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.
"I appeal to you again to constantly bear in mind that with
you, and not with politicians, not with Presidents, not with
office-seekers, but with you, is the question, "Shall the Union and
shall the liberties of this country be preserved to the latest
generation?"
--From the February 11, 1861 Speech to Gov. Morton in Indianapolis
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." 
