Abraham Lincoln

Sixteenth president of the United States and president during the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865) was immortalized by his Emancipation Proclamation, his Gettysburg Address, and two outstanding inaugural addresses.

Abraham Lincoln was born on Feb. 12, 1809, in a log cabin on a farm in Hardin County, Ky. His father had come with his parents from Virginia and had grown to manhood on the Kentucky frontier. He had evidently become moderately successful as a farmer and carpenter, for in 1803 he was able to pay £118 cash for a farm near Elizabethtown. Three years later he married Nancy Hanks, described as "intelligent, deeply religious, kindly, and affectionate," but as "illiterate" as himself. Of her family and background little authentic is known.

Lincoln's Background

The young couple soon moved to the one-room cabin on Nolin Creek where their second child, Abraham, was born. Two years later the family moved to the farm on Knob Creek that Abraham later remembered. There, when there was no pressing work to be done, Abraham walked 2 miles to the schoolhouse, where he learned the rudiments of reading, writing, and arithmetic.

Five years later the elder Lincoln sold his lands and carried his family into the untracked wilderness of Indiana across the Ohio River. It was late fall, and there was time only to pull together a crude three-sided shelter of logs, brush, and leaves. The open side was protected by a blazing fire which had to be replenished at all times. The only water was nearly a mile away. For food the family depended almost entirely on game.

They began building a better home and clearing the land for planting. They were making progress when, in the summer of 1818, a dread disease known as milk sickness struck the region. First it carried off Mrs. Lincoln's uncle and aunt and then Nancy Hanks Lincoln herself. On the shoulders of Abraham's 12-year-old sister, Sarah, fell the burden of caring for the household; the home was soon reduced to near squalor.

The next winter Abraham's father returned to Kentucky and brought back a second wife, Sarah Bush Johnson, a widow with three children. Abraham learned to love her and in later years referred to her as "my angel mother."

As time passed, the region where the Lincolns lived grew in population, and James Gentry's little store became a trading center around which the village of Gentryville grew. There Abraham spent much of his spare time, early showing a marked talent for storytelling and mimicry. He grew tall and strong, and his father often hired him out to work for neighbors. Through this came the chance, with Gentry's son Allen, to take a flatboat of produce down the Ohio and Mississippi rivers to New Orleans—Lincoln's first sight of anything other than frontier simplicity.

Meanwhile Lincoln's father had again moved his family to a new home in Illinois, where he built a cabin on the Sangamon River. This was open prairie country, but the abundant trees along the streams supplied the rails to fence their fields. Young Lincoln, already skilled with his ax, was soon splitting rails, not only for the Lincoln farm but for others as well.

At the end of the first summer in Illinois an attack of fever and ague put the Lincolns again on the move. This time it was to Coles County. Abraham, however, did not go along. He was now of independent age and had agreed with two friends to take a cargo of produce, belonging to one Denton Offutt, downriver to New Orleans. Offutt was so impressed with Lincoln's abilities that he placed him in charge of the mill and store which he had established at New Salem.

Entering Public Life

This was the turning point; the Lincoln of history began to emerge. To the store came people of all kinds to talk and trade and to enjoy the stories and rich human qualities stored up in this unique man. The young roisterers from Clary's Grove found him to be more than a match for their champion wrestlers and became his devoted followers. The members of the New Salem Debating Society welcomed him; and when the Black Hawk War broke out, the volunteers of the region elected Lincoln to be their captain. On his return he announced himself as a candida te for the Illinois Legislature on a "Henry Clay-Whig" platform of internal improvements, better educational facilities, and lower interest rates. He was not elected, but he did receive 277 of the 300 votes cast in the New Salem precinct.

Lincoln next formed a partnership with William Berry and purchased one of the other stores in New Salem. However, on the death of his partner Lincoln found himself responsible for a $1,100 debt. His appointment as New Salem postmaster and the chance to work as deputy surveyor of the country improved his finances. He also was enabled to widen his acquaintances and to win election to the state legislature in 1834. The skill with which Lincoln conducted his campaign so impressed John Todd Stuart, the Whig leader of the county and an outstanding lawyer in Springfield, that he took Lincoln under his care and inspired him to begin the study of law.

Lincoln served four successive terms in the legislature and became floor leader of his party in the lower house. Meanwhile, he mastered the law books he could buy or borrow and in September 1836 passed the bar examinations and was admitted to practice. He played an important part in having the state capital moved from Vandalia to Springfield, and in 1837 he moved there to become Stuart's law partner. Coming into a firm already well established, Lincoln had a secure legal future. He not only practiced in Springfield but rode the Eighth Circuit of some 160 miles through the Sangamon Valley. He did not, however, neglect politics, and in 1846 he was elected to the U.S. Congress.

In these years Lincoln had become engaged to Mary Todd, a cultured and well-educated Kentucky woman who was visiting relatives in Springfield. After a rather stormy courtship, they were married on November 2, 1842. The part which Mary played in Lincoln's life is still a matter of controversy.

National Politics

Lincoln's election to Congress came just as the war with Mexico began. Like many Whigs, he doubted the justice of the war, but since it was popular in Illinois he kept quiet.

When Congress convened in December 1847, Lincoln, the only Whig from Illinois, voted for the Wilmot Proviso whenever it came up. When William A. Richardson, Illinois Democrat, presented resolutions declaring the war just and necessary and Mexico the aggressor, Lincoln countered with resolutions declaring that Mexico, not the United States, had jurisdiction over "the spot" where blood was first shed. These resolutions, together with one to abolish slavery in the District of Columbia, brought sharp criticism from the people back in Illinois. Lincoln was "not a patriot." He had not correctly represented his state. Although the Whigs won the presidency in 1848, Lincoln could not even control the patronage in his own district. His political career seemed to be ended. His only reward for party service was an offer of the governorship of far-off Oregon, which he refused. He could only return to the practice of law.

War on the Horizon

During the next 12 years, while Lincoln rebuilt his legal practice, the nation was drifting steadily toward sectional confrontation. Victory in the Mexican war, having added vast western territory to the United States, had raised anew the issue of slavery in the territories. To southerners it involved the security and rights of slavery everywhere; to Northerners it was a matter of morals and democratic obligations. Tempers flared and the crisis developed. Only the frantic efforts of Henry Clay and Daniel Webster brought about the Compromise of 1850 as a temporary truce. The basic issues, however, were not eliminated. Four years later Stephen A. Douglas, by his bill to organize the Kansas-Nebraska Territory according to "squatter sovereignty" and "with all questions pertaining to slavery … left to the decision of the people," reopened the whole bitter struggle.

Douglas's bill, plus the repeal of the Missouri Compromise, brought Lincoln back into politics. He had always viewed slavery as a "moral, social and political wrong" and looked forward to its eventual abolition. Although willing to let it alone for the present in the states where it existed, he would not see it extended one inch. Douglas's popular sovereignty doctrine, he thought, revealed an indifference to the moral issue and ignored the growing Northern determination to rid the nation of slavery. So when Douglas returned to Illinois to defend his position, Lincoln seized every opportunity to point out the weakness in it.

Republican Leader

Lincoln's failure to receive the nomination as senator in 1855 convinced him that the Whig party was dead, and by summer 1856 he became openly identified with the new Republicans. At their state convention that year he delivered what many have considered his greatest speech. It was an appeal aimed at welding all anti-Nebraska men into a vigorous and successful party. Thus, Lincoln had made himself the outstanding leader of the new party. At the party's first national convention in Philadelphia, he received 110 votes for vice president on the first ballot. Though he was not chosen, he had been recognized as an important national figure.

