Abraham Lincoln Biography

Harriet Tubman confided that she did not like the anti-slavery, Republican candidate for the 1860 United States presidential election. She questioned the nominee’s motivations. Ralph Waldo Emerson, an avowed abolitionist, voted for the Republican nominee but he, too, not only questioned the candidate’s convictions but also his capacities. 

One could hardly fault Tubman and Emerson for their judgments. The man they were sizing up had little in his personal biography to instill confidence among the electorate and the stakes were high. Furthermore, both were surprised and disappointed that William Seward, the abolitionist Senator from New York who had sold Tubman her property, did not win the Republican Party nomination as expected. And what Emerson could not yet appreciate was that this tall, almost oafish candidate was the very embodiment of the self-reliance that Emerson so forcefully propounded. 

This politician did not hail from the Eastern elite halls of power that tended to produce presidents but rather from the frontier. In fact, his grandfather and namesake, Abraham, had been killed in an Indian raid in 1786. On February 12, 1809, the younger Abraham was born in a log cabin in Hardin County, Kentucky to Thomas and Nancy Lincoln. When young Abe was three or four, his infant brother died. At age nine, and then living in rural southern Indiana, Abe’s beloved mother died of contaminated milk. Thomas, desperate to find a new wife, left for more metropolitan areas and simply deserted Abe and his 11-year-old sister, Sarah. For six months, the abandoned siblings toiled by themselves. Self-reliance was not a choice. It was a survivalist imperative.

Thomas eventually returned with his new wife, Sarah, a widowed mother with three children of her own. Thomas valued manual labor, finding education of little practical value on the frontier. Conversely, Abe disliked the hard-scrabbled existence of frontier life and naturally gravitated toward more cerebral interests, creating constant friction between father and son. Fortunately for Abe, his stepmother saw something special in him and encouraged his reading and intellectual pursuits. Abe’s hard-earned, physical self-reliance morphed into a natural capacity to teach himself. In aggregate, he received no more than 12 months of formal primary education. From his stepmother’s sense of humor, he also developed a brilliant, comedic wit, an asset that would serve him well.

Abe’s hard-earned, physical self-reliance morphed into a natural capacity to teach himself. In aggregate, he received no more than 12 months of formal primary education.

In his early twenties, Lincoln pursued a variety of livelihoods. He was a partner in a general store, a captain in the Illinois Militia, a failed candidate for Illinois General Assembly, a postmaster, and a surveyor. Eventually, he began teaching himself law. Before being admitted to the bar in 1836, he ran a second time for state legislature in 1834. This time he was successful.

Lincoln later ran for a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives. Once again, he was defeated on his first try but succeeded in his second campaign. After a two-year term, he returned to practicing law as the national debate over slavery heated up. Lincoln opposed slavery and decided to act on that political will by attempting to unseat U.S. Senator Stephen Douglas of Illinois. It was at this point Lincoln delivered his famous “House Divided” speech and the two candidates sparred in heavyweight debates. Again, Lincoln was defeated, but the campaign had brought him national notoriety. 

Lincoln debating Douglas

In 1860, he was nominated as the Republican candidate for the presidency and beat a field of opponents that included his rival Stephen Douglas, thus becoming the sixteenth president of the United States. Before his inauguration, however, seven Southern states had seceded from the Union as the nation lurched toward civil war.

At the outset of the American Civil War, Lincoln and his Union Army’s purpose was to reunify the nation. However, defeats came swiftly to the Union Army as Lincoln scrambled to replace civilian and military leadership. After the terribly bloody Union victory at Antietam, Lincoln used the opportunity to issue the Emancipation Proclamation that freed slaves in the Confederate states. The Union’s purpose was no longer only to preserve the Union, but also to abolish slavery.

In 1864, Lincoln was reelected in a landslide victory and inaugurated in March 1865. One month later Confederate General Robert E. Lee surrendered to Union General Ulysses S. Grant. After four years of bloodshed, the war had finally ended. The Union had been preserved, slavery abolished, and four million slaves were freed. Victory, however, came at an enormous price. More soldiers died in the American Civil War than the combined number of American military deaths suffered in the future two world wars.

Even before the end of the war, Lincoln had begun considering how best to welcome the conquered southern states back into the Union. He would not, however, face the challenges of Reconstruction. Two days after the Confederate surrender, Lincoln delivered a speech in which he promoted the idea of voting rights for blacks. In the audience, seething with anger, was a former Confederate spy named John Wilkes Booth. Three days later Booth shot Lincoln at Ford’s Theater in Washington, D.C. After Lincoln remained in a coma for nine hours, John Jay, the president’s secretary, noted, “a look of unspeakable peace came upon his worn features.” Those present knelt in prayer, after which Edwin Stanton, Lincoln’s Secretary of War, said, “Now he belongs to the ages.”

Lincoln died on April 15, 1865 at the age of 56. His final resting place is the Lincoln Tomb and War Memorials State Historic Site at Oak Ridge Cemetery in Springfield, Illinois.

Abraham Lincoln by Daniel Chester French, Lincoln Memorial, Washington, D.D.