biography
| sex:
| male
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| lived:
| (1809–65)
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| biography:
| US statesman and 16th president (1861–5), born near Hodgenville, Kentucky, USA. Born in a log cabin to a modest farm family, he moved early with his family to Indiana. His mother died in 1818 and his stepmother, Sarah Bush Johnston, provided a fine model who inspired the ambitious but unschooled boy to discipline and educate himself. The Lincolns moved to Illinois (1830) and, after twice sailing a flatboat to New Orleans, he settled in New Salem, IL where he pursued workaday jobs while studying law on his own. In the 1832 Black Hawk War he served as a volunteer but saw no action. In 1835 he entered the Illinois state legislature as a Whig, and after unremarkable service he left the legislature (1841). In 1837 he began a law practice in Springfield, IL, and in 1842 married Mary Todd of a prominent Springfield family. His position as a prominent Whig in Illinois took him to the US House of Representatives (1847–9), where he again had a lacklustre record despite his opposition to the war in Mexico. Back in Springfield, he gradually began to prosper as a lawyer, often representing business interests, but his eloquently stated if moderate anti-slavery views gained him increasing attention. This came to a head during his unsuccessful race (1858) for the US Senate against Stephen A Douglas, who led the Democratic accommodation to slave interests. The historic debates between the two men secured Lincoln a national following, which led to his becoming the presidential nominee of the new anti-slavery Republican Party in 1860. Although he received only 40% of the popular vote, due to a split in the Democratic Party Lincoln won a majority of the Electoral College votes. Although he had stated his willingness to tolerate slavery where it currently existed, his election precipitated the secession of Southern states and the formation of the Confederacy. In the years of civil war that followed, the inxperienced Lincoln proved to be one of the most extraordinary leaders, both political and moral, the USA has ever seen. First defining the war as being fought over secession rather than slavery, he oversaw the creation of the Union army. When the political time was right he announced the Emancipation Proclamation (Sep 1862), thereby interpreting the war as a crusade against slavery, and later oversaw the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment (1865) which legally ended slavery. With his immortal Gettysburg Address (Nov 1863), he further defined the war as the struggle for preservation of the democratic idea which he called ‘government of the people, by the people, for the people’. Meanwhile, he took a direct interest in the conduct of the war, hiring and firing generals, getting daily reports from the battlefields, and visiting the troops in the front lines. All this time he had also to mediate between the pressures of radical and conservative elements of the North, using an astute combination of suppression and conciliation, and barely surviving the election in 1864. Having seen the victory of the Union forces (Apr 1865), he was beginning to plan a generous reconstruction policy when he was assassinated by Southern fanatic John Wilkes Booth. His body was taken by train from Washington to be buried in Springfield, IL, as the nation he had refounded mourned their ‘Father Abraham’. Master of both a Biblical eloquence and a homespun vernacular, a natural at combining practical politics with moral principles, in only four years as president he had established why he is one of the few Americans who truly ‘belong to the ages’. |
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