Violence in Kansas and the Supreme Court decision in the Dred Scott case soon centered national attention on Illinois. There Douglas, who had broken sharply with the new administration over acceptance of the proslavery Lecompton Constitution, had returned to wage his fight for reelection to the Senate. It would be an uphill struggle, with the fate of the national Democratic party in the balance. It would not be like earlier elections, for Illinois had grown rapidly and the population majority had shifted from the southern part of the state to the central and northern areas. In these growing areas the new Republican party had gained a large majority and offered, in Abraham Lincoln, a rival candida te of proven ability. Some Republicans in the East thought that Douglas should not be opposed, because of his stand on Kansas; but Lincoln thought differently. He had delivered his now famous "house divided" speech, and he pressed Douglas for a joint discussion of issues. Out of this came the Lincoln-Douglas debates, in which Lincoln proved his ability to hold his own against the "Little Giant." In the end Douglas was reelected, but Lincoln had gained national attention. Invitations for speeches pored in from all over the country. His speech at Cooper Institute in New York attracted wide attention and gave him a new standing in the East.

When the Republican National Convention met to choose its presidential candida te for 1860, Lincoln was the first or second choice of most delegations. As a result, when serious objections were raised against other first choices, many turned to Lincoln. That he stood well in the states which the Republicans had lost in 1856 also helped; the bargains and promises which Lincoln's managers made did the rest. He was nominated on the third ballot. The split in the Democratic party and the formation of the Constitutional Union party made Lincoln's election certain. He would be a minority, sectional president. Seven Southern states reacted by seceding from the Union and forming the Confederate States of America.

Sixteenth President

In the critical months before taking office, Lincoln selected his Cabinet. It was a strange group, chosen with the aim of representing all elements in the party. The skill with which Lincoln taught each of his men that he was their master and secured maximum service from them is one of the marks of his greatness.

In his inaugural address he clarified his position on the national situation. Secession, he said, was anarchy. The Union could not legally be broken apart. He would not interfere with slavery in the states, but he would "hold, occupy, and possess" all Federal property and places. Firmness and conciliation would go together.

The first test came when Secretary of State William H. Seward secretly conferred with Southerners regarding the evacuation of Ft. Sumter in Charleston harbor. Lincoln firmly but kindly put Seward in his place and refused to yield even though it meant the outbreak of the Civil War.

A second test came when Col. John C. Frémont, in command at St. Louis, invoked martial law and announced the confiscation of the property of all persons who had taken up arms against the government and the freeing of their slaves. Lincoln quickly rescinded the orders and, when Frémont resisted, removed him from command.

Civil War

From this time on, Lincoln's life was shaped by the problems and fortunes of civil war. As president, he was the head of all administration agencies and commander in chief of the armies. On him the criticisms for inefficiency in administration and failure in battle fell first. Radicals in Congress were soon demanding a reorganization of his Cabinet and a new set of generals to lead his armies. He let the dissatisfied congressmen air their views and in the end withdraw in confusion. To the critics of Gen. George McClellan, he pointed to the army this general had created, relieved him when he failed, but brought him back to serve until better men had been developed. Meanwhile Lincoln himself studied military books. He correctly evaluated Gen. Ulysses S. Grant and Gen. William T. Sherman and the importance of the western campaign.

As to slavery, Lincoln waited until after the victory at Antietam, when it would have real meaning as a war measure, to issue his Emancipation Proclamation. Later, at Gettysburg, he gave the war its universal meaning as a struggle to preserve a nation "conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal."

As the war dragged on, Lincoln's critics began to question his chances for reelection. Salmon P. Chase in the Cabinet and Radicals in Congress plotted to crowd him aside, and only the loyalty of the people and final military success secured his reelection. His second inaugural address was brief. It lacked bitterness toward the South and urged his people "to bind up the nation's wounds." "With malice toward none; with charity for all," Americans could achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace.

Lincoln had already taken steps in that direction. As the Federal Army had conquered Southern territory, he had set up military governments and soon had governments in Tennessee, Louisiana, Arkansas, and Virginia. When Congress opposed this, he applied the "pocket veto" to its bill. He had never learned to hate. He was interested only in a restored Union. He did insist on ending slavery in the reconstructed states, and there are some indications that he favored votes for capable Negroes. What the final outcome might have been, history does not know, for on the night of April 14, 1865, an assassin's bullet ended his life. Then, as Edwin Stanton said, he belonged to the ages.

Further Reading

Lincoln's writings are gathered in The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln (8 vols., 1953), edited by Roy P. Basler and others. The Lincoln Reader (1947), edited by Paul M. Angle, is one of many anthologies of selected writings. Lincoln and His America, 1809-1865: The Words of Abraham Lincoln (1970), arranged by David Flowden and the editors of Viking Press, is a handsome book that gives a portrait of Lincoln's entire life through his own words and includes hundreds of photographs.

The literature on Lincoln is enormous and still growing. A useful bibliography is Paul M. Angle, A Shelf of Lincoln Books: A Critical, Selective Bibliography of Lincolniana (1946). One of the most popular biographies is Carl Sandburg's sprawling study, Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years (2 vols., 1926) and Abraham Lincoln: The War Years (4 vols., 1939), all condensed into one volume in 1954. Among the many good biographies are older works: W. H. Herndon and J. W. Weik, Herndon's Lincoln (3 vols., 1889); the classic work of John G. Nicolay and John Hay, Abraham Lincoln: A History (10 vols., 1890), condensed into an excellent one-volume edition in 1966; Lord Charnwood, Abraham Lincoln (2 vols., 1925); and Albert J. Beveridge, Abraham Lincoln, 1809-1858 (2 vols., 1928). Edgar Lee Masters, Lincoln the Man (1931), portrays Lincoln unfavorably. More recent biographies are Benjamin P. Thomas, Abraham Lincoln (1952); Stefan Lorant, The Life of Abraham Lincoln (1954); Reinhard Henry Luthin, The Real Abraham Lincoln (1960); and Edward J. Kempf, Abraham Lincoln's Philosophy of Common Sense: An Analytical Biography of a Great Mind (3 vols., 1965).

Interpretative studies of Lincoln's life include Roy P. Basler, The Lincoln Legend: A Study in Changing Conceptions (1935), which analyzes the creation of a national legend about Lincoln; David Herbert Donald, Lincoln Reconsidered: Essays on the Civil War Era (1956); Richard N. Current, The Lincoln Nobody Knows (1958); and David D. Anderson, Abraham Lincoln (1970), which examines Lincoln's personal and political life through the development of his thought and prose.

There are numerous studies of specific aspects of Lincoln's career and influence. Among them are T. Harry Williams, Lincoln and the Radicals (1941) and Lincoln and the Generals (1952); David M. Potter, Lincoln and His Party in the Secession Crisis (1942; with a new preface, 1962); Reinhard Henry Luthin and Harry J. Carman, Lincoln and Patronage (1943); Jay Monaghan, Diplomat in Carpet Slippers (1945); Burton J. Hendrick, Lincoln's War Cabinet (1946); James G. Randall, Lincoln and the South (1946), Lincoln the President (4 vols., 1946-1955), Lincoln the Liberal Statesman (1947), and Mr. Lincoln (1957); William Best HesseHine, Lincoln and the War Governors (1948); Donald W. Riddle, Lincoln Runs for Congress (1948); Don E. Fehrenbacher, Prelude to Greatness: Lincoln in the 1850s (1962); Benjamin Quarles, Lincoln and the Negro (1962); Paul Simon, Lincoln's Preparation for Greatness: The Illinois Legislative Years (1965); Dean Sprague, Freedom under Lincoln (1965); and Richard Allen Heckman, Lincoln vs. Douglas: The Great Debates (1967), which attempts to diminish the exaggerated importance of the debates and place them in a better perspective. A critique of special interest is Benjamin P. Thomas, Portrait for Posterity: Lincoln and His Biographers (1947). The 1860 and 1864 presidential elections are detailed in Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., History of American Presidential Elections (4 vols., 1971). □

LINCOLN, ABRAHAM

Abraham Lincoln was the 16th president of the United States, serving from 1861 until his assassination in April 1865. Lincoln and his supporters preserved the Union by defeating the South in the Civil War.

