Lincoln, Abraham, 1809-1865

Abraham Lincoln was the sixteenth president of the United States, whose election to the White House as an anti-slavery Republican in 1860 led several southern states to declare themselves separate from the Union and create the Confederate States of America. Lincoln was commander-in-chief of Union forces during the Civil War. Over the course of four years, Lincoln oversaw the Union war effort and took steps to end the institution of slavery to aid the federal military effort and destroy the root cause of the north versus south sectional conflict.

Born on February 12, 1809, near Hodgenville, Kentucky, Lincoln moved with is family to Indiana as a child and grew up in a poor, frontier society. Although he received minimal formal education, Lincoln proved to be highly intelligent and a voracious reader. He held various jobs as a young man, including working on a flatboat down the Mississippi River, splitting rails and logs, and as a store keeper. He moved to Illinois in 1830 and in 1832, he volunteered for military service during the Black Hawk War in Illinois. Elected captain of a militia company, Lincoln saw no combat, but credited his time leading men in the military as one of the most proud and instructional periods of his life.

After the Black Hawk War, Lincoln operated a general store in New Salem, Illinois. When the business began to lose money, he decided to study law and become an attorney. Unlike most other lawyers, who attended a law school or studied under established attorneys, Lincoln’s education was self-guided through legal texts and books he borrowed or purchased. Meanwhile, he developed an interest in politics. After an unsuccessful run for the Illinois legislature in 1833, he ran again in 1834 and won a seat in the state’s House of Representatives. He served one term and became known for his support of internal improvements and his Free Soil position on slavery, which opposed slavery in the new territories and criticized abolition (the immediate, forced end of slavery).

After leaving the Illinois legislature in 1836, Lincoln became a successful attorney in Springfield. He handled many different types of cases, and over the course of his legal career, representing poor individuals in criminal cases as well as large businesses, such as the Illinois Central Railroad. Lincoln argued 175 cases before the Illinois Supreme Court, serving as the single attorney in 51 of those cases (31 of which he won). As an attorney, he developed a reputation for integrity and earned the nickname “Honest Abe.”

In 1846, Lincoln won an election as a member of the Whig Party to the U.S. House of Representatives for Illinois. As a freshman congressman, he helped author legislation to abolish slavery in the District of Columbia, but the bill died due to insufficient support. More notably, Lincoln opposed the Mexican-American War which erupted in 1846 due to a border dispute between the United States and Mexico. He criticized Democratic president James K. Polk, but this proved unpopular in his home state. He had promised to only serve one term in Congress and declined to run for reelection. He returned to Springfield after the expiration of his term in 1849 and resumed his law practice.

Lincoln’s political ambitions continued to grow in the 1850s. The volatile debate over the future of slavery in the territories, especially following passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854—which overturned slavery restrictions established by the Missouri Compromise of 1820 and opened all western territories to slavery through popular sovereignty (vote of the residents)—inspired Lincoln to speak publicly about his opposition to slavery. His chief rival became Illinois senator Stephen A. Douglas, a powerful voice in the national Democratic Party, and the author of the Kansas-Nebraska Act. Lincoln gave numerous speeches denouncing slavery as a moral wrong and opposing its extension into the territories. However, like most northerners, he was not an abolitionist and did not advocate for the immediate end of slavery across the United States. Most white Americans during the 1850s embraced white supremacy, and many northerners did not want African Americans—as slaves or as free people—in their communities. Lincoln believed that southern states had the legal right to maintain the institution of slavery within their own borders, and he fended off accusations that he was for African American equality. For years he gave tacit support to a plan promoted among moderate politicians to send freed slaves to Africa.

The issue of slavery in the territories effectively broke apart the Whig Party and gave rise to the new Republican Party. Lincoln joined this new anti-slavery party and by 1858 received the party’s nomination in Illinois to challenge Douglas’s reelection to the U.S. Senate. Upon receiving the nomination, Lincoln gave one of his most famous speeches, declaring in part that “a house divided against itself cannot stand”—a reference to the United States being half slaveholding and half free—and predicting that the fight over slavery would either make the country give in to slaveholding interests or end the institution. During the 1858 Illinois campaign, Lincoln and Douglas engaged in eight public debates which have become the most famous political debates in United States history. Douglas championed his principle of “popular sovereignty,” allowing white residents of the territories to make their new states free or slaveholding, while Lincoln advanced a moral opposition to slavery in the territories as contrary to the principles of American freedom. Douglas ultimately won the Senate election, but the debates catapulted Lincoln to national fame and the leading voice for the growing anti-slavery movement in the north

Only two years later, in 1860, the Republican Party nominated Lincoln for U.S. president. His chief rival was, again, Stephen Douglas. The election was the most contested and significant in American history. The Democratic Party split during its convention over the defense of slavery. Douglas and his outwardly neutral platform on slavery received the party’s formal nomination, but many southern delegates walked out to hold their convention, nominating John C. Breckenridge as the champion of pro-slavery interests. Talk of secession, which had circulated in years past, increased as southern politicians warned that election of Lincoln would be a direct assault upon their slaveholding interests and justify disunion.

