Abraham Lincon

Abraham Lincoln was born on February 12, 1809, in Hadin County, Kentucky. His parents had both been born in Virginia, and they weren’t wealthy. Lincoln’s mother died when he was only ten years old. While Lincoln was growing up, he didn’t receive any formal education. Still, he somehow knew how to read and write. Lincoln overwhelming efforts to try to get an education while living and working on a farm, taking care of a store in New Salem, Illinois, and splitting rails for fences.

In his adult life, he was a captain in the Black Hawk War, and had spent eight years in the Illinois legislature. Me married Mary Todd, and they had four children together, although only one lived to see maturity. Lincoln fought against Stephen A. Douglas for Senator in 1858. He lost, but while he was campaigning against Douglas he’d made a name for himself, and it helped him in winning the Republican Nomination for President in 1860. Lincoln made the Republican political party stronger and more popular and formed it into a ‘strong national organization’. He also rallied most northern Democrats to the Union Cause. He issued the Emancipation Proclamation, which declared all slaves in the Confederacy to be free for eternity. He never let the worl forget what the war was really about, and stated so in The Gettysburg address (“That we here are highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain…”).

Abraham Lincoln won re-election in 1864, as the Union victors celebrated themselves and their success at the end of the war. He encouraged Southerners put down their weapons and to join again in reunion.

On Good Friday, April 14, 1865, At Ford’s Theatre, President Lincoln was assassinated by John Wilkes Booth, a Southern Actor who thought he was helping out the South.