Lincoln was born February 12, 1809, in Hodgenville, Kentucky. In 1816 his family moved to a farm in Indiana, where he spent the rest of his childhood. He attended school for less than a year and gained most of his education by reading books. In 1828 and 1831, he made flat-boat trips down the Mississippi River to take produce to New Orleans. On these trips he was first exposed to the institution of slavery.

In 1830 his family moved to Decatur, Illinois. He left his family in 1831 and moved to New Salem, Illinois, where he worked at various jobs and continued his self-education. He began to study law, then was sidetracked by political ambitions.

In 1832 he ran for the state legislature as a member of the whig party. He aligned himself with the views of Whig party leader henry clay, who served as a U.S. senator from Kentucky. Like Clay, Lincoln promised to use the power of the government to improve the life of the people he represented. During the 1832 campaign, the Black Hawk War erupted in southern Illinois. Lincoln enlisted in the local militia and was elected captain. Though he served for eighty days, he never saw battle. His service in the military distracted him from his campaign for the legislature, and he lost his first election.

In 1834 he was elected to the state legislature. He was reelected in 1836, 1838, and 1840. John T. Stuart, a fellow legislator and also a lawyer, was impressed with Lincoln's intellectual and oratorical abilities and encouraged him to practice law. In the fall of 1836, Lincoln was admitted to the Illinois bar, and in 1837 he became Stuart's law partner in Springfield, Illinois. In 1841 the pair dissolved their partnership and Lincoln began a new partnership with Stephen T. Logan. By 1844 that arrangement had dissolved and Lincoln took William H. Herndon as a partner. Lincoln was a hardworking attorney who over the years represented railroad companies and other business entities. By the 1850s he had argued many times before the Illinois Supreme Court and various federal courts.

However, his interest in politics continued. In 1847 he was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives as a member of the Whig party. His one brief term in this office was detrimental to his career, for his opposition to the Mexican War and his stand on several other issues were received unfavorably by his constituents.

He did not seek reelection in 1848, choosing instead to work on the presidential campaign of zachary taylor. After Taylor's victory Lincoln was severely disappointed when he failed to receive a prominent presidential appointment. He abandoned politics and devoted his energies to his law practice in Springfield.

Events involving slavery soon drew Lincoln back into the political arena. The passage in 1854 of the kansas-nebraska act infuriated Lincoln. Senator stephen a. douglas, of Illinois, a Democrat and rival of Lincoln's, had drafted this legislation, which revoked the missouri compromise of 1820. The repeal meant that the settlers of Kansas and Nebraska could allow slavery to exist if they so wished. This was intolerable to Lincoln and many antislavery Whigs and Democrats. Lincoln took to the political stump again, railing against slavery and the congressional actions that had placed the issue at the forefront of national policy.

The Whig party fell apart over the slavery question. In 1856 Lincoln joined others opposed to slavery from both the Whig and Democrat

"Whenever I hear anyone arguing for slavery, I feel a strong impulse to see it tried on him personally."
—Abraham Lincoln

parties, in the newly formed republican party. He quickly rose to prominence. The Republicans chose him as their candidate in the 1858 senatorial race against Douglas. The campaign was marked by a series of seven brilliant debates between the two contenders. Lincoln advocated loyalty to the Union, regarded slavery as unjust, and was opposed to any further expansion of slavery. He opened his campaign by declaring, "'A house divided against itself cannot stand.' I believe this government cannot endure permanently half slave and half free." Lincoln lost the election owing to an unfavorable apportionment of legislative seats in Illinois. (At that time U.S. senators were elected by a vote of the state legislature.) Though Republicans garnered larger numbers of votes, Douglas was reelected.

Despite the Senate loss, Lincoln's national reputation was enhanced by his firm antislavery position. He was urged to run for president in 1860. At the Republican National Convention in Chicago in May 1860, Lincoln defeated William H. Seward for the nomination. A split in the democratic party led to the fielding of two Democratic candidates, John C. Breckenridge and Douglas. This split enabled Lincoln easily to defeat his rivals, including john bell, head of the Constitutional Union party. He would be easily reelected in 1864.

By the time Lincoln took his oath of office in March 1861, seven Southern states had seceded from the Union and had established the Confederate States of America. Jefferson Davis was elected president of the new government. Lincoln wished to find a solution short of war that would preserve the Union, but there were few options. When Lincoln allowed supplies to be sent to Fort Sumter, a Union base on an island outside Charleston, South Carolina, the new Confederate government seized the opportunity to interpret this as an act of war. On April 12, 1861, Fort Sumter was attacked by Confederate forces, and the Civil War began.

Lincoln's initial actions against this act of aggression included drafting men for military service, approving a blockade of the Southern states, and suspending the writ of habeas corpus. His troop request led to the secession of Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Arkansas. Suspending habeas corpus effectively curtailed civil liberties, as persons who were suspected of being Southern sympathizers could be held in custody indefinitely. All these actions were taken by executive order, in Lincoln's capacity as commander in chief, because Congress was not in session at the time.

The Lincoln Assassination: Conspiracy or a Lone Man's Act?

On April 14, 1865, President Abraham Lincoln was assassinated at Ford's Theater in Washington, D.C. Five days earlier, Confederate General Robert E. Lee had surrendered to Union troops. John Wilkes Booth, a well-known actor, Confederate sympathizer, and spy, has gone down in history as the lone assailant of Lincoln. However, Booth was killed by federal soldiers before he could be brought to trial. Eyewitnesses at Ford's Theater identified Booth as the man who shot the president at point-blank range with a single bullet to the back of the head. But Booth's exact motive in the killing was never established. In the wake of the first assassination of a U.S. president, eight of Booth's associates were charged as conspirators. All eight were convicted. However, since then, some modern theories have downplayed the roles of Southern radicals in the conspiracy. Some historians have even pointed fingers at the Republicans, Lincoln's own party.

Shortly before his death, Lincoln announced his Reconstruction policy for restoring the United States. He advocated "malice toward none, charity for all." However, more than a handful of Confederates distrusted Yankee politics. Confederate plots to kill the president or kidnap him had certainly existed long before April 1865. Lincoln appeared unconcerned about the threats, however, and refused to heed the advice of his advisers to take fewer risks in his public appearances. "What does anybody want to assassinate me for?" Lincoln once asked. "If anyone wants to do so, he can do it any day or night, if he is ready to give his life for mine. It is nonsense."

Booth fled Ford's Theater immediately after killing Lincoln and headed for refuge in the South. The Union cavalry, after a massive manhunt (announced throughout the nation), cornered Booth at the Garrett farm, his hiding spot in Virginia. Soldiers shot him through the neck leaving him partially paralyzed. Booth somehow managed to exit the barn when it was set on fire. He died at the feet of federal officers on the morning of April 26.

