The Wilderness Years: Kentucky to Illinois
Abraham Lincoln was born on February 12, 1809, in a one-room log cabin on Sinking Spring Farm in Hardin County, Kentucky — now LaRue County. His father, Thomas Lincoln, was a farmer who owned land but could never quite hold onto it, losing farms to disputed titles and moving the family repeatedly: to Knob Creek, still in Kentucky, when Lincoln was two; to Little Pigeon Creek in Indiana when he was seven, after Thomas lost his Kentucky land to a faulty deed. His mother, Nancy Hanks Lincoln, died of milk sickness in 1818 when Lincoln was nine. His stepmother, Sarah Bush Johnston, whom Thomas married the following year, was warm and encouraging, and Lincoln credited her with his love of reading.
His formal schooling amounted to less than a year in total — brief stints at various frontier schools where teachers taught what they knew, which was not much. Everything else he taught himself: Aesop, the Bible, Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, Weems's biography of Washington, and eventually Blackstone's Commentaries on the Laws of England, which he borrowed and read by firelight. The self-education was complete by any standard that mattered. By his early twenties he was arguing cases in frontier courts with a logical precision and a plain eloquence that experienced lawyers found disconcerting.
The family moved to Illinois when Lincoln was twenty-one. He worked a variety of jobs — flatboat pilot, store clerk, postmaster, surveyor — before setting himself to studying law. He was elected to the Illinois state legislature in 1834, serving four terms before leaving to focus on his law practice in Springfield. He married Mary Todd in 1842, a match that produced four sons and a tempestuous domestic life that neither party found easy.
The Prairie Lawyer and the Kansas-Nebraska Act
Lincoln had served one term in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1847 to 1849, gaining distinction mainly for his opposition to the Mexican-American War — which was unpopular with his constituents — and then returning to Springfield, apparently finished with national politics. He spent the early 1850s building a successful law practice, arguing cases before the Illinois Supreme Court and the federal circuit courts, representing railroads and small farmers with equal competence.
The Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 brought him back. The act, engineered by Illinois Senator Stephen Douglas, repealed the Missouri Compromise of 1820 and opened new territories to slavery through "popular sovereignty" — the principle that settlers in each territory would decide for themselves whether to permit or prohibit the institution. For Lincoln, who had always believed that slavery was morally wrong even while accepting its legal existence in Southern states, this was a qualitative change: slavery was no longer being contained; it was being permitted to expand.
His response was the Peoria speech of October 16, 1854, in which he argued against Douglas with a thoroughness and moral clarity that made him the leading voice of anti-Kansas-Nebraska sentiment in Illinois. He failed in his attempt to win a Senate seat in 1854 — the Illinois legislature elected Lyman Trumbull instead — but the attempt established him within the emerging Republican coalition that was forming from the wreckage of the Whig Party and the anti-Nebraska Democrats.
The Lincoln-Douglas Debates and National Recognition
The 1858 Illinois Senate race between Lincoln and Stephen Douglas produced seven debates across the state that were reported nationally and that made Lincoln one of the most discussed political figures in the country. Douglas was the front-runner for the 1860 Democratic presidential nomination and a genuine political giant — the "Little Giant" as he was known, for his short stature and large presence. Lincoln matched him argument for argument for the length of the campaign.
At Freeport, he posed the question that became "the Freeport Doctrine": Could a territory exclude slavery under popular sovereignty even if the Supreme Court, in the Dred Scott decision of 1857, had ruled that Congress could not prohibit slavery in the territories? Douglas answered that settlers could effectively exclude slavery by refusing to enact the local legislation needed to enforce it. The answer saved his Illinois Senate race but destroyed his presidential prospects — Southern Democrats would not support a candidate who acknowledged a mechanism to keep slavery out of territories.
Lincoln lost the Senate race because the district boundaries still gave Democrats a structural advantage. He won the national argument.
His Cooper Union address in New York in February 1860 — a methodical, heavily researched demolition of the Southern argument that the founders had approved of extending slavery — introduced him to Eastern Republicans who had dismissed him as a regional figure. He was a serious candidate for the Republican presidential nomination.
The 1860 Election and the Secession Crisis
The 1860 Republican convention in Chicago was his to lose — he had fewer enemies than William Seward, the frontrunner, and his managers traded promises for delegate support with a skill Lincoln had approved in advance and claimed not to remember in detail afterward. He won on the third ballot.
The general election was a four-party race: Lincoln for the Republicans; Douglas for the Northern Democrats; John C. Breckinridge for the Southern Democrats, who had split from the party over the platform; and John Bell for the Constitutional Union Party. Lincoln won 39.8 percent of the popular vote — not a single electoral vote from any Southern state, where he was not even on the ballot in most — and 180 electoral votes, enough for a clear majority.
Between his election in November 1860 and his inauguration in March 1861, seven Southern states seceded and formed the Confederate States of America. Lincoln spent the interregnum in Springfield, saying nothing publicly while managing the incoming Cabinet appointments with considerable skill. He chose Seward as Secretary of State, Chase as Treasury Secretary, and the other leading Republican candidates as Cabinet members — a "team of rivals" strategy that gave him the party's strongest figures in positions where he could manage and use them.
He was inaugurated on March 4, 1861. His First Inaugural was a masterpiece of careful argument and strategic ambiguity, reaching out to the South while making clear that he would not abandon federal property in Confederate states. Fort Sumter, a federal garrison in Charleston Harbor, South Carolina, was besieged. Lincoln chose to resupply it rather than abandon it. Confederate forces opened fire on April 12, 1861. The Civil War had begun.
