1809-1865 · Sixteenth president of the United States, who led the Union through the Civil War
About Abraham Lincoln
Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865) was born in a Kentucky log cabin, grew up on the Indiana frontier, and taught himself law in New Salem, Illinois. He served four terms in the Illinois legislature and one in Congress (1847-1849), then returned to politics in 1854 to oppose the Kansas-Nebraska Act. He lost the 1858 Senate race to Stephen A. Douglas, won the presidency in 1860, led the Union through the Civil War, issued the Emancipation Proclamation, and was assassinated in April 1865.
“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.”
“Fourscore and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.”
“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.”
On the evening of 16 June 1858 the Illinois Republican state convention, meeting in the Hall of Representatives of the State House at Springfield, resolved that Abraham Lincoln was its first and only choice for the United States Senate against the Democratic incumbent, Stephen A. Douglas. Lincoln answered with a carefully written acceptance speech that opened the campaign and set its terms.
On 19 November 1863, four and a half months after the Union victory at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, a large crowd gathered to dedicate the Soldiers' National Cemetery, where Union soldiers killed in the fighting of 1-3 July were being reinterred. The principal orator was Edward Everett, the former secretary of state and president of Harvard, who spoke for about two hours.
Abraham Lincoln took the oath for his second term on 4 March 1865 on the East Portico of the Capitol, under a newly finished dome, before a crowd standing in mud after a morning of rain. The war was nearly won: Sherman had marched through Georgia and the Carolinas, Grant held Lee at Petersburg, and Congress had sent the Thirteenth Amendment to the states five weeks earlier.