ABRAHAM LINCOLN 1809 – 1865

            Abraham Lincoln was born on February 12, 1809, in Hardin County, Kentucky. His fa­ther was a farmer, who drifted from our place to another along the frontier. When Abraham Lincoln was eight years old the family moved to Spencer County, Indiana. Abraham Lincoln helped to build the cabin they lived in. It had only three walls. On the open side a fire had to be left going day and night.

          Lincoln had little schooling but he loved to read. Then were few books on the frontier, but Lincoln borrowed all he could. At night he read by the light of an open fire.

             In time Lincoln’s family moved from Indi­ana to Illinois. Outdoor work made Lincoln’s arms and shoulders unusually strong. His voice was high-pitched. It sounded strange coming from such a tall, powerful body. Yet even as a boy he had a great gift for telling stories. He could make people laugh. And people liked him. People trusted him. They believed in him.

            As a young man Lincoln got a job on a flatboat going to New Orleans. Back in Illinois be got a job in a country store. The store failed and he got other odd jobs. He worked as a surveyor. Finally a friend told him be ought to be a lawyer. Lincoln borrowed books and studied. He was always quick to learn. He became a lawyer and was elected to the state legislature. Then be was elected to Congress.

            In Congress, Lincoln proposed one impor­tant law. He said the government should buy all the slaves in the District of Colum­bia and let them free. The law did not pass, but it showed how Lincoln felt. He believed slavery was wrong. But he did not believe slavery could be abolished without payment to the slave owners.

           Lincoln did not win a second term in Con­gress. He went back to Illinois to practice law. For a few years he took little part in politics.

            It seemed as if Lincoln’s public life was over. But the question of slavery was being de­bated more and more throughout the coun­try. Then territory was being opened in the west; new states were coming into the Un­ion. Should they be free or slave?

             Lincoln was opposed to the spread of slav­ery. More than that, he wanted to help the poor of any race. He knew what it was to be poor. He began to make speeches in favour of keeping the territories free. They should not be turned over to rich slave owners.

           In 1858, the Illinois Republican party asked Lincoln to run for the senate against Stephen Douglas. Douglas was in favour of letting each new state decide for itself whether or not to have slaves. In a famous series of speeches, Lincoln and Douglas debated this question. Douglas won the elec­tion. But the Lincoln-Douglas debates made Lincoln famous. In was partly because of this that the Republican party named him to run for President two years later. Lin­coln was also from Illinois, a state the Re­publicans wanted to carry.

            It was a bitter election. The Democratic party split in two, one part in the South, one in the North. A new third party tried to find some kind of compromise. Lincoln and the Republicans came out against the spread of slavery.

            The election was held in the autumn of 1860. Lincoln won but he was not to take office until March 1861. In the meanwhile one southern state after another voted to leave the union and set up a new government. President Buchanan let them go, not know­ing what else to do.

           On March 4, 1861, Lincoln became Presi­dent. A month went by and he took no ac­tion. There were a number of reasons for this. Several of the border states had not yet decided whether to secede or stay in the Union. Lincoln wanted to hold these states if he could. Also there were a number of people in the North who did not believe ei­ther the Union or slavery was worth fight­ing about. Lincoln knew that if he started a war himself, many of these people would not support it. But his determination to save the Union never wavered.

           On April 12, 1861, southern soldiers fired on the Union-held Ford Sumter in Charles­ton, South Carolina. This was the start of the War Between the States (later called the Civil War).

          A great wave of patriotism swept the North. Lincoln knew that now the people would support him.

          The next four years were probably the most desperate in the history of the U.S. In these years Lincoln proved himself to be a great President. Even so, there was a while when he made many mistakes. He tried one gen­eral after another before he found a really good one. He did not get along too well with his own cabinet. Some of them did not understand this tall, gaunt man, who always looked as if he had bought his clothes second-hand from a man much shorter than he was.

           Lincoln’s great gift was his ability to make the common people understand and believe in what he was doing. His purpose was to save the Union because to him the Union was not just a group of states that had got together to form a government. It was the only important democratic government in the world. If it were destroyed, it would mean that free men were not able to govern themselves. The fight to save the union was the fight to save free government all over the world.

            Somehow he made the people understand this. He made them understand how wrong slav­ery was. He made them understand that the war touched on the great principle that all people are created free and equal before god.

            In the past Lincoln had not believed that under the Constitution, the federal govern­ment had the right simply to declare an end to slavery. Yet what good would it do to hold the Union together by force if slavery, which had caused the war in the first place, was not ended? Lincoln thought more and more about this as the war went on. Finally “the moment came”, he said, “when I felt that slavery must die that the nation might live”. And so on September 22, 1862, he issued his Emancipation Proclamation. This stated that on January 1, 1863, all slaves in any state still in rebellion against the Union would be free.

           The Emancipation Proclamation did not ac­tually free any slaves at all. In applied only to the rebellious states where Lincoln had no power to enforce it. Slavery was still le­gal in several of the border states that had not left the Union. Lincoln believed that to end slavery in these states, the Constitu­tion would have to be amended. He began to work toward such an amendment (it be­came the 13^th Amendment).

          Although Emancipation Proclamation itself did not end slavery, it made clear one im­portant reason for the war. And it won sym­pathy for the North throughout the civi­lized word. In this way it contributed to the North’s final victory.

             For Lincoln the entire period was a period of much personal grief. He was always aware of the death and suffering on both sides. Men saw him walking the streets at night, alone deep in thought. By the au­tumn of 1864 it was clear the North was wining the war. Lincoln was easily elected to a second term.

            Lincoln never wanted revenge upon the South. Instead he said “Blood cannot restore blood, and government should not act for revenge”. He only wanted to restore the Un­ion, as quickly and peacefully as possible. It was his dream.

            On April 9, 1865, General Robert E. Lee surrendered to Lincoln’s general, U.S. Grant in a house in the small village of Appomattox Courthouse, Virginia. On the night of April 14, five days later, Presi­dent and Mrs Lincoln went to see a play at a Washington Theatre. During the play an actor named John Wilkes Booths stepped into the box behind Lincoln and shot him the back of the head. The next day one of the greatest men in all American history lay dead.

          It is probable that Booth in some crazed way believed he was helping the South. But in fact, Lincoln’s death hurt the South a great deal. Had Lincoln lived, he might have brought the South back into the Union with the least possible bloodshot and bitterness. Without Lincoln some of the worst men. both North and South, came into power.