Abraham Lincoln

Abraham Lincoln was born in a log cabin on the Kentucky frontier, into a poor family of ordinary pioneer farmers. He lost his mother as a child, and the family drifted across Kentucky, Indiana, and Illinois in search of land. In all his life his formal schooling amounted to less than a year; he learned to read and study almost entirely by borrowing books on his own, forming a lifelong habit of reading.

As a young man he left home to make his own way, working as a boatman, store clerk, postmaster, and surveyor, among many trades. In New Salem, Illinois, he studied law while he worked, and in his twenties was elected to the state legislature and admitted to the bar, moving to the state capital, Springfield, to practice and gradually becoming a well-regarded trial lawyer. From frontier boy to professional lawyer and state politician, his path was paved almost entirely by self-teaching and diligence.

In the 1850s, the question of whether slavery would spread into new territories tore the nation apart. Lincoln publicly opposed the expansion of slavery and joined the newly formed Republican Party. In 1858 he faced Douglas in seven public debates on the issue; though he lost the Senate race, he won a national reputation, and in 1860 was elected the 16th President of the United States.

Around the time he took office, several Southern states declared their secession from the Union, and the Civil War broke out. Lincoln led the Union with the preservation of national unity as his foremost aim, and during the war issued the Emancipation Proclamation, making the abolition of slavery one of its explicit goals. In 1863, at the Gettysburg national cemetery, he delivered a brief address reaffirming freedom and the democratic ideal of government 'of the people, by the people, for the people'—words still recited in American history to this day.

In 1864, with the war not yet ended, he won reelection and pushed Congress to pass the Thirteenth Amendment abolishing slavery. The following spring, Confederate General Lee surrendered, the war's main fighting ended, and national unity was preserved. Yet only days after victory, he was shot while watching a play at Ford's Theatre in Washington and died the next morning, becoming the first American president to be assassinated.

Of humble origins and self-taught, Lincoln preserved the Union's unity through the nation's deepest rupture and wrote the abolition of slavery into the course of history. His speeches and ideals, together with his gentle, resilient, and unpretentious image, made him one of the most far-reaching figures in American history, long remembered and studied by later generations.