He lost the election, but in debating with Douglas he gained a national reputation that won him the Republican nomination for President in 1860.Īs President, he built the Republican Party into a strong national organization. He married Mary Todd, and they had four boys, only one of whom lived to maturity. His law partner said of him, “His ambition was a little engine that knew no rest.” He was a captain in the Black Hawk War, spent eight years in the Illinois legislature, and rode the circuit of courts for many years. Lincoln made extraordinary efforts to attain knowledge while working on a farm, splitting rails for fences, and keeping store at New Salem, Illinois. Still somehow, I could read, write, and cipher … but that was all.” Of course when I came of age I did not know much. It was a wild region, with many bears and other wild animals still in the woods. My father … removed from Kentucky to … Indiana, in my eighth year…. My mother, who died in my tenth year, was of a family of the name of Hanks…. My parents were both born in Virginia, of undistinguished families–second families, perhaps I should say. Five months before receiving his party’s nomination for President, he sketched his life: The son of a Kentucky frontiersman, Lincoln had to struggle for a living and for learning. Four more slave states joined the Confederacy but four remained within the Union. When Confederate batteries fired on Fort Sumter and forced its surrender, he called on the states for 75,000 volunteers. Lincoln thought secession illegal, and was willing to use force to defend Federal law and the Union.

You have no oath registered in Heaven to destroy the government, while I shall have the most solemn one to preserve, protect and defend it.”

Lincoln warned the South in his Inaugural Address: “In your hands, my dissatisfied fellow countrymen, and not in mine, is the momentous issue of civil war. The biography for President Lincoln and past presidents is courtesy of the White House Historical Association.Ībraham Lincoln became the United States’ 16th President in 1861, issuing the Emancipation Proclamation that declared forever free those slaves within the Confederacy in 1863.

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A. Lincoln by Ronald C. White Jr.