and masterful pen
One day he would become a giant among men

With the father of the nation standing behind
He summoned the best angels of his mind
Candlelight bathed his head, heart, and hand
He dipped the quill and let his spirit take command
And what came forth was of such magnificence
No prose or verse could compare to its eloquence

For this was more than the mending of a broken nation
But rather no less than democracy’s own preservation
An experiment set forth by enlightened founders of bold vision
Now stood trial before the world for the promise of its own ambition

Humbly the sage attested no words could further consecrate
What soldiers’ blood at Gettysburg had come to mandate
That a union would be preserved and an ideal given rebirth
That such an institution shall not perish from this earth