In somewhat mysterious fashion, Booth's "diary" (actually an 1864 date-book), was recovered from the site of his death. Booth wrote a running commentary, in scattered detail, on his plans before he shot Lincoln, and the developments of his final days. He wrote: "For six months we had worked to capture. But our cause, being almost lost, something decisive & great must be done. But it's failure was owing to others, who did not strike for their country with a heat. I struck boldly and not as the papers say."

Booth even described himself as a savior, claiming, "Our country owed all her trouble to him, and God simply made me the instrument of his punishment." Booth's diary would not be used directly as evidence in the trial of others with whom he had allegedly conspired. Instead, it is a primary piece of evidence to support the argument that Booth acted alone.

Booth's quick death with no trial left many in the nation questioning the circumstances surrounding the murder of the North's beloved leader. Federal investigators subsequently singled out eight Southern civilians who had, by varying accounts, associated with Booth at a boarding house in Maryland. The eight were held as prisoners, accused of assisting in the crime of the century. David Herold, Lewis Payne, George Atzerodt, Michael O'Laughlin, Samuel Arnold, Dr. Samuel Mudd, Edward Spangler, and Mary E. Surratt were charged as traitors and conspirators in a plot to kill Lincoln, Vice President andrew johnson, secretary of state William H. Seward and General ulysses s. grant.

Lincoln's secretary of war, edwin m. stanton, had conducted most of the criminal investigation. Based on the charges he developed, former Confederate President Jefferson Davis was directly implicated, but not tried, in the assassination plot. Stanton and Attorney General james speed subsequently put together a nine man military commission of seven generals and two colonels from the Union Army to sit in judgment. All nine of the appointed officers were staunch Republicans.

In the trial of the suspects, the prosecution relied heavily on the testimony of one individual in particular, Louis Weichmann. Weichmann had been closely acquainted with most of the conspirators and had first learned of their plot, according to his testimony, at a Maryland boarding house run by Mary Surratt. The accounts Weichmann gave primarily implicated Surratt and a country doctor, Samuel Mudd. The defense noted that Weichmann had not reported any of the alleged activity at the boarding house until after the assassination. However, the evidence to which Weichmann led investigators, particularly a boot of Booth's with the inscription "J. Wilkes," found at the home of Dr. Mudd, appeared to seal the fate of the eight defendants.

On June 29 the commission met behind closed doors to consider the evidence. They deliberated for two days and then sentenced four prisoners to death and four to imprisonment and hard labor. On July 7 Surratt was the first to be led to the gallows. Atzerodt, Herold, and Payne also received the death penalty.

Though four people were sent to their deaths, and four to prison, for the crime, historians continue to debate the conspiracy to kill Lincoln. One book that stirred much discussion on the subject was Otto Eisenschiml's Why Was Lincoln Murdered?, published in 1937. Eisenschiml postulated that Stanton and a group of Northern industrialists plotted the death of Lincoln to secure the interests of radical Republicans who were bent on the takeover of the newly restored Union. That theory, however, has been largely rebutted by other historians.

further readings

Coyle, Marcia. 2002. "History with a Sept. 11 Twist; Heirs Attack Action by Army Tribunal in Lincoln's Killing." The National Law Journal 24 (April 29): A1.

Guttridge, Leonard F., and Ray A. Neff. 2003. Dark Union: The Secret Web of the Profiteers, Politicians, and Booth Conspirators that Led to Lincoln's Death. New York: Wiley.

Johnson, James H. 2001. "The Trial of the 19th Century: Vengeance Trumped the Rule of Law in the Lincoln Conspiracy Case." Legal Times 24 (June 3): 28.

During the early stages of the war, the North suffered great losses, particularly at Bull Run. A succession of Union generals failed to achieve military success. Not until General ulysses s. grant emerged in 1863 as a strong and successful military leader did the Union army begin to achieve substantial victories. In 1864 Lincoln named Grant the commander of the Union army. In April 1865 General Robert E. Lee surrendered his Confederate army to Grant at Appomattox, Virginia, signaling the end of the war.

Lincoln fought the Civil War to preserve the Union, not to end slavery. Though he was personally opposed to slavery, he had been elected on a platform that pledged to allow slavery to remain where it already existed. However, wartime pressures drove Lincoln toward emancipation of the slaves. Military leaders argued that an enslaved labor force in the South allowed the Confederate states to place more soldiers on the front lines. By the summer of 1862, Lincoln had prepared an emancipation proclamation, but he did not want to issue it until the Union army had better fortune on the battlefield. Otherwise the proclamation might be seen as a sign of weakness.

The Union army's victory at Antietam encouraged the president to issue on September 22, 1862, a preliminary proclamation that slavery was to be abolished in areas occupied by the Confederacy effective January 1, 1863. The wording of the Emancipation Proclamation on that date made clear that slavery was still to be tolerated in the border states and areas occupied by Union troops, so as not to jeopardize the war effort. Lincoln was uncertain that the U.S. Supreme Court would uphold the constitutionality of his action, so he lobbied Congress to adopt the thirteenth amendment, which totally abolished slavery.

Lincoln's writing and speaking skills played a vital part in maintaining the resolve of the Northern states during the war and in preparing the nation for the aftermath of the war. In 1863, at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, Lincoln delivered his poignant Gettysburg Address at the dedication of a national cemetery for soldiers who had died at the bloody battleground. The speech summarized the tragic and human aspects of Gettysburg and distilled Lincoln's resolve to protect the Union. At his second inauguration, in March 1865, Lincoln reached out to the South as the end of the war approached. He proclaimed, "With malice toward none; with charity for all."

Even before the war ended, Lincoln began to formulate a plan for Reconstruction, which included the restoration of Southern state governments and the amnesty of Confederate officials who vowed loyalty to the Union. These proposals met fierce opposition in Congress, as the Radical Republicans sought harsher treatment for the South and its supporters.

The war ended on April 9, 1865, but Lincoln did not have a chance to fight for his Reconstruction proposals. He was shot in the head on April 14 by John Wilkes Booth during the performance of a play at Ford's Theatre, in Washington, D.C. He died the next day. After lying in state in the Capitol, his body was returned to Springfield for burial.

further readings

Amar, Akhil Reed. 2001. "Abraham Lincoln and the American Union." University of Illinois Law Review. (October): 1109–33.

Cottrell, John. 1966. Anatomy of an Assassination. London: Muller.

Eisenschiml, Otto. 1937. Why Was Lincoln Murdered? New York: Crosset and Dunlap.

Good, Timothy S., ed. 1995. We Saw Lincoln Shot. Jackson: Univ. Press of Mississippi.

Keneally, Thomas. 2003. Abraham Lincoln. New York: Lipper/Viking.

Pinsker, Matthew. 2002. Abraham Lincoln. Washington, D.C.: CQ Press.

Pitman, Benn. 1954. The Assassination of President Lincoln and the Trial of the Conspirators. New York: Funk & Wagnall's.

Roscoe, Theodore. 1959. The Web of Conspiracy: The Complete Story of the Men Who Murdered Abraham Lincoln. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall.

Stephens, Otis H., Jr., and John M. Scheb II. 2003. American Constitutional Law. 3d ed. St. Paul, Minn.: West Group.

Stone, Geoffrey R. 2003. "Abraham Lincoln's First Amendment." New York University Law Review 78 (April): 1–29.

Tidwell, William A. 1995. Confederate Covert Action in the American Civil War, April '65. Kent, Ohio: Kent State Univ. Press.

