Abraham Lincoln

In the backwoods of Hardin County, Kentucky on February 12, 1809 in a crude log cabin, a little baby boy was born named Abraham Lincoln. Starting himself in such humble surroundings he would become famously known as the sixteenth president of the 

United States of America. Little could his parents realize that this tiny baby would grow up and lead the people of the United States to a more unified nation and a more peaceful place to live. 

His early life was one of poverty and tragedy. On October 5, 1818 his mother, Nancy, at the age of thirty-four died from a disease called milk sickness, a sickness which is contracted from drinking milk from cows who have grazed on poisonous white snakeroot. Abraham, who was only nine years old at the time carved the pegs for his mother’s coffin. 

His father married Sarah Bush Johnston in December of 1819 and the family moved to Indiana. Lincoln in the later years said this of the move, “It was a wild region, with many bears and other wild animals still in the woods. There I grew up…but that was all” (Lincoln). 

Abraham became close with his step mother. She was illiterate but greatly encouraged Abraham to read and study, while his father never understood Abraham’s desire to study or learn. Abraham and his father were not close and when he passed away on January 17, 1851, Abraham did not attend his funeral. 

Although Abraham grew up in poverty he made excellent efforts to attain knowledge while working as a surveyor, postmaster, and storekeeper in New Salem, Illinois. He became a great man full of wisdom, knowledge, and determination, traits that led him to become one of the greatest peacemakers of all time. 

Lincoln met his future wife Mary Todd at a dance at her sister’s house in Springfield Illinois. They had an on again off again courtship. Abraham, having doubts about his true love for her even called off their wedding. A year and some months had passed when they eventually got back together and on November 4, 1842 they were married. Although they both shared a love of poetry and politics, their marriage suffered many grief’s, disappointments, and a lack of communication which is vital in any relationship. They had extremely different personalities, Mary was used to luxury, Abe was use to hard work and poverty. They both dealt with bouts of depression. They were married for twenty-two years before the bullet of an assassin stole his life away. 

Abraham Lincoln had an amazing political career before he was elected for president. When he was still quite young, the average height for a man was about five feet, but Lincoln stood out with his height being six-feet-four-inches. With his stovetop hat, he stood to about seven feet tall. Lincoln became well acquainted by swapping stories and making friends with the New Salem community. The people were fascinated by his integrity and intelligence. In 1832, after six months in New Salem, Lincoln became more ambitious then ever and decided to run as an independent candidate for the Illinois State Legislature, where he later served four terms. During this time, the Black Hawk War broke out and Lincoln became a temporary captain. Off to war he went; his office campaigning had to be postponed. Lincoln served three terms in the Black Hawk War, which totals about eighty days. When he arrived home, he continued campaigning with the little time that was left. When election day came, Lincoln won the majority of votes in New Salem, but came in eighth out of thirteen throughout the county. The loss of this election made Lincoln decide to put forth a couple of years into studying law. He attained his license in the year of 1837 after passing the bar exam a year earlier. Two years after he first ran for the Illinois State Legislature, while still studying for his law degree, he decided to run again.  In the year of 1834 Lincoln won the election with both Democrats and Republicans supporting him. 

In 1841, after 4 terms serving the Illinois State Legislature, Lincoln left office until 1846. Then he ran to win a Whig nomination for a seat in the Illinois seventh congressional district to the U.S. House of Representatives. During this time, another war broke out: the Mexican American War. Unlike his opponents, Lincoln said nothing about the war which was why he won a majority of the votes by the district. After he won was when Lincoln spoke up about the war saying that the Mexicans started it on America’s land.

In the year of 1848 Lincoln campaigned in the states of Maryland and Massachusetts for Zachary Taylor, a Whig presidential candidate. He decided to campaign for Zachary Taylor because it would help him keep his name before the national audience. Once he was through campaigning he went back to  Springfield, Illinois where he used his knowledge to practice law for about five years through which he became successful. 

In 1854, he was once again elected to the state legislature, but wanted to run for the U.S. Senate instead, so he resigned. Unfortunately Lincoln was defeated and lost on the ninth ballot. In 1856, because of defeat he left the Whig party and joined the new Republican Party. The Republican party was against slavery and called for abolition. Lincoln then got placed in nomination for vice president but failed to win while he was at Philadelphia for a convention.  

On June 16, 1856, Lincoln gave his “House Divided Speech,” where he spoke to congressmen and Stephan A. Douglas, one of his rivals in the Illinois state capital. The purpose of the speech was to show how much America was hurting itself by fighting endlessly over slavery. He acknowledged that slavery was immoral because it violated the Declaration of Independence, which stated that all men are created equal. He pointed out the many wrongdoings of the government by treating slaves as property, and not as people. The speech recognized the hard times between northern and southern opinion and their inability to cooperate with one another. This famous speech forced Douglas to do what he did not want to do, which was to explain himself during the past few years. All Douglas wanted  people to do was forgive the past, but Lincoln would not back down. He crowded Douglas every step of the way through his party’s records to make him face the truth of the Republican party who proclaimed that slavery was wrong. Lincoln tried to appeal to the inner emotions of the delegates sitting in front of him. He wanted to make the people see that things could not continue the way they were moving now because it would cause a tremendous downfall for the country that the people before them worked so hard to establish.

