Abraham Lincoln

Chapter 1 · A Frontier Childhood

Kentucky, Indiana, and a borrowed education

1809 – 1834 · Kentucky · Indiana · New Salem, Illinois

Abraham Lincoln was born on 12 February 1809 in a one-room log cabin in Hardin County, Kentucky. His father Thomas was a farmer and carpenter who could sign his name; his mother Nancy Hanks died when Abraham was nine, probably of milk sickness caused by cattle eating white snakeroot. His stepmother, Sarah Bush Johnston, encouraged his reading, and he later spoke of her with unqualified affection.

His total formal schooling amounted to less than twelve months. He learned by borrowing books — the Bible, Aesop, Shakespeare, a life of Washington, later Euclid's *Elements*, which he read in his thirties to train himself in what it meant to demonstrate something.

The family moved to Indiana in 1816, partly, Lincoln said, because of land-title disputes and partly because of slavery, and to Illinois in 1830. At twenty-two he struck out alone to New Salem, where he worked as a store clerk, postmaster and surveyor, served briefly as a militia captain in the Black Hawk War without seeing combat, and was known for physical strength, storytelling and honesty about debts he could not pay.

He lost his first election in 1832, won a seat in the Illinois legislature in 1834, and taught himself law from borrowed books, receiving his licence in 1836. He was one of a very small number of nineteenth-century American lawyers with no formal training whatever.

Why this matters

Lincoln's self-education explains his prose: he learned to write from a handful of books he knew intimately, and to argue from Euclid, which is why his speeches build like proofs.

You have met the self-taught frontier lawyer. What would you ask him?

Ask Lincoln

• “How did you teach yourself law with no schooling?”
• “Why did you read Euclid in your thirties?”
• “What did your stepmother do for you?”
• “What did you see of slavery growing up on the frontier?”
• “What did New Salem teach you about ordinary people?”

Chapter 2 · The Politician and the Question

A career revived by the Kansas-Nebraska Act

1842 – 1860 · Springfield · Illinois · New York

Lincoln married Mary Todd in 1842, from a slaveholding Kentucky family and far better educated than he was. They had four sons; only Robert survived to adulthood, and the death of eleven-year-old Willie in the White House in 1862 devastated both parents.

He built a successful law practice, much of it commercial and railroad work, and served one unhappy term in Congress from 1847, where he attacked the Mexican War in a series of resolutions that made him unpopular at home. He then left politics for five years.

The Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, which allowed settlers in new territories to vote slavery in, brought him back. His position was consistent from then on and is worth stating exactly: he believed slavery was a moral wrong, he accepted that the Constitution protected it where it already existed, and he insisted it must not be allowed to spread. He was not, in the 1850s, an abolitionist, and he said publicly that he did not favour political and social equality between the races — a position he later moved beyond.

His 1858 Senate campaign against Stephen Douglas produced seven debates before enormous crowds and the House Divided speech, arguing that the country could not remain permanently half slave and half free. He lost the election and won a national reputation. The Cooper Union address in New York in February 1860 convinced eastern Republicans he was electable, and he took the presidency that November with under forty per cent of the popular vote and no support in the South.

Why this matters

Lincoln's careful distinction — slavery is wrong, but the Constitution protects it where it exists, so it must not spread — is what made him electable and what made the South treat his election as intolerable.

You have the politician before the war. What would you ask him?

Ask Lincoln

• “Why did you oppose slavery spreading but not abolish it where it existed?”
• “What did you mean by a house divided?”
• “How did losing to Douglas make your career?”
• “Did your views on racial equality change during your life?”
• “Why did the South treat your election as unbearable?”

Chapter 3 · Holding the Union Together

Generals, habeas corpus and a war nobody expected to last

1861 – 1863 · Washington · Antietam · Gettysburg

Seven states seceded before Lincoln took office; four more followed the firing on Fort Sumter in April 1861. He defined the war, at first, as a war to preserve the Union — a framing designed to hold the loyal slaveholding border states, whose defection would probably have lost it.

He governed with an expansive view of executive power in emergency. He suspended habeas corpus, allowing military detention without trial, and disregarded a ruling by the Chief Justice that he lacked the authority. Thousands were held. Newspapers were suppressed in some areas. Defenders point to genuine insurrection in Maryland and elsewhere; critics note that emergency powers, once claimed, tend to stay claimed.

He was also an unusually engaged commander-in-chief who read manuals, studied maps and went through a long series of cautious or unlucky generals before finding Grant, who was willing to fight continuously and accept the casualties.

His great political act came in 1862. After the bloodiest single day in American history at Antietam, he issued the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, declaring that from 1 January 1863 enslaved people in areas still in rebellion would be free. Its legal basis was his war power, which is why it did not apply to the loyal border states — a limitation critics noted at the time. Its effect was enormous: it changed the purpose of the war, made European intervention on the Confederate side politically impossible, and authorised the enlistment of Black soldiers, of whom around 180,000 served.

Why this matters

The Emancipation Proclamation shows a president using war powers to do what he believed he could not do by ordinary law — a decision that transformed the conflict and remains a case study in executive authority.