Weichmann, Louis J. 1975. A True History of the Assassination of Abraham Lincoln and the Conspiracy of 1865. New York: Knopf.

Zane, John Maxcy. 2002. Lincoln, the Constitutional Lawyer. Union, N.J.: Lawbook Exchange.

cross-references

"Emancipation Proclamation," "Gettysburg Address," "House Divided Speech," and "Second Inaugural Address" (Appendix, Primary Documents).

Lincoln, Abraham (b. Hardin County, Ky., 12 Feb. 1809; d. Washington, D.C. 15 Apr. 1865), lawyer, congressman, and president of the United States, 1861–1865.

As the newly inaugurated president of a divided nation, Abraham Lincoln anticipated working with a generally cooperative Congress. Though still viable, its Democratic ranks had been both diminished in size and deprived of some of its most forceful and experienced legislators owing to the departure of the seceded states' delegations. But of the southern justices of the Supreme Court, only Alabaman John A. Campbell had resigned in 1860. As feared, the chief justice, Marylander Roger B. Taney, did try to lead a bloc hostile to Union war objectives. His circuit opinion in Ex parte Merryman (1861) condemned Lincoln's “arbitrary arrests” of allegedly disloyal civilians as arrogations of Congress's sole authority to declare and wage war. Taney denounced the president's refusal to obey his order to produce the detainee John Merryman as a fatal blow to constitutional government. Like many other lawyers, however, Lincoln believed that the Merryman opinion violated Taney's own political question doctrine counseling judicial restraint, as enunciated in Luther v. Borden (1849), which suggested that in civil strife the elective branches bore responsibility for making basic policy choices.

Merryman convinced no other justices and few lower federal judges. By stressing the obvious dangers to the Union, Lincoln stymied an antiwar bloc on the Court by disseminating the conclusions of legal scholars that previous crises had triggered comparable exercises of the nation's war powers. Lincoln believed that the Constitution was adequate for both peace and war. Most northern lawyers accepted Lincoln's position that erroneous judicial opinions such as Scott v. Sandford (1857) and Merryman were ultimately reversible by political processes.

Nature of the Lincoln Court

While the war ground on, the Court's composition changed. Campbell's resignation in 1860, then Peter Daniel's death in 1860, John McLean's in 1861, and Taney's in 1864, permitted Lincoln to appoint Republicans Noah H. Swayne of Ohio, David Davis of Illinois, and Samuel Miller of Iowa, plus antisecession Democrat Stephen J. Field of California. For the post of chief justice, Lincoln named abolitionist veteran Salmon P. Chase of Ohio, who since 1861 had served effectively as secretary of the treasury. Lincoln believed that these appointees concurred with administration civil‐military policies and long‐term postwar aims.

Lincoln supported statutes such as the 1862 Judicial Reorganization Act and the 1863 Habeas Corpus Act, which enlarged the federal courts' jurisdiction and increased the number of circuits and of justices and judges. These measures increased opportunities for antigovernment decisions and opinions on war governance from the highest bench.

Lincoln's desire for interbranch accord was apparent early in his administration. Meanwhile, the embittered Taney repeatedly violated judicial propriety by preparing opinions‐without‐cases, declaring unconstitutional executive orders and statutes dealing with emancipation, conscription, and state reconstruction. Lincoln ordered federal attorneys to avoid initiating prosecutions involving these policies, but he could not inhibit victims or other opponents from bringing suit. His gamble paid off because most justices also wished to emphasize shared constitutional responsibilities and to avoid confrontation, at least while the war continued.

Prosecution of the War

Despite Taney, throughout the war a narrow Court majority sustained presidential orders and statutes as constitutionally adequate. For example, Justice James M. Wayne's opinion in Ex parte Stevens (1861) implicitly rejected Merryman. Stevens involved a Union soldier who had responded to Lincoln's call for ninety‐day volunteers, then had his enlistment extended to three years by presidential order, an extension that Congress retroactively legitimized. The Court sustained the president's and Congress's actions.

Following a year‐long interval, the Court heard arguments in the Prize Cases (1863). This challenge to Lincoln's proclamations of 1861 and 1862 imposing naval blockades on southern ports raised technical issues about when the Civil War began and basic questions about its legitimacy. The plaintiffs argued that no war, but rather a rebellion, existed. Blockades were appropriate only for formal international wars that only Congress could declare. Military necessities could not, they maintained, transcend the Constitution's provisions governing the declaration and conduct of war. Echoing arguments made earlier in Stevens, the Prize Cases claimants asserted that even if blockades were proper, all seizures of violators' property before Congress confirmed Lincoln's orders were illegal as, implicitly, were other executive initiatives. Government attorneys pleaded the adequacy of the Constitution's provisions for the nation's defense against foreign or domestic fees, the inappropriateness of excessively formal doctrines to the existing crisis, and the political‐question precedent of Luther. By a bare 5‐to‐4 majority, the Court sustained the government, Justice Robert C. Grier holding that the existence of the war was a political reality and that the Confederacy's citizens were technically enemies whose property could be confiscated. For the minority, Justice Samuel Nelson insisted that Lincoln's orders became legitimate only when Congress ratified them.

The justices similarly avoided constitutional confrontation in Ex parte Vallandigham (1864), which raised issues of military arrests and trials of civilians. Vallandigham, a former Ohio Democratic congressman, had encouraged antiwar activists in Ohio. General Ambrose Burnside had him charged with treason in 1863. An army court sentenced Vallandigham to prison for the duration of the war. Determined to make no martyrs, Lincoln commuted the sentence to exile to the Confederacy, from where Vallandigham slipped back into Ohio and resumed antiwar politicking. Lincoln ordered federal attorneys and the army to ignore him. Vallandigham petitioned the Supreme Court to void his earlier military arrest and trial as unlawful. Wayne's terse opinion skirted substantive civil‐military questions, instead holding that the Court lacked jurisdiction over an appeal from a military tribunal (see Military Trials and Martial Law). The Court's majority again declined to hear an appeal on jurisdictional grounds in Roosevelt v. Meyer (1863), implicitly sustaining a wartime statute authorizing the issuance of paper money. By such cautious rulings and by avoiding challenges to executive orders on conscription, confiscation, and emancipation, the Court exercised judicial review yet avoided confrontation with the president and Congress.

Activist Wartime Court

None of this suggests that the Court was supine, however. Instead, the justices vigorously established unprecedented authority over states' public policies and the judgments of states' supreme courts. The outstanding example is Gelpcke v. Dubuque (1864). Iowa municipalities defaulted on bonds issued to attract all rail lines and terminals. Successive elected Iowa supreme courts issued conflicting decisions on the validity of the bonds and of the repudiations. The bondholders appealed to lower federal courts, which by statute and custom deferred to state supreme court rulings on state law. But the federal judges lacked guidance as to which of the multiple and contradictory state decisions prevailed. After federal judges in Iowa sustained repudiation, bondholders appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court. As recently as 1862, in Leffingwell v. Warren, the Court had ruled that the most recent state supreme court judgment construing state law should control. But in Gelpcke, Justice Swayne reverted to an earlier holding that a contract valid by state standards when made could not invalidated by subsequent state laws or state supreme court rulings. Gelpcke increased investors' confidence both in the stability of state bonds and in the role of the federal courts in supervising elected state judges, who allegedly bowed to their constituents' parochial interests. The Supreme Court's reporter, John W. Wallace, extolled the justices for enforcing “high moral duties … upon a whole community, seeking apparently to violate them” (1 Wall. xiv).

