Abraham Lincoln

• 1. Introduction

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  Abraham Lincoln was born in a one-room log cabin in Kentucky on the 12th of February 1809, and he died with a bullet in the back of his head at twenty-two minutes past seven on a April morning in 1865. Between those two facts sits the most consequential American life of the nineteenth century. He had less than twelve months of formal schooling by the age of fifteen. He studied law by borrowing books and reading alone, later saying he studied with nobody. He lost a Senate race, a House seat after a single term, and a bid to run the General Land Office. Yet this self-taught frontier lawyer became the 16th president, held the Union together through its bloodiest war, and signed away the legal foundation of slavery. How does a boy hired out to area farmers, his wages pocketed by his own father, end up the most quoted man in American history? Why did a moderate who promised the South he would not touch their slaves become the figure who freed them? And what made a single trip down a flatboat to New Orleans repel him so deeply that it would, in the words of one historian, leave an indelible impression?

• 2. The Frontier Cabin

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  Sinking Spring Farm, near Hodgenville, Kentucky, was where Thomas Lincoln and Nancy Hanks Lincoln raised their second child. The family descended from Samuel Lincoln, an Englishman who emigrated to Massachusetts in 1637. Abraham's paternal grandfather and namesake, Captain Abraham Lincoln, had moved the family from Virginia to Kentucky, and was killed in a Native American raid in 1786. Thomas Lincoln could not catch a break on land. He bought multiple farms in Kentucky but failed to secure clear property titles to any of them, losing hundreds of acres in legal disputes. In 1816 the family moved to Indiana, where titles were more reliable, settling on a forested plot in the Little Pigeon Creek Community. Thomas worked there as a farmer, cabinetmaker, and carpenter. Death came early and often. On the 5th of October 1818 Nancy died from milk sickness, leaving eleven-year-old Sarah to run a household that included her father and nine-year-old Abraham. Thomas married a widow named Sarah Bush Johnston in December 1819, and Abraham grew close to his stepmother, calling her Mama. His own sister died in childbirth on the 20th of January 1828, a loss that devastated him. The boy who carried goods by flatboat to the slave markets of New Orleans would soon put a thousand miles between himself and that grave.

• 3. Reading Law Alone

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  Less than twelve months of formal schooling, gathered from itinerant teachers, was all Lincoln ever sat through. He learned to read but probably not to write during two short stints in Kentucky. As a teenager he was hired out to neighboring farmers, and his father pocketed the wages as the custom allowed. Friction with Thomas grew, partly over the father's indifference to education, and Lincoln would later refuse to attend his father's deathbed or funeral in 1851. He chose his own path into the law, and it was an unusual one. Rather than apprenticing in an established attorney's office, Lincoln borrowed legal texts and taught himself. He worked through Blackstone's Commentaries and Chitty's Pleadings, lent to him by the attorney John Todd Stuart. He was admitted to the Illinois bar on the 9th of September 1836 and moved to Springfield to practice. In Springfield he partnered first with Stuart, then with Stephen T. Logan, and from 1844 with William Herndon. He handled, in one biographer's phrase, virtually every kind of business that could come before a prairie lawyer. His courtroom instincts could be theatrical. Defending William Duff Armstrong in an 1858 murder trial, Lincoln answered a witness who swore he saw the crime by moonlight. He produced a Farmers' Almanac showing the Moon hung at a low angle, and Armstrong was acquitted. One detail set Lincoln apart from every other man who would hold his office. In 1849 he received a patent for a flotation device to lift riverboats over shallow water, making him the only U.S. president to hold a patent.

• 4. A Turbulent Marriage

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  Ann Rutledge, a young woman Lincoln met in New Salem, is named by some historians as his first romantic interest. She died of typhoid fever on the 25th of August 1835, and Lincoln took her death so hard that he sank into serious depression and contemplated suicide. Whether the friendship was truly a romance, the historian David Herbert Donald wrote, cannot be reconstructed from the record. His path to marriage was not smooth. Lincoln courted Mary Owens of Kentucky and even agreed to a match, but in August 1837 he wrote her a letter saying he would not blame her for ending things, and she declined to marry him. Mary Todd changed the course of his domestic life. He met her in Springfield in 1839, the daughter of a wealthy Lexington lawyer and businessman, Robert Smith Todd. Lincoln broke off their engagement in early 1841, then reconciled, and the two married on the 4th of November 1842. The marriage was turbulent, and Mary was at times verbally and even physically abusive toward her husband. Their household was marked by grief. Of four sons, only the eldest, Robert Todd Lincoln, born in 1843, lived to maturity. Eddie died in 1850, probably of tuberculosis, and Willie died of a fever in the White House on the 20th of February 1862. The melancholy that shadowed Lincoln, now thought to be clinical depression, never fully left him.

