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 government will not
assail you.... You have no oath registered in Heaven to destroy the government, while I shall ha
ve the most solemn one to preserve, protect and defend it."
Lincoln thought secession illegal, and was willing to use force to defend Federal law and the
Union. When Confederate batteries fired on Fort Sumter and forced its surrender, he called on
the states for 75,000 volunteers. Four more slave states joined the Confederacy but four remained
within the Union. The Civil War had begun.
The son of a Kentucky frontiersman, Lincoln had to struggle for a living and for learning. Five
months before receiving his party's nomination for President, he sketched his life:
"I was born Feb. 12, 1809, in Hardin County, Kentucky. My parents were both born in Virginia, of
undistinguished families--second families, perhaps I should say. My mother, who died in my tenth
year, was of a family of the name of Hanks.... My father ... removed from Kentucky to ...
Indiana, in my eighth year.... It was a wild region, with many bears and other wild animals still
in the woods. There I grew up.... Of course when I came of age I did not know much. Still
somehow, I could read, write, and cipher ... but that was all."
Lincoln made extraordinary efforts to attain knowledge while working on a farm, splitting rails
for fences, and keeping store at New Salem, Illinois. 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.
His law partner said of him, "His ambition was a little engine that knew no rest."
He married Mary Todd, and they had four boys, only one of whom lived to maturity. In 1858
Lincoln ran against Stephen A. Douglas for Senator. He lost the election, but in debating with
Douglas he gained a national reputation that won him the Republican nomination for President in
1860.
As President, he built the Republican Party into a strong national organization. Further, he
rallied most of the northern Democrats to the Union cause. On January 1, 1863, he issued the
Emancipation Proclamation that declared forever free those slaves within the Confederacy.
Lincoln never let the world forget that the Civil War involved an even larger issue. This he
stated most movingly in dedicating the military cemetery at Gettysburg: "that we here highly
resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain--that this nation, under God, shall have a
new birth of freedom--and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall
not perish from the earth."
Lincoln won re-election in 1864, as Union military triumphs heralded an end to the war. In his
planning for peace, the President was flexible and generous, encouraging Southerners to lay
down their arms and join speedily in reunion.
The spirit that guided him was clearly that of his Second Inaugural Address, now inscribed on
one wall of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D. C.: "With malice toward none; with charity
for all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish
the work we are in; to bind up the nation's wounds.... "
On Good Friday, April 14, 1865, Lincoln was assassinated at Ford's Theatre in Washington by John
Wilkes Booth, an actor, who somehow thought he was helping the South. The opposite was the
result, for with Lincoln's death, the possibility of peace with magnanimity died.
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 government will not
assail you.... You have no oath registered in Heaven to destroy the government, while I shall ha
ve the most solemn one to preserve, protect and defend it."
Lincoln thought secession illegal, and was willing to use force to defend Federal law and the
Union. When Confederate batteries fired on Fort Sumter and forced its surrender, he called on
the states for 75,000 volunteers. Four more slave states joined the Confederacy but four remained
within the Union. The Civil War had begun.
The son of a Kentucky frontiersman, Lincoln had to struggle for a living and for learning. Five
months before receiving his party's nomination for President, he sketched his life:
"I was born Feb. 12, 1809, in Hardin County, Kentucky. My parents were both born in Virginia, of
undistinguished families--second families, perhaps I should say. My mother, who died in my tenth
year, was of a family of the name of Hanks.... My father ... removed from Kentucky to ...
Indiana, in my eighth year.... It was a wild region, with many bears and other wild animals still
in the woods. There I grew up.... Of course when I came of age I did not know much. Still
somehow, I could read, write, and cipher ... but that was all."
Lincoln made extraordinary efforts to attain knowledge while working on a farm, splitting rails
for fences, and keeping store at New Salem, Illinois. 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.
His law partner said of him, "His ambition was a little engine that knew no rest."
He married Mary Todd, and they had four boys, only one of whom lived to maturity. In 1858
Lincoln ran against Stephen A. Douglas for Senator. He lost the election, but in debating with
Douglas he gained a national reputation that won him the Republican nomination for President in
1860.
As President, he built the Republican Party into a strong national organization. Further, he
rallied most of the northern Democrats to the Union cause. On January 1, 1863, he issued the
Emancipation Proclamation that declared forever free those slaves within the Confederacy.
Lincoln never let the world forget that the Civil War involved an even larger issue. This he
stated most movingly in dedicating the military cemetery at Gettysburg: "that we here highly
resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain--that this nation, under God, shall have a
new birth of freedom--and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall
not perish from the earth."
Lincoln won re-election in 1864, as Union military triumphs heralded an end to the war. In his
planning for peace, the President was flexible and generous, encouraging Southerners to lay
down their arms and join speedily in reunion.
The spirit that guided him was clearly that of his Second Inaugural Address, now inscribed on
one wall of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D. C.: "With malice toward none; with charity
for all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish
the work we are in; to bind up the nation's wounds.... "
On Good Friday, April 14, 1865, Lincoln was assassinated at Ford's Theatre in Washington by John
Wilkes Booth, an actor, who somehow thought he was helping the South. The opposite was the
result, for with Lincoln's death, the possibility of peace with magnanimity died.