Lincoln welcomed the Court's generally co‐operative stance. Election results in 1862 and 1864 suggested that the northern public, including soldiers, believed that the Lincoln administration and the Supreme Court were sustaining constitutionalism and law. Republican congressmen sometimes expressed anti‐Court views. Yet they and Lincoln applauded the Court's reviving credibility after Dred Scott and Merryman. Accordingly, Congress never transformed criticism into constraints on the Court that would have denied its appropriate role in evaluating public policies and protecting private rights.

Emancipation, Citizenship, and Reconstruction

Indeed, Lincoln deferred to the Court as the final legitimizer of one of his most sensitive war power orders, that of 8 December 1863 on the political reconstruction of the Confederate states. In this order, Lincoln reshaped the federal system by imposing standards for readmission and interim governance of the affected states, including the abolition of slavery in new constitutions and the reconstitution of the states' electorates. But Lincoln also feared that the Court might yet reverse his Reconstruction orders, a possibility that spurred Republican efforts to confirm emancipation in what became the Thirteenth Amendment. Lincoln vigorously supported the amendment, seeing in the Constitution thus improved an appropriate guide for the post‐Appomattox Supreme Court and for the reunited nation.

Lincoln believed that the Constitution was adequate for all purposes. His impressive educability and his innate instinct for interracial decency led him, on becoming president, to envisage an improved as well as reunified nation. In 1862 he requested Attorney General Edwin Bates to specify the rights adhering to national citizenship. Bates's reply rested on Justice Bushrod Washington's 1823 circuit opinion in Corfield v. Coryell. He stressed mobility, a right no slave enjoyed. Lincoln's catalog of federal citizens' rights grew much larger after his military emancipation order in 1862 and his 1863 orders to the army to recruit blacks, especially recent slaves.

In his address at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, in late 1863, the president linked the Declaration of Independence to the Constitution. Meanwhile, his administration was embodying equalitarian aspirations in recommended statutes, especially the Homestead, Morrill, and Jurisdiction laws of 1862 and 1863. These federal laws implicitly defined freedom as a cluster of national rights, including widened access to property (especially land), literacy (education), and legal remedies for both private and public wrongs. Having advocated in 1863 that the occupied states both constitutionalize abolition and educate their black residents, Lincoln expanded that idea to all states in 1865. He reported happily the numerous Homestead Act sales to smallholders, including Union Army veterans, among them many black soldiers. In April 1865, with total victory imminent and a new presidential term seemingly ahead, Lincoln defined his final objectives: suffrage for literate blacks and black veterans and state‐supported education for all children, white and black.

The Postwar Era and the Johnson Administration

Lincoln's perception of the Thirteenth Amendment was central to his postwar objectives. Abolition would help him and Congress implement individuals' rights derived from the national Constitution, rights paralleling and not displacing those derived from state citizenship. Lincoln's view of federalism allowed for interstate diversity but required states' laws and customs to be race blind.

People who shared Lincoln's aspirations, like Chief Justice Chase, failed to convince his successor, Andrew Johnson, that the Thirteenth Amendment embraced civil and political rights and extended federal power over private as well as public wrongs. Johnson made no appointments to the Supreme Court, but he filled many lower federal judgeships and other court offices and the entire judiciary of all the southern states with whites, predominantly pardoned ex‐Confederates. Though the Court after 1865 remained dominated by Lincoln's appointees, most justices shared only some of his views on the need for race‐blind equality under state laws as a primary ingredient in federal rights. The Supreme Court began to lose its wartime sense of restraint and of enhanced national purpose.

In the Test Oath (see Test Oaths) and Ex parte Milligan decisions of 1866–1867, the Court, with Chase vainly dissenting, adopted increasingly ahistorical formalist views. The decision in the Slaughterhouse Cases (1873) limited the Thirteenth Amendment to formal abolition. Thereafter, victims of private wrongs, including those connived at by state authorities, enjoyed few practical federal remedies. Another retrograde decision in the pivotal 1873 Court term, Osborn v. Nicholson, validated a prewar contract for the sale of a slave. Another, Bradwell v. Illinois, excluded qualified women who sought access to state‐licensed professions from Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendment protections. Nevertheless, the war‐time Court had built enduring constitutional redoubts against a total return to official racism.

See also Civil War; Race and Racism.

Bibliography

Herman Belz , Emancipation and Equal Rights: Politics and Constitutionalism in the Civil War Era (1978).
Harold M. Hyman and and William M. Wiecek , Equal Justice under Law: Constitutional Development, 1835–1875 (1982).
James G. Randall , Constitutional Problems under Lincoln, rev. ed. (1951).
David M. Silver , Lincoln's Supreme Court (1956).

Harold M. Hyman

Abraham Lincoln , 1809–65, 16th President of the United States (1861–65).

Early Life

Born on Feb. 12, 1809, in a log cabin in backwoods Hardin co., Ky. (now Larue co.), he grew up on newly broken pioneer farms of the frontier. His father, Thomas Lincoln, was a migratory carpenter and farmer, nearly always poverty-stricken. Little is known of his mother, Nancy Hanks, who died in 1818, not long after the family had settled in the wilds of what is now Spencer co., Ind. Thomas Lincoln soon afterward married Sarah Bush Johnston, a widow; she was a kind and affectionate stepmother to the boy. Abraham had almost no formal schooling—the scattered weeks of school attendance in Kentucky and Indiana amounted to less than a year; but he taught himself, reading and rereading a small stock of books. His first glimpse of the wider world came in a voyage downriver to New Orleans on a flatboat in 1828, but little is known of that journey. In 1830 the Lincolns moved once more, this time to Macon co., Ill.

After another visit to New Orleans, the young Lincoln settled in 1831 in the village of New Salem, Ill., not far from Springfield. There he began by working in a store and managing a mill. By this time a tall (6 ft 4 in./190 cm), rawboned young man, he won much popularity among the inhabitants of the frontier town by his great strength and his flair for storytelling, but most of all by his strength of character. His sincerity and capability won respect that was strengthened by his ability to hold his own in the roughest society. He was chosen captain of a volunteer company gathered for the Black Hawk War (1832), but the company did not see battle.

Returning to New Salem, Lincoln was a partner in a grocery store that failed, leaving him with a heavy burden of debt. He became a surveyor for a time, was village postmaster, and did various odd jobs, including rail splitting. All the while he sought to improve his education and studied law. The story of a brief love affair with Ann Rutledge , which supposedly occurred at this time, is now discredited.

Early Political Career

In 1834, Lincoln was elected to the state legislature, in which he served four successive terms (until 1841) and achieved prominence as a Whig. In 1836 he obtained his license as an attorney, and the next year he moved to Springfield, where he became a law partner of John T. Stuart. Lincoln's practice steadily increased. That first partnership was succeeded by others, with Stephen T. Logan and then with William H. Herndon , who was later to be Lincoln's biographer. Lincoln displayed great ability in law, a ready grasp of argument, and sincerity, color, and lucidity of speech.

In 1842 he married Mary Todd (see Lincoln, Mary Todd ) after a troubled courtship. He continued his interest in politics and entered on the national scene by serving one term in Congress (1847–49). He remained obscure, however, and his attacks as a Whig on the motives behind the Mexican War (though he voted for war supplies) seemed unpatriotic to his constituents, so he lost popularity at home. Lincoln worked hard for the election of the Whig candidate, Zachary Taylor, in 1848, but when he was not rewarded with the office he desired—Commissioner of the General Land Office—he decided to retire from politics and return to the practice of law.

