Abraham Lincoln

Their life

Sixteenth president of the United States, self-educated frontier lawyer, and the leader who preserved the Union through civil war and ended slavery by proclamation and constitutional amendment.

Known for

• Preserving the Union through civil war
• Emancipation Proclamation
• Gettysburg Address
• Lincoln-Douglas Debates
• Thirteenth Amendment abolishing slavery
• Self-made rise from frontier poverty

The road they walked

Abraham Lincoln was born in 1809 in a one-room cabin in Kentucky, to a farming family that moved first to Indiana and then to Illinois in search of better land. He had less than a year of formal schooling in total, teaching himself law and grammar by candlelight while working as a farmhand, rail-splitter, store clerk, and postmaster. He rode the legal circuit as a country lawyer for over two decades, building a reputation for sharp argument and plain, memorable speech, and served four terms in the Illinois legislature before a single term in Congress in the late 1840s left him, for a time, out of national politics altogether.

He returned to public life in the 1850s as the country tore itself over the expansion of slavery into new territories. The Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, which opened the possibility of slavery spreading north and west, drew Lincoln back into politics and into the newly forming Republican Party. His 1858 Senate campaign against Stephen Douglas, lost in the vote count but won in the court of public opinion through a series of widely printed debates, made him a national figure by arguing that the Union could not endure permanently half slave and half free. Two years later he won the presidency in a fractured four-way race, carrying no Southern state, and within months of his inauguration seven states had seceded and the country was at war with itself.

As president, Lincoln proved a shrewd and often ruthless political manager, holding together a fractious cabinet and an uncertain public through four years of a war whose casualties exceeded anything the nation had known. He grew, in office, from a leader chiefly committed to preserving the Union into one who redefined the war as a fight against slavery itself, issuing the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863 and pushing the Thirteenth Amendment through Congress in early 1865. His brief address at Gettysburg in 1863, delivered almost as an afterthought to a longer program, became the war's most enduring statement of purpose. Reelected in 1864 as Union victory finally came into view, he began sketching a lenient peace meant to bind the nation's wounds rather than deepen them.

How their story ended

On the evening of April 14, 1865, just five days after General Lee's surrender at Appomattox, Lincoln was shot in the head by the actor and Confederate sympathizer John Wilkes Booth while watching a play at Ford's Theatre in Washington. He never regained consciousness and died the following morning, April 15, 1865, the first American president to be assassinated. His death, arriving at the very moment of Union victory, turned the work of reconstructing the nation over to lesser hands and left unfinished the reconciliation he had only begun to imagine.

In their words

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Tables where Abraham sits

The Presidents’ Table

For decisions where the buck stops with you.

The Public Servant’s Council

For leading with integrity when the decisions are heavy.

The Resilience Table

For finding your footing after a setback.

From the Journal