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"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 ... but that was all."
- Abraham Lincoln |
Biography of Abraham Lincoln
Lincoln warned the South in his Inaugural Address:
"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."
Lincoln thought secession illegal, and was willing to use force to
defend Federal law and the Union. When Confederate batteries fired
on Fort Sumter and forced its surrender, he called on the states for
75,000 volunteers. Four more slave states joined the Confederacy but
four remained within the Union. The Civil War had begun.
The son of a Kentucky frontiersman, Lincoln had to struggle for a
living and for learning. Five months before receiving his party's
nomination for President, he sketched his 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 ... but that was all."
Lincoln made extraordinary efforts to attain knowledge while working
on a farm, splitting rails for fences, and keeping store at New Salem,
Illinois. He was a captain in the Black Hawk War, spent eight years
in the Illinois legislature, and rode the circuit of courts for many
years. His law partner said of him, "His ambition was a little
engine that knew no rest."
He married Mary Todd, and they had four boys, only one of whom lived
to maturity. In 1858 Lincoln ran against Stephen A. Douglas for Senator.
He lost the election, but in debating with Douglas he gained a national
reputation that won him the Republican nomination for President in
1860.
As President, he built the Republican Party into a strong national
organization. Further, he rallied most of the northern Democrats to
the Union cause. On January 1, 1863, he issued the Emancipation Proclamation
that declared forever free those slaves within the Confederacy.
Lincoln never let the world forget that the Civil War involved an
even larger issue. This he stated most movingly in dedicating the
military cemetery at Gettysburg: "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."
Lincoln won re-election in 1864, as Union military triumphs heralded
an end to the war. In his planning for peace, the President was flexible
and generous, encouraging Southerners to lay down their arms and join
speedily in reunion.
The spirit that guided him was clearly that of his Second Inaugural
Address, now inscribed on one wall of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington,
D. C.: "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.... "
On Good Friday, April 14, 1865, Lincoln was assassinated at Ford's
Theatre in Washington by John Wilkes Booth, an actor, who somehow
thought he was helping the South. The opposite was the result, for
with Lincoln's death, the possibility of peace with magnanimity died.
Source: The White House
Founding
Fathers and Presidents
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