You are inside the war. What would you ask him?

Ask Lincoln

• “Why did the Emancipation Proclamation not free everyone?”
• “How do you justify suspending habeas corpus?”
• “Why did it take so long to find a general who would fight?”
• “What difference did Black soldiers make to the war?”
• “Was keeping the border states worth delaying emancipation?”

Chapter 4 · Two Hundred and Seventy-Two Words

Gettysburg, the Second Inaugural, and how he wrote

1863 – 1865 · Gettysburg · Washington

On 19 November 1863 Lincoln spoke for about two minutes at the dedication of a cemetery at Gettysburg, following a two-hour oration by Edward Everett. His remarks ran to roughly 272 words in the most commonly used text.

What he did in them was reframe the country. He dated the nation not from the Constitution of 1787, which protected slavery, but from 1776 and the proposition that all men are created equal. He described the war as a test of whether a government so conceived could endure, and asked the living to finish the work — closing with the hope that government of the people, by the people, for the people should not perish from the earth. The scholar Garry Wills argued that Lincoln effectively rewrote the founding in those two minutes.

The Second Inaugural Address of March 1865 is the more remarkable speech. With victory close, Lincoln refused triumph. He noted that both sides read the same Bible and prayed to the same God, treated the war as a judgement on the whole nation for the offence of slavery — North and South alike — and ended not with vengeance but with malice toward none and charity for all.

He also pushed the Thirteenth Amendment through the House in January 1865, lobbying individual congressmen with the whole weight of his office, because he knew the Proclamation was a war measure and might not survive the peace.

“With malice toward none, with charity for all…”

— Second Inaugural Address, 4 March 1865

Why this matters

Lincoln's speeches did constitutional work: Gettysburg made equality the founding American principle, and the Thirteenth Amendment turned a wartime order into permanent law.

You have the words that changed the country. What would you ask him?

Ask Lincoln

• “Why date the nation from 1776 rather than the Constitution?”
• “Why speak of charity rather than victory in the Second Inaugural?”
• “Why was the Thirteenth Amendment necessary after the Proclamation?”
• “How did you learn to write so plainly?”
• “Did you believe the war was a judgement on the whole country?”

Chapter 5 · Ford's Theatre and the Unfinished Peace

Five days after the surrender

April 1865 and after · Washington · Springfield

Lee surrendered at Appomattox on 9 April 1865. Two days later Lincoln spoke from a White House window about reconstruction and, for the first time in public, endorsed voting rights for some Black men — at least the educated and those who had served as soldiers. In the crowd, John Wilkes Booth reportedly told a companion that it meant citizenship for Black Americans and would be the last speech Lincoln ever made.

On the evening of 14 April, Booth shot him in the back of the head at Ford's Theatre. Lincoln died the next morning without regaining consciousness. It was part of a wider conspiracy that also targeted the Vice-President and the Secretary of State.

His death removed the one figure with the political authority and the stated intention to conduct reconstruction with both firmness and generosity. His successor Andrew Johnson opposed Black civil rights and vetoed protections repeatedly; the eventual settlement left former Confederates in local power and Black Americans, within a generation, subject to segregation and disenfranchisement that lasted until the 1960s. What Lincoln would have done differently is one of the great unanswerable questions of American history.

His reputation has been continuously contested: revered as the emancipator, criticised for his caution and his earlier statements on race, defended as a politician who moved as fast as a democracy at war would let him. Frederick Douglass, who pressed him hard in life, gave the fairest summary in 1876 — that Lincoln was the white man's president, and yet under his administration the enslaved were made free.

Why this matters

Lincoln's assassination shaped the century that followed: the collapse of Reconstruction after his death is the direct background to the civil rights movement a hundred years later.

You have reached the end and the unfinished work. What would you ask him?

Ask Lincoln

• “What did you plan for the South after the surrender?”
• “Why did you endorse voting rights for Black men in April 1865?”
• “How would you answer Frederick Douglass's assessment of you?”
• “Could you have moved faster on emancipation?”
• “What did the war cost the country beyond the dead?”

What Lincoln changed

Lincoln preserved the United States as a single country and made the abolition of slavery permanent through the Thirteenth Amendment. His reframing of the nation around the equality clause of the Declaration became the basis of later civil rights argument, and his expansion of presidential power in emergency set precedents still debated in constitutional law.

A debate that continues

Historians argue over how much of Lincoln's emancipation was moral conviction and how much military necessity, and over whether his documented earlier statements on racial equality should temper his reputation or be read as the position of a politician moving an electorate.

Keep exploring — ask Lincoln

• “How did the deaths of your own children affect how you saw the war's casualties?”
• “What changed your mind about what was politically possible?”
• “How would you have handled the South differently from your successor?”

Related lives

• Frederick Douglass — The Lion of Anacostia
• Harriet Tubman — Moses of Her People
• George Washington — Commander-in-Chief · First President

Related themes

The American Civil War · Slavery and abolition · Presidential power in wartime