Slavery and the Lincoln-Douglas Debates

The prairie lawyer emerged again into politics in 1854, when he was caught up in the rising quarrel over slavery. He stoutly opposed the policy of Stephen A. Douglas and particularly the Kansas-Nebraska Act . In a speech at Springfield, repeated at Peoria, he attacked the compromises concerning the question of slavery in the territories and invoked the democratic ideals contained in the Declaration of Independence. In 1855 he sought to become a Senator but failed.

He had already realized that his sentiments were leading him away from the Whigs and toward the new Republican party, and in 1856 he became a Republican. He quickly came to the fore in the party as a moderate opponent of slavery who could win both the abolitionists and the conservative free-staters, and at the Republican national convention of 1856 he was prominent as a possible vice presidential candidate. Two years later he was nominated by the Republican party to oppose Douglas in the Illinois senatorial race.

Accepting the nomination (in a speech delivered at Springfield on June 16), Lincoln gave a ringing declaration in support of the Union: "A house divided against itself cannot stand." The campaign that followed was impressive. Lincoln challenged Douglas to a series of debates (seven were held), in which he delivered masterful addresses for the Union and for the democratic idea. He was not an abolitionist, but he regarded slavery as an injustice and an evil, and uncompromisingly opposed its extension.

Presidency

Though Douglas won the senatorial election, Lincoln had made his mark by the debates; he was now a potential presidential candidate. His first appearance in the East was in Feb., 1860, when he spoke at Cooper Union in New York City. He gained a large following in the antislavery states, but his nomination for President by the Republican convention in Chicago (May, 1860) was as much due to the opposition to William H. Seward , the leading contender, as to Lincoln's own appeal. He was nominated on the third ballot. In the election the Democratic party split; Lincoln was opposed by Douglas (Northern Democrat), John C. Breckinridge (Southern Democrat), and John Bell (Constitutional Unionist). Lincoln was elected with a minority of the popular vote.

To the South, Lincoln's election was the signal for secession. All compromise plans, such as that proposed by John J. Crittenden , failed, and by the time of Lincoln's inauguration seven states had seceded. The new President, determined to preserve the Union at all costs, condemned secession but promised that he would not initiate the use of force. After a slight delay, however, he did order the provisioning of Fort Sumter , and the South chose to regard this as an act of war. On Apr. 12, 1861, Fort Sumter was fired upon, and the Civil War began.

Although various criticisms have been leveled against him, it is generally agreed that Lincoln attacked the vast problems of the war with vigor and surpassing skill. He immediately issued a summons to the militia (an act that precipitated the secession of four more Southern states), ordered a blockade of Confederate ports, and suspended habeas corpus. The last action provoked much criticism, but Lincoln adhered to it, ignoring a circuit court ruling against him in the Merryman Case (see Merryman, ex parte ). In the course of the war, Lincoln further extended his executive powers, but in general he exercised those powers with restraint. He was beset not only by the difficulties of the war, but by opposition from men on his own side. His cabinet was rent by internal jealousies and hatred; radical abolitionists condemned him as too mild; conservatives were gloomy over the prospects of success in the war.

In the midst of all this strife, Lincoln continued his course, sometimes almost alone, with wisdom and patience. The progress of battle went against the North at first. Lincoln himself made some bad military decisions (e.g., in ordering the direct advance into Virginia that resulted in the Union defeat at the first battle of Bull Run ), and he ran through a succession of commanders in chief before he found Ulysses S. Grant . In the early stages of the war Lincoln revoked orders by John C. Frémont and David Hunter freeing the slaves in their military departments. However, the Union victory at Antietam gave him a position of strength from which to issue his own Emancipation Proclamation .

The restoration and preservation of the Union were still the main tenets of Lincoln's war aims. The sorrows of war and its rigorous necessity afflicted him; he expressed both in one of the noblest public speeches ever made, the Gettysburg Address , made at the dedication of the soldiers' cemetery at Gettysburg in 1863. For a time Lincoln was threatened by the desertion of the Republican leaders as well as by a strong opposition party in the presidential election that loomed ahead in the dark days of 1864; but a turn for the better took place before the election, a turn brought about to some extent by a change of military fortune after Grant became commander and particularly after William T. Sherman took Atlanta.

Lincoln was reelected over George B. McClellan by a great majority. His second inaugural address, delivered when the war was drawing to its close, was a plea for the new country that would arise from the ashes of the South. His own view was one of forgiveness, as shown in his memorable phrase "With malice toward none; with charity for all." He lived to see the end of the war, but he was to have no chance to implement his plans for Reconstruction . On the night of Apr. 14, 1865, when attending a performance at Ford's Theater, he was shot by the actor John Wilkes Booth . The next morning Lincoln died. His death was an occasion for grief even among those who had been his opponents, and many considered him a martyr.

The Lincoln Legend

As time passed Lincoln became more and more the object of adulation; a full-blown "Lincoln legend" appeared. Yet, even if his faults and mistakes are acknowledged, he stands out as a statesman of noble vision, great humanity, and remarkable political skill. It is not surprising that the Illinois "rail-splitter" is regarded as a foremost symbol of American democracy. Paintings, sculptures, and architectural works memorializing Lincoln are legion; the most famous shrines are his home and tomb in Springfield , Ill., and the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C.

Bibliography

Innumerable biographies, novels, poems, plays, and essays have been devoted to Lincoln. His collected works were edited by R. P. Basler (9 vol., 1953). See also D. C. Mearns, ed., The Lincoln Papers (1948). The standard older bibliography is J. Monaghan, Lincoln Bibliography, 1839–1939 (2 vol., 1943–45); others are P. M. Angle, A Shelf of Lincoln Books (1946); V. Searcher, Lincoln Today (1969); E. W. Matthews, Lincoln as a Lawyer (1991).

Lincoln, Abraham (1809–1865), sixteenth president of the United States.Lincoln was born in a log cabin near Hodgenville, Kentucky. A paternal ancestor had arrived in Massachusetts from England in 1637. Abraham's father, Thomas, a respected farmer though semiliterate, shared the restlessness of the frontier, and in 1816 the family moved to Indiana. In 1818, when Lincoln was nine, his mother, Nancy Hanks, died. His father soon married Sarah Bush Johnston, who became a loving stepmother. Abraham attended school for scarcely a year, but he read such works as the Bible, Pilgrim's Progress, and Aesop's Fables and displayed a remarkable capacity for self‐education. Migrating with his family to Illinois in 1830, young Lincoln tried various occupations and served briefly in the Black Hawk War (1832). Passing the bar exam in 1836, he moved in 1837 to Springfield, the state capital, where law and politics absorbed his interests. Joining the Whig party, he served in the Illinois legislature (1834–1841) and a term in Congress (1847–1849), during which he opposed the Mexican War and proposed a bill providing for the gradual, compensated emancipation of slaves with local consent. Returning to Springfield, Lincoln virtually abandoned politics while developing a thriving law practice with his partner, William Herndon, and rearing a family. In 1842 he had married Mary Todd, who was from a prominent Kentucky family. Of their four sons, only the eldest, Robert, lived to maturity.

The Kansas‐Nebraska Act of 1854, opening the territories to slavery, aroused Lincoln and thrust him back into politics. At the 1856 convention of the new Republican party, he was a favorite‐son candidate for the vice presidential nomination. Lincoln's skill as a stump speaker, enhanced by his six‐foot‐four‐inch height, contributed to his political rise. In 1858, Illinois Republicans nominated him for the U.S. Senate; in accepting, Lincoln asserted: “‘A house divided against itself cannot stand.’ I believe the government cannot endure permanently half slave and half free.” In seven well‐publicized debates with his Democratic opponent, Stephen A. Douglas, Lincoln attacked slavery expansion. He lost the election but gained national recognition.

