One of the most famous politicians in American history, Abraham Lincoln was born on February 12, 1809. He successfully led the country through its greatest internal crisis, the Civil War, preserved the Union, and helped end slavery. Reared in a poor family on the western frontier, he was mostly self-educated. He became a country lawyer, an Illinois state legislator and a one-term member of the U. S. House of Representatives, but failed in two attempts to gain a seat in the U. S. Senate.
As an outspoken opponent of the expansion of slavery in the United States, Lincoln was the Republican nominee in 1860 and was elected president with a plurality of 40 percent of the popular vote and a decisive majority of 180 out of 303 electoral votes. By the time of his inauguration in March 1861, seven Southern states had already seceded from the Union. As president, he concentrated on the military and political dimensions of the war effort, always seeking to reunify the nation. He vigorously exercised unprecedented war powers, including arrest and detention without trial of thousands of suspected secessionists.
Lincoln closely supervised the war effort, especially the selection of top generals. Under his leadership, the Union took control of the Border States at the start of the war and tried repeatedly to capture the Confederate capitol at Richmond. A shrewd politician deeply involved with patronage and power issues in each state, he managed his own re-election campaign in 1864.
On April 14, 1865, six days after the surrender of Lee’s Confederate army, Lincoln was assassinated, the first U. S. president to suffer such a fate.
Image Courtesy Wilson’s Creek National Battlefield; WICR 31305