Lincoln won the 1860 presidential election without any southern support, not only placing the first truly anti-slavery president in the White House but proving that northern voters could elect a candidate against southern interests. Within weeks, states in the lower south began holding secession conventions to declare their separation from the Union. South Carolina led the way with its ordnance of secession passing on December 20, 1860. Mississippi was second, on January 9, 1861. In total, seven southern states declared secession even before Lincoln was inaugurated in March 1861.

Lincoln entered the presidency in the midst of this secession crisis. He rejected the legitimacy of the lower south’s separation from the Union. The matter erupted into open hostilities in April 1861, when Confederate forces attacked and overwhelmed federal troops at Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor, South Carolina. In response, Lincoln called for 75,000 volunteers to put down the rebellion, as he called it. Northern states responded enthusiastically, while several states in the upper south—including Virginia, Arkansas, North Carolina, and Tennessee—chose to join the Confederacy.

Lincoln’s objective at the start of the Civil War was restoration of the Union as it was. He resisted efforts by more radical anti-slavery northerners to attack slavery itself, and overruled Union general John C. Frémont’s effort to liberate slaves in Missouri in 1861. His actions were guided by concerns regarding his legal authority to challenge slavery where it already existed, and from fears that such steps would drive moderate Unionists in the border states of Missouri, Kentucky, and Maryland into the Confederacy. (Lincoln still personally opposed slavery and in 1862 signed an emancipation act liberating enslaved people in Washington, D.C., fulfilling a goal he had first undertaken as a congressman in the 1840s.)

However, as Confederate military forces won multiple battlefield victories in 1861 and 1862, prolonging the conflict, Lincoln sought more desperate measures. For one, thousands of enslaved people had fled to Union lines, and more arriving daily. Secondly, the institution was the Confederacy’s greatest economic and labor interest. Millions of enslaved people grew crops that fed and funded the Confederate war effort, and southern officials used slave labor to construct forts and trenches that held back the Union armies. Recognizing that the Union could not defeat the Confederacy while protecting or leaving the institution of slavery untouched, on January 1, 1863, Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation, which declared all slaves in secessionist areas permanently free. Although the proclamation was limited in scope (as it was a military measure that did not, nor could not, liberate enslaved people in areas not in rebellion against federal authority), it was a revolutionary act in American history. It formally changed the Union objective of the war, from preserving it as it was to “a new birth of freedom,” as Lincoln famously said in a speech in November 1863 at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. Additionally, the proclamation authorized federal officers to protect the freedom of all enslaved people who fled to Union armies in Confederate territories and to liberate those they encountered during their campaigns in the south. Finally, the Emancipation Proclamation formally authorized the United States military to enlist African American soldiers. As a result around 180,000 black soldiers fought for the Union during the Civil War.

Throughout the Civil War, Lincoln struggled to lead the Union war effort in a challenging political and military environment. Democrats in the north vehemently opposed his administration and Republican Party policies, particularly those against slavery. Union generals in Virginia failed to defeat the Confederate army, lowering morale in the north and boosting prospects of southern success. Lincoln managed to handle these various challenges well, often accepting public criticism from generals and relieving them of command only when they failed to deliver military victories. He also stretched the authority of the presidency, authorizing the imprisonment of critics he believed directly harmed the war effort. While his administration was accused of violating the civil rights of some Americans, the Republican-led Congress frequently backed Lincoln and expanding his power.

In 1864, Lincoln feared he would lose reelection as the Civil War continued to drag on, costing hundreds of thousands of lives and millions of dollars. However, through battlefield successes by Union generals Ulysses S. Grant, William Tecumseh Sherman, and Philip Sheridan in Virginia and Georgia, Lincoln won the election and support to continue the war until Confederate defeat. He also worked behind the scenes with Congress and various state leaders to legally end slavery through a constitutional amendment. While he voiced some support for the old plan of relocating freed slaves to Africa, by the end of the war Lincoln knew such plan was impractical and he supported protecting basic civil rights of African Americans within the United States.

In the spring of 1865, the Confederate war effort began to collapse. Much of Lincoln’s attention was turned to reconstructing the former Confederate areas, some of which were already under federal control. He advocated for a speedy reunification, without malice or vengeance, and one in which former secessionists were welcomed back to the Union without slavery and with some recognitions of black civil rights. In April 1865, Robert E. Lee surrendered his Army of Northern Virginia to General Grant in Virginia and Union forces chased down the last southern troops across the lower south. On April 14, as the Civil War was ending, Lincoln was shot in the head by John Wilkes Booth at Ford’s Theater in Washington, D.C. The mortally wounded president was carried to a boarding house across the street where he passed away the following morning. Lincoln’s murder ended most hopes for a peaceful reconstruction, as it inflamed tensions in the north and energized Radical Republicans who Lincoln had largely held in check.

Lincoln was married to Mary Todd, who was from a wealthy family in Kentucky. He had four sons, only one of whom (Robert) survived into adulthood. Lincoln is buried in a large tomb in Oak Ridge Cemetery in Springfield, Illinois. (Wikipedia; American Battlefield Trust; National Park Service)