• 5. Becoming A Republican

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  The Kansas-Nebraska Act, which narrowly passed Congress in May 1854, pulled Lincoln back into political life after years at the bar. Senator Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois had proposed popular sovereignty, letting each territory's voters decide the status of slavery, and the measure alarmed Northerners who wanted to halt slavery's spread. Lincoln's Peoria Speech of October 1854 declared his opposition to slavery. It was one of an estimated 175 speeches he delivered on excluding slavery from the territories over the next six years. His old party was dying around him. The Whigs were irreparably split, and in 1855 Lincoln wrote, I think I am a whig; but others say there are no whigs, and that I am an abolitionist. He resisted early entreaties from the new Republican Party, fearing it would become a platform for extreme abolitionists, before joining and helping found the Illinois party at the Bloomington Convention in 1856. His national reputation was forged in argument. In 1858 he challenged Douglas for the Senate, opening with the House Divided Speech: a house divided against itself cannot stand. The campaign featured seven debates drawing thousands, with the atmosphere of a prizefight. Douglas won re-election when the legislature backed him, but Lincoln had gained a national presence. He sealed it on the 27th of February 1860 at Cooper Union in Manhattan, where he insisted morality required opposition to slavery and rejected any groping for some middle ground between the right and the wrong. Of his own ambitions he admitted, the taste is in my mouth a little.

• 6. Holding The Union

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  On the 6th of November 1860 Lincoln was elected the first Republican president, taking 1,866,452 votes, or 39.8 percent in a four-way race. No ballots were cast for him in ten of the fifteen Southern slave states. His victory split the country before he took office. South Carolina adopted an ordinance of secession on the 20th of December 1860, and by the 1st of February 1861 six more states had followed, forming the Confederate States of America under Jefferson Davis. A month into his presidency, on the 12th of April 1861, Confederate forces fired on Union troops at Fort Sumter, and the Civil War began. Lincoln took unprecedented control as commander-in-chief. He called for 75,000 militiamen, imposed a naval blockade on Confederate ports, and suspended the writ of habeas corpus to allow arrests without formal charges. Chief Justice Roger Taney, in Ex parte Merryman, wrote that only Congress could suspend the writ, but Lincoln persisted in select areas. Under various suspensions, 15,000 civilians were detained without trial. His generals frustrated him for years. George B. McClellan built nearly impregnable defenses for Washington, with 48 forts and 480 guns, but his slow caution wore Lincoln's patience thin. The president cycled through commanders, from McClellan to Halleck, Pope, Burnside, Hooker, and Meade, until he found the man who fought. Of Ulysses S. Grant, criticized after Shiloh, Lincoln said, I can't spare this man. He fights.

• 7. The Work Of Freedom

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  January the 1st 1863 was the day the final Emancipation Proclamation took effect, freeing slaves in the ten states still in rebellion while exempting areas already under Union control. Lincoln had warned that emancipation by his generals exceeded their power and might push loyal border states to secede, so he waited for the Union victory at Antietam before issuing the preliminary proclamation in September 1862. On signing the final document, he said he never in his life felt more certain that he was doing right. He had been candid about his priorities. Replying to the editor Horace Greeley in August 1862, Lincoln wrote that his paramount object was to save the Union, and was not either to save or to destroy slavery. The proclamation changed the war's character, making enlistment of freedmen official policy, and Lincoln told military governor Andrew Johnson that the sight of fifty thousand armed Black soldiers on the Mississippi would end the rebellion at once. His words at a Pennsylvania cemetery outlasted the war. On the 19th of November 1863 he dedicated the Gettysburg battlefield cemetery, calling the nation conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. He closed with a vow that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth. He then pressed Congress to abolish slavery for good. The Senate passed the amendment in April 1864, the House failed once, then passed it on the 31st of January 1865. After ratification in December 1865, it became the Thirteenth Amendment, ending chattel slavery in the United States.

• 8. Ford's Theatre

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  Our American Cousin was the play, and the evening was the 14th of April 1865, five days after Lee surrendered to Grant at Appomattox. John Wilkes Booth was a well-known actor and Confederate spy from Maryland with contacts in the Confederate secret service, though he never joined the Confederate army. Booth had attended Lincoln's last public address on the 11th of April, in which the president stated his preference that the vote be conferred on some Black men, specifically the very intelligent and those who served as soldiers. That speech sealed Booth's resolve. At a quarter past ten that night, Booth entered the theater box, crept up from behind, and fired into the back of Lincoln's head. He stabbed Major Henry Rathbone, who grappled with him, and escaped. Lincoln was carried across the street to Petersen House, where he lay in a coma for nine hours and died at 7:22 am on the 15th of April. He was the first U.S. president to be assassinated. Two weeks later Booth was found, shot, and killed at a Virginia farm by Sergeant Boston Corbett. The grief moved across the country by rail. The caskets of Lincoln and his son Willie traveled two weeks on a funeral train from Washington to Springfield, stopping for memorials attended by hundreds of thousands, with crowds gathering along the tracks by bonfire and hymn. Walt Whitman composed four elegies, among them O Captain! My Captain! Lincoln's body was buried at Oak Ridge Cemetery in Springfield, where it now lies within the Lincoln Tomb, and the man once mocked for sneaking into the capital in a soft felt hat became a national martyr ranked among the greatest presidents in American history.