Commanding the War: Four Years of Catastrophe and Resolution
Lincoln had no military experience beyond a brief service in the Black Hawk War in 1832, during which he saw no combat and later joked that the fiercest battles he fought were against mosquitoes. He taught himself military strategy from Jomini's treatises and Halleck's Elements of Military Art and Science, corresponded constantly with his generals, and developed a strategic vision that his military commanders frequently resisted: he wanted to attack Confederate armies and destroy them, not capture geographic objectives.
His command of the war was conducted under political conditions of unrelenting difficulty. The Union armies suffered catastrophic defeats at First and Second Bull Run, at Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville. Generals who looked capable — McClellan, Burnside, Hooker, Pope — proved incapable of translating military resources into victory. He protected McClellan far longer than the general's performance warranted, understanding that removing a popular commander before his successor was established would damage morale.
The political pressures were equally severe. The Radical Republicans in Congress, who controlled the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War, pushed for more aggressive prosecution of the conflict and for earlier and more sweeping action against slavery. The War Democrats demanded that the war be fought on a pure "restore the Union" basis without touching slavery. The Peace Democrats — Copperheads — demanded an immediate negotiated settlement. Lincoln navigated between all of them with a combination of tactical accommodation and strategic firmness.
The Emancipation Proclamation
Lincoln's position on slavery evolved under the pressure of the war. He had entered office committed to preventing slavery's expansion but not to abolishing it where it existed — that was beyond his constitutional authority and would have shattered the Union coalition before it won anything. As the war continued and Confederate armies remained undefeated, he came to see emancipation as both a military necessity and a moral imperative.
He drafted the Emancipation Proclamation in July 1862 and was persuaded by Secretary of State Seward to withhold it until after a Union military victory, lest it appear an act of desperation rather than strength. The Battle of Antietam on September 17, 1862 — the bloodiest single day in American history, with combined casualties of approximately 23,000 — was enough of a Union strategic success to provide the platform. He issued the preliminary proclamation five days later and the final proclamation on January 1, 1863.
The proclamation freed enslaved people in Confederate states — not in the border states still in the Union — and authorized the enlistment of Black men in the Union Army. It was, in its legal structure, a war measure under the commander-in-chief's powers rather than a universal abolition. But it transformed the meaning of the war. The Union was no longer fighting only to restore the political status quo ante; it was fighting to destroy slavery. European powers, particularly Britain, which had been considering recognizing the Confederacy, could not do so while the Confederacy was visibly the defender of slavery against a Union fighting for freedom.
Gettysburg, Re-election, and the End
The Battle of Gettysburg in July 1863, combined with Grant's simultaneous capture of Vicksburg on the Mississippi River, marked the turning point of the war. Lincoln found in Ulysses S. Grant a general who understood what he required: relentless pressure on Confederate armies until they were destroyed. He made Grant general-in-chief in March 1864.
The Gettysburg Address, delivered on November 19, 1863, at the dedication of the military cemetery on the battlefield site, is the finest piece of political prose in the American language. At 272 words it took approximately two minutes to deliver. The main address by the orator Edward Everett lasted two hours. The crowd applause for Lincoln's remarks was respectful but not extraordinary; many newspapers the following day ignored or dismissed it. History's judgment has been absolute in the other direction.
The 1864 election came close to unseating him. By August 1864, with Grant's armies stuck in the trenches before Petersburg and Sherman not yet having captured Atlanta, the war seemed unwinnable and Lincoln expected to lose. He wrote and sealed a memorandum acknowledging that he would probably be defeated and committing himself to cooperating with his successor during the transition. Sherman's capture of Atlanta on September 2 transformed the political picture. Lincoln won re-election against McClellan with 212 electoral votes to 21.
His Second Inaugural Address, delivered on March 4, 1865, is the other great text of his presidency: "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." General Lee surrendered to Grant at Appomattox Court House on April 9, 1865.
On the evening of April 14, 1865, five days after Appomattox, Lincoln attended a performance of "Our American Cousin" at Ford's Theatre in Washington. John Wilkes Booth, a Southern sympathizer who had moved from a conspiracy to kidnap Lincoln to a plan to kill him simultaneously with Vice President Johnson and Secretary of State Seward, shot Lincoln in the back of the head at approximately 10:15 p.m. Lincoln was carried unconscious to the Petersen House across the street and died at 7:22 a.m. on April 15.
Legacy: The Standard By Which Presidents Are Measured
Lincoln is ranked the greatest American president in virtually every survey of presidential historians. The ranking reflects the scale of what he confronted and the quality of the judgment he brought to it: preserving the Union against a Confederate secession, transforming the war's purpose into the abolition of slavery, managing a political coalition of extraordinary difficulty, and doing all of it with a prose eloquence that turned the hardest political choices into permanent literature.
The Thirteenth Amendment, abolishing slavery throughout the United States, was ratified in December 1865, eight months after his death. The Reconstruction he had planned — emphasizing reconciliation with the South over punishment — was replaced after his death by the more punitive Radical Republican program, then by the abandonment of Reconstruction entirely under the Hayes-Tilden compromise of 1877, which returned the South to white supremacist rule. The full consequences of the war's unfinished business would take another century to begin to resolve.
He is also the president who established the modern understanding of executive power in wartime — suspending habeas corpus, imposing naval blockades, and issuing the Emancipation Proclamation on the basis of his commander-in-chief authority. Every subsequent president who has expanded presidential power in a crisis has operated in the precedent he created.
