NAME : Abraham LincolnBIRTH DATE : February 12, 1809
DEATH DATE : April 15, 1865
PLACE OF BIRTH : Hodgenville, Kentucky
PLACE OF DEATH : Washington, D.C.
Height: 1.93 m
Assassinated: April 15, 1865, Washington, D.C., United States
Spouse: Mary Todd Lincoln (m. 1842–1865)
Children: William Wallace Lincoln, Robert Todd Lincoln, Edward Baker Lincoln, Tad Lincoln
NICKNAME : Honest Abe,The Great Emancipator
Abraham Lincoln is famous for the Gettysburg Address, abolishing slavery and being one of the four presidents who have been assassinated.
Abraham's father remarried and, as the frontier expanded and became more populated, so the quality of life increased. Lincoln soon broke out on his own and moved to New Salem. Here he was successful, and he managed a mill store.
When the Black Hawk War broke out, the volunteers elected Lincoln to be their captain. After the war, Lincoln announced his intention to stand for the Illinois Legislature. He was not elected, but had pockets of high popular support. In 1834, he tried again, and this time was successful. Lincoln served four terms in the legislature, becoming floor leader of his party.
At the same time, Lincoln was studying law, taking and passing the bar in 1836. He became engaged to Mary Owens from Kentucky after meeting in the early 1830s but on 16 August 1837, he wrote her a letter suggesting he would not blame her for ending the relationship as they had both had second thoughts. She never replied.
In 1842, Lincoln married Mary Todd, and their relationship, as well as the part she played in his subsequent career, remain a matter of some debate. The pair met in 1839 and were engaged in December 1840 but they called off a wedding scheduled for 1 January 1841 at Lincoln's initiative. However, after meeting again they finally married on 8 November 1842.
In 1844, they bought a house in Springfield near Lincoln's law firm and she took care of the house diligently on a limited budget. They had four sons including Robert Todd Lincoln, who was born in 1843 and was their only child to reach adulthood.
Edward, who was born in 1846 died of tuberculosis in 1850, 'Willie' was born in 1850 and died in 1862, while son Tad was born in 1853 and died of heart failure at the age of 18 in 1871.
In 1846, Lincoln was elected to the U.S. Congress. His career got off to a stormy start, as he was not a staunch supporter of the war with Mexico, and he believed that slavery should be abolished. Both of these beliefs were not popular in his district of Illinois, and he was not re-elected.
Over the next 12 years, Lincoln practiced law and built up his firm. In 1854, the contentious issue of slavery erupted, with a bill brought by Stephen Douglas to organise the Kansas-Nebraska Territory.
This bill so incensed Lincoln that he re-entered the political fray. However, Lincoln failed to receive the nomination for senator in 1855 and, convinced his former party, the Whigs, were essentially dead, he joined the new Republicans, becoming a prominent figure in the party.
When Douglas returned to Illinois to fight for re-election to the Senate, Lincoln pressed Douglas for a discussion on the issue of slavery. These discussions became the famous Lincoln-Douglas debates and, although Douglas was re-elected, Lincoln had gained national recognition.
In 1860, Lincoln was elected presidential candidate for the Republican Party, although it was not an easy election. He was elected president but, as a result, seven Southern states seceded from the Union.
In Lincoln's inauguration speech, he said that secession was anarchic and illegal. He told The Union that while he would not interfere with slavery, he would hold or repossess all Federal property. Civil war broke out soon after.
It was a difficult time for Lincoln, but his tactics began to prevail. In his Gettysburg address, after a great victory for the North, Lincoln proclaimed that the end of the civil war stood for freedom and equality for all.
However, the war dragged on, and critics began to question Lincoln's strategy and his chances for re-election.
Following victory in the war, Lincoln was re-elected. In his second inaugural address, Lincoln urged the North and South to come together and bury past differences, "With malice toward none; and charity for all".
Lincoln never had an opportunity to govern outside war time as, on 14 April 1865, an assassin killed him.
He was shot while watching the play 'Our American Cousins' at the Ford Theatre by well-known actor and Confederate spy John Wilkes-Booth. Booth originally planned to kidnap the president but Lincoln made a speech on 11 April about voting rights for black people, angering Booth. After being in a coma for nine hours, Lincoln died on 15 April. His body lay in state until 21 April and was taken on a tour of the north by train for three weeks, with thousands attending memorial services for him.
