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Abraham Lincoln's strong anti-slavery stance angered southern states, and his election threw into sharp relief the growing cultural and political divide between the North and South.
Abraham Lincoln was born on February 12, 1809 in a small cabin on Nolin Creek in central Kentucky. After a childhood that included losing his mother to milk sickness and seeing his father's farm taken away due to a faulty land title, Lincoln and his family settled in Coles County, Illinois in 1831. A year later, Lincoln served as a captain during the brief Black Hawk War fought between the United States and the Sauk tribe. In 1834, he was elected to his first of four terms as a Representative in the Illinois General Assembly as a member of the Whig party. Two years later, he obtained a law license and began practicing as a "prairie lawyer" in and around his home in Springfield, Illinois, recently christened as the state capital partly owing to Lincoln's work in the legislature. In 1842, Abraham Lincoln married Mary Todd, the daughter of a wealthy Kentucky banker.
In August 1846, after a previous failed attempt, Lincoln was elected to the United States House of Representatives as a member of the Whig Party. During his single two–year term, he spoke out strongly against slavery, drafting a quickly–abandoned bill to abolish the institution. He also spoke out vehemently against what he perceived as President Polk's brutal militarism in the Mexican–American war. Returning to his law practice after his term in the legislature, he continued to publicly oppose decisions such as the Kansas–Nebraska Act and the Dred Scott ruling. After a failed Senate bid, Lincoln ran for United States President on the Republican ticket in the 1860 election. He won the office to become the United States' sixteenth president, receiving 180 of 303 electoral votes.
Abraham Lincoln's strong anti–slavery stance angered southern states, and his election threw into sharp relief the growing cultural and political divide between the North and South. On December 20, 1860, just over a month after Lincoln won office, South Carolina seceded from the United States. Georgia, Alabama, Florida, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas soon followed suit. These states formed the Confederate States of America in February 1861, selecting Jefferson Davis as president.
After several failed attempts by Lincoln's government at reconciliation, Confederate troops seized Fort Sumter, South Carolina on April 12, 1861, setting into motion the American Civil War. The following five weeks saw Virginia, Tennessee, North Carolina, and Arkansas join the Confederacy. On April 15, Lincoln issued a proclamation convening Congress and calling on the states to deploy their militia. Days later, a group of suspected secessionists in Maryland, including the mayor of Baltimore, were arrested and imprisoned. In an unprecedented expansion of wartime presidential power, Abraham Lincoln suspended the writ of habeas corpus, allowing him to detain thousands of suspected secessionists over the course of the war.
Despite political opposition from both anti–war Democrats in the North and Radical Republicans critical of his moderate politics, Lincoln helmed the Union firmly as the war progressed. In August 1861, he signed the Confiscation Act, making it legal to free slaves being used in the Confederacy's war effort. In November of that year, two Confederate diplomats were forcibly removed from the British ship Trent during an effort to seek formal recognition of the Confederacy from Britain. Britain was outraged, but Lincoln avoided a potential war by releasing the two men, who proceeded to England but failed to gain the Confederacy's recognition.
The next year of fighting culminated in the Battle of Antietam in September 1862, which remains the bloodiest one–day battle in the history of the United States, with 23,000 casualties. Lincoln used the Union victory in this battle to announce that he would deliver an Emancipation Proclamation the following January. The now famous proclamation freeing the slaves was enacted on January 1, 1863. Another crucial Union victory, this time in the Battle of Gettysburg in July 1863, set the stage for Lincoln's most famous address. The Gettysburg Address was delivered at the battlefield cemetery on November 19, 1863. In this short speech, Lincoln framed the Civil War as a struggle for "a new birth of freedom. "
Amid the turmoil of war, Abraham Lincoln ran for re–election in the 1864 presidential election. He replaced his former vice president Hannibal Hamlin with new running mate Andrew Johnson. Lincoln and Johnson ran on the National Union Party ticket, enacting a brief change in name to appeal to pro–war Democrats who would not vote for a Republican candidate. Lincoln won re–election in a landslide, winning 212 of 233 electoral votes. Just a month after his inauguration, Confederate general Robert E. Lee surrendered to Union general Ulysses S. Grant, effectively ending the war.
In 1864, a popular actor and Confederate sympathizer named John Wilkes Booth drew up a plan to kidnap President Lincoln. He later became so enraged at Lincoln's policies that he decided to instead assassinate him. On April 14, 1865, Lincoln and his wife attended a production of Our American Cousin at Ford's Theatre in Washington, D.C. During the play's intermission, Booth broke into the president's balcony box and shot him in the back of the head. Lincoln died the following morning. Booth was tracked down and killed on a farm in Virginia 12 days later.
As time progressed after Lincoln's death, his reputation grew steadily. He is now consistently considered one of the greatest American presidents, being embraced by the political left and right alike. Lincoln has been memorialized innumerable times, most notable through his appearance on Mount Rushmore, the five dollar note, the penny, and the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C.
The Washington Post; February 2, 2012
The Washington Post; January 27, 2012
Daily Mail (London); December 29, 2011
Daily Mail (London); August 17, 2011
Daily Mail (London); August 15, 2011
Chicago Defender; March 18, 2000
Point of Beginning; December 1, 2002
Presidential Studies Quarterly; December 1, 2004
Reviewer's Bookwatch; March 1, 2009
Insight on the News; April 6, 1998
In Washington DC, on the night of April 14, 1865, a man named John Wilkes Booth shot and killed the 15thsup1 President of the United States, Abraham Lincoln. On the evening of his assassination, President Lincoln and his wife Mary, a military officer named Henry Rathbone and Rathbone's...
Read more »Abraham Lincoln entered the presidency on November 6, 1860, becoming the first president to be elected from the Republican party. He won the election despite the fact that absolutely no ballots were cast in his name in 10 of the 15 Southern slave states – he only won two of 996 counties in...
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