Abraham Lincoln Biography
Abraham Lincoln
Abraham Lincoln Biography
Abraham Lincoln Biography - eBook Collection
Abraham Lincoln Biography
"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."
Abraham Lincoln - Short Biography 1
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
have 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.
Abraham Lincoln - Short Biography 2
Abraham Lincoln was born on Sunday, February 12, 1809, in a
log cabin on his father's farm in what was at that time Larue County (today
Hardin County) Kentucky. His parents were Thomas Lincoln and Nancy Hanks
Lincoln. He had an older sister, Sarah. In 1816, when Abraham was 7 years
old, his parents moved to Perry County (later part of Spencer County) in
southern Indiana, where his father bought land directly from the federal
government. There, as Lincoln later described his life, he was "raised
to farm work." His mother died in 1818, and his sister Sarah in
childbirth in 1828. From here, Lincoln first traveled on a flatboat to New
Orleans.
In 1830, when Abraham Lincoln was 21 years old, he migrated with his father
and stepmother (Sarah Bush Johnston Lincoln) and her children to Logan
County, Illinois. After the discouragingly hard winter of 1830-31, the
Lincolns started to return to Indiana, but stopped in Coles County,
Illinois, where Abraham's parents lived out the rest of their lives.
In the spring of 1831, Lincoln left his parents to try to find his own way
in life. He was again hired to take a flatboat of produce to New Orleans.
After returning to Illinois from this successful journey, he settled in the
small village of New Salem, where he had mixed success in a variety of
callings. He had a partnership in a store-which failed, he served in the
militia during the Black Hawk war, he was Postmaster, learned and practiced
surveying, and considered being a blacksmith. Already in 1832, he first ran
for a seat in the state legislature. He lost, but two years later, was
successful, and was again in 1836. At the time of the 1834 campaign, he was
encouraged to study law. In March of 1837, he was enrolled as an attorney,
and that April, he moved to Springfield to begin his law practice.
While living in Springfield, Abraham Lincoln made the acquaintance of many
people in different walks of life. Some of these people were to become his
allies - and some his opponents - in political activities and in his work as
a lawyer. In the years that he was getting established, Lincoln also met an
attractive young woman named Mary Todd. They had many interests in common
that brought them together and in 1842 they were married. Within the next
year their first son, Robert, was born.
In 1844, Abraham purchased and took up residence with his family in the
house on the corner of Eighth and Jackson Streets. This was to be the only
home he and his wife ever owned. Here the Lincolns had three more sons -
Edward (Eddie), William (Willie), and Thomas (Tad). Their second son,
Edward, died near the age of four in their Springfield home. When Lincoln
was elected sixteenth President of the United States in 1860, the oldest
boy, Robert, was away at college, while the other two, Willie and Tad, were
still living with their parents. Lincoln was a loving and indulgent father
and Mrs. Lincoln later wrote of him: "Mr. Lincoln was the kindest man
and most loving husband and father in the world. He was very - exceedingly
indulgent to his children. Chided or praised them for what they did - their
acts, etc. He always said It is my pleasure that my children are free, happy
and unrestrained by parental tyranny. Love is the chain whereby to bind a
child to its parents.'"
On the morning of February 11, 1861, Lincoln was making his final
preparations to depart from Springfield and to begin his fateful journey to
the White House in Washington, D.C. The sky was full of low clouds and
drizzling rain as he went to the train depot. There were about a thousand
people gathered at the depot to see him off. They called for a speech and
Lincoln made a brief address to the residents of Springfield from the rear
platform of the train. Then the train pulled away and Lincoln left the place
that had been his home for nearly 25 years. He was leaving Springfield to
face formidable difficulties as President during the turbulent years of the
Civil War.
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