In 2012, Steven Spielberg directed a biopic of the president's life called 'Lincoln'. Daniel Day-Lewis subsequently won a Best Actor Oscar® for his portrayal of the leader.
A Successful Law Practice and One Term in Congress (1847-1849)
After retiring from the legislature in 1841, Lincoln devoted most of his time to his law practice. In 1841 he formed a partnership with Stephen T. Logan, who helped him become more thorough and meticulous in preparing his cases. The Springfield courts sat only a few weeks a year, requiring Lincoln to ride the circuit of county courts throughout central Illinois for several months each spring and fall. Most of his cases involved damage to crops by foraging livestock, property disputes, debts, and assault and battery, with an occasional murder trial to liven interest. By the time of his marriage Lincoln was earning $1,200 a year, income equal to the governor's salary. In 1844 he bought a house in Springfield--the only home he ever owned. In 1844 he also dissolved his partnership with Logan and formed a new one with 26-year-old William H. Herndon, to whom Lincoln became a mentor.
Lincoln's ambitions were not fulfilled by a successful law practice. He wanted to run for Congress from this safe Whig district, but the concentration of Whig hopefuls in Springfield meant that he had to wait his turn under an informal one-term rotation system. When his turn came in 1846, Lincoln won handily over Democratic candidate Peter Cartwright, a well-known Methodist clergyman who tried to make an issue of Lincoln's nonmembership in a church (Mary later joined Springfield's First Presbyterian Church, which Abraham also occasionally attended).
Lincoln's congressional term (1847-1849) was dominated by controversies over the Mexican War. He took the standard Whig position that the war had been provoked by President James K. Polk. On 22 December 1847 Lincoln introduced "spot resolutions" calling for information on the exact "spot of soil" on which Mexicans shed American blood to start the war, implying that this spot was actually Mexican soil. Lincoln also voted several times for the Wilmot Proviso, declaring that slavery should be prohibited in any territory acquired from Mexico. On these issues Lincoln sided with the majority in the Whig House of Representatives. In addition, Lincoln introduced a bill (which was buried in committee) for compensated abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia if approved by a majority of the District's voters.
Lincoln's opposition to the Mexican War was not popular in Illinois. "Spotty Lincoln," jibed Democratic newspapers, had committed political suicide. "What an epitaph: 'Died of Spotted Fever' " (Thomas, p. 120). When Lincoln campaigned in 1848 for the Whig presidential nominee Zachary Taylor, the "Spotty Lincoln" label came back to haunt him. The Whig candidate for Congress who succeeded Lincoln under the rotation system, his former partner Stephen T. Logan, went down to defeat--perhaps because of voter backlash against the party's antiwar stance. Taylor nevertheless won the presidency, but Lincoln did not get the patronage appointment he expected as commissioner of the General Land Office.
Lincoln returned to Springfield disheartened with politics and gave full time to his law practice. During the 1850s he became one of the leading lawyers in the state. His annual income reached $5,000. The burst of railroad construction during the decade generated a large caseload. Lincoln at various times represented railroads. In two of his most important cases he won exemption of the Illinois Central from county taxation and successfully defended the Rock Island from a suit by a shipping company whose steamboat had hit the Rock Island's bridge over the Mississippi (the first such bridge ever built). Yet it would be misleading to describe Lincoln as a "corporation lawyer" in the modern sense of that term, since he opposed corporations with equal frequency. In one important case he represented a small firm in a patent infringement suit brought against it by the McCormick Reaper Company. Lincoln continued to ride the circuit each spring and fall; the great majority of cases handled by Lincoln and Herndon (some 200 each year) concerned local matters of debt, ejectment, slander and libel, trespass, foreclosure, divorce, and the like.
Abraham Lincoln Quotes
Most folks are as happy as they make up their minds to be.
You cannot escape the responsibility of tomorrow by evading it today.
All that I am, or hope to be, I owe to my angel mother.
Character is like a tree and reputation like a shadow. The shadow is what we think of it; the tree is the real thing.
No man is good enough to govern another man without the other's consent.
Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe.
I do the very best I know how - the very best I can; and I mean to keep on doing so until the end.
I remember my mother's prayers and they have always followed me. They have clung to me all my life.
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