Lincoln’s campaign style was one that people will never forget. After he was last defeated while running for the U.S. Senate, he spent sixteen months traveling through the north making campaign speeches for a variety of Republican candidates. Lincoln was clear and simple in his logic and avoided being wordy. By 1860, the first time that Lincoln was going to be elected president, he established a group of campaign managers and supporters who lined up votes for him. He also laid out his groundwork for candidacy against his rival William H. Seward, a former governor of New York and U.S senator. As the Republicans gathered together on May 16, 1860 at the Wigwam in Chicago Illinois, they believed that they were no match for Seward and that they were sure to lose the election. Lincoln could use all of the delegate support that he could gather because on the first ballot, Seward rose above Lincoln with a 1731/2 to 102. Through the support, Lincoln gained another seventy-nine votes on the second ballot, and won the third ballot. After Lincoln won, his presidency was dominated by the Civil War. He became the nations first Republican President and the first President not born in one of the original thirteen colonies. Thereafter, Senator Hannibal Hamlin was Lincoln’s vice presidential running partner. Three weeks before Lincoln was inaugurated, he assured the country that his first priority as President of the United States would be higher tariffs. He had led this idea on throughout his early political career as well, when in 1832, as he announced his cadency for the Illinois State Legislature, Lincoln proclaimed, “I presume you all know who I am. I am humble Abraham Lincoln. My politics are short and sweet, like the old woman’s dance. I am in favour of a national bank, the internal improvement system and a high protective tariff” (Lincoln).Through this, Lincoln held truth to antislavery and wanted to bind the nation together as one to become a free-labor society and in the future to end slavery for good.

On September 22, 1862, Lincoln issued a preliminary proclamation which stated that if rebelling states did not return themselves to the Union by the first day of 1863, he would declare their slaves to be free forever. The South rejected Lincoln’s policy so in 1863 he moved to free the slaves by issuing the Emancipation Proclamation. The Proclamation states, “Slaves within any state, or designated part of a state…then…in rebellion,…shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free.” The Emancipation caused leaders in the South to turn completely against Lincoln. With Lincolns influence the House of Representatives approved the Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which called for liberation of all slaves with no reimbursement to their owners. The amendment was passed in the year of 1864, but did not receive  enough votes from the House of Representatives. By December of 1865, however, there were enough states to ratify the amendment which made it constitutionally fitting.  There was now a bigger sense of peace between the slaves, and the people that once owned them. Lincoln was now known as the “Great Emancipator.”

In December of 1863, Lincoln announced his plan for reconstruction. He tried to reestablish peace between the Union and the Confederacy. He offered a pardon to all Southerners who pledged an oath of loyalty to the United States. Once ten percent of all state voters had signed the oath, Congress would reinstate the state into the Union. He also urged that African Americans who could read and write would gain the right to vote. Resistance to Lincoln’s plan was shown by his Radical Republican opponents in Congress. This group proposed a bill that would put the South under military rule and only allow a state to be readmitted  to the Union if the majority of the electorate signed the oath of loyalty.  Lincoln vetoed this bill. However, when he realized that his own plans were not working properly, he began to negotiate with the Radical Republican leaders. 

The election of 1864 took place during the Civil War, a time when our country was in a crisis that could drastically change the future and is known to be one of the most important elections in American history. Lincoln just finished out his first term as president of the U.S. and had been nominated as the Republicans’ candidate for president. Lincoln had doubts that he would succeed in winning re-election because no president since Andrew Jackson who served from  1829 to 1837 had been re-elected for a second term. Lincoln was strongly anti-slavery and wanted the Civil War to be fought out successfully in order for this crisis to end correctly. He hoped that the winner would help the losers recover. The other candidate, George McClellan , wanted the war to end right away, unfinished, and was not strongly opposed to slavery. Seventy-eight Union electorate cast ballots on election day, and Lincoln was re-elected president, 212 to McClellan’s 21. Soldiers in the army gave Lincoln seventy percent of their vote. 

Lincoln had a dream predicting his own death, in which he heard crying in the White House. In his dream, he asked somebody who had died. They said it was the President, and when he took a look into the coffin, he saw his own face. His dream played out to be correct. On April 14, 1865, at the age of fifty-six and six weeks after his re-election, he was shot in the head  by John Wilkes Booth while viewing a performance at Ford’s Theater in Washington, D.C.  President Lincoln was taken to the house across the street where he died early the next morning after not awakening from a coma. Booth believed that Lincoln wanted to destroy the Constitution, crush civil liberties, and restore the monarchy, and the only way to uphold the values of our founding fathers was to assassinate Lincoln. Abraham Lincoln was the first President of the United States to ever be killed by an assassin’s bullet.  

Honest Abe is considered a beloved American President and takes the credit for the freeing of the slaves and creating peace throughout the nation. Lincoln wrote the Emancipation and changed almost every man’s opinion of the war. He was an amazing man who changed the world forever. If this courageous man wouldn’t have lived, we might still have slavery on this earth today. This proves that he was a great person, writer, and savior of our country.  He will always be admired for the political moderation that allowed him to preserve our nation.