In 1860, the Republicans nominated Lincoln for president. A four‐way contest in a divided nation gave him the presidency, but only 39 percent of the popular vote and no electoral votes in any of the eleven southern states that would soon secede. By 1 February 1861—more than a month before Lincoln's inauguration—seven states of the Lower South had seceded to form the Confederacy. Confronting a gathering crisis, Lincoln in his inaugural address pledged not to interfere with slavery where it already existed, but he insisted that the Union must be preserved, and affirmed the duty of any president “to administer the present Government and to transmit it, unimpaired by him, to his successors.” With the surrender of Fort Sumter in Charleston harbor on 13 April, the Civil War began.

Further inflamed by Lincoln's call to arms, four more states seceded. Four border states remained loyal, however, and keeping them in the Union became one of Lincoln's prime concerns. By the time Lincoln summoned the fractured Congress to Washington on 4 July 1861, he had already adopted war measures that stretched the Constitution, declaring martial law and suspending habeas corpus in areas of the Union where antiwar sentiment ran high.

Inevitably, the war dominated Lincoln's presidency. The rout of Union forces at the Battle of Bull Run near Washington in July 1861 spurred Congress to make abundant authorizations of money and men, but Lincoln had trouble finding generals who could use these resources effectively. George B. McClellan (1826–1885), while skillful in organizing troops, proved reluctant to confide in Lincoln or to conduct an aggressive war. Not until March 1862 did McClellan's huge Army of the Potomac advance, approaching Richmond, Virginia, the Confederate capital, by the peninsula formed by the York and James Rivers, contrary to Lincoln's preference for an overland march shielding Washington.

Frustrated by McClellan's caution, his overestimation of enemy strength, and his complaints of lack of support, Lincoln relieved him in August 1862 but reappointed him after a second Union reverse at Bull Run. At the Battle of Antietam, 17 September 1862, McClellan repelled General Robert E. Lee's invading forces but failed to pursue the enemy. The partial victory at Antietam did, however, enable Lincoln to issue the Emancipation Proclamation, on 1 January 1863, freeing the slaves in rebel areas, welcoming freedmen into military service, and laying the groundwork for the Thirteenth Amendment of 1865, officially ending slavery.

Lincoln's troubles continued with defeats at Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville, Virginia. The tide turned in July 1863, however, as Union forces repulsed the Confederates’ northern advance at the Battle of Gettysburg, and Ulysses S. Grant took Vicksburg, Mississippi, dividing the Confederacy in the West. On 9 March 1864, Lincoln appointed Grant to command all Union armies. Leaving the western campaign to General William T. Sherman, Grant laid plans to defeat Lee's army in Virginia and invade the Lower South. By late 1864, Sherman's march through the South had brought him to Savannah, Georgia, while Grant, although failing to defeat Lee in the field, had enveloped Lee's forces at Petersburg, Virginia.

Throughout 1864, Lincoln's reelection remained doubtful. His generals’ inability to end the war conclusively was accompanied by a growing peace movement and a congressional struggle over postwar Reconstruction. The Democrats nominated McClellan and adopted a peace platform (which McClellan repudiated). Lincoln himself despaired of reelection, but Union successes in Georgia and Mobile Bay brought him victory with 55 percent of the popular vote. His Second Inaugural Address of March 1865, meditating on the war's meaning and looking forward to peace (“With malice toward none, with charity for all”), ranks with his brief but eloquent Gettysburg Address of 19 November 1863 as a masterpiece of American public oratory.

Looking to the postwar period, Lincoln in December 1863 had proclaimed a Reconstruction plan that Congress believed too lenient and an infringement on its authority. Proceeding with plans for dealing with the collapsing Confederacy, Lincoln pocket‐vetoed the Wade‐Davis Bill of July 1864, which required a harsher approach. By early 1865, Lincoln was moving in the direction of enfranchising and educating some freedmen while displaying flexibility in restoring seceding states to the Union. His cabinet failed to support his suggestion for compensating slaveholders, however.

On 9 April 1865, Lee surrendered at Appomattox, Virginia. Lincoln, however, had little time to savor victory. On the night of 14 April, as he sat with his wife at Ford's Theatre in Washington, he was shot by John Wilkes Booth, an actor and rabid Confederate supporter. He died the following morning. Grief enveloped the North as his body was borne back to Springfield for burial.

Historians have long probed Lincoln's life and character, seeking the key to his almost saintlike standing in the American pantheon. His earthy humor, his ability to joke when things seemed darkest, and his endless supply of homespun stories certainly helped him cope with the crises of war. Beneath the humor, however, lay a profound melancholy. His relations with the temperamental and unstable Mary Todd Lincoln were often strained, and the death of his beloved son Willie in 1862 brought further grief. His frontier origins, his plainspoken eloquence, his magnanimity toward the defeated South, and the circumstances of his death all contributed to his enduring reputation as perhaps the greatest of presidents. Walt Whitman's elegiac When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd and Oh Captain, My Captain, beloved of school orators, launched a tide of commemorative poems, biographies, and works of art. The Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. (1914–1917), housing Daniel Chester French's heroic seated statue, remains one of the capital's best‐known icons. Carl Sandburg's multivolume biography (1926–1939) presented Lincoln as a son of the West who supremely embodied the straightforward frontier virtues that underlay his grandeur of character and nobility of thought. Although debunking historians have presented Lincoln as a calculating politician, vacillating and temporizing in his approach to racism and slavery, and psychohistorians have dissected his enigmatic and sometimes tortured personality, Abraham Lincoln's standing in the hearts of the American people seems unassailable.
See also Antebellum Era; Antislavery; Confederate States of America; Federal Government, Executive Branch: The Presidency; Lincoln‐Douglas Debates.

Bibliography

Albert J. Beveridge , Abraham Lincoln, 1809–1858, 2 vol., 1928.
J.G. Randall , Lincoln the President, 4 vols., the 4th completed by R.N. Current, 1946–1955.
T. Harry Williams , Lincoln and His Generals, 1952.
Merrill D. Peterson , Lincoln in American Memory, 1994.
David Herbert Donald , Lincoln, 1995.
James A. Rawley , Abraham Lincoln and a Nation Worth Fighting For, 1996.

James A. Rawley

Lincoln, Abraham 1809-1865

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Abraham Lincoln, the sixteenth president of the United States, was born February 12, 1809, in a log cabin in Kentucky. His opinions against slavery seem to have been shaped while he was a boy, partly by his father’s antislavery opinions, partly by the fact that his father took everything Lincoln earned until he was of majority, and partly by a trip to New Orleans where he witnessed the institution in operation.

Lincoln’s political career began in 1832, when he ran as a Whig for the Illinois state legislature from the town of New Salem and lost. He won two years later, though, and began studying law. New Salem was not a promising town, and Lincoln moved to Springfield in 1837. There he honed his legal skills, ultimately becoming one of Illinois’s most prominent attorneys and, in the 1850s, a successful corporate lawyer. It was also in Springfield that he met Mary Todd (1818–1882), whom he married in 1842. They had four sons together, only one of whom lived past eighteen.

After four terms in the legislature, Lincoln was elected to Congress in 1846. To the extent that he made a name for himself in Washington, it was by challenging the grounds on which the Mexican War began. Lincoln was not reelected. Discouraged about politics, he focused on his practice instead. The Kansas-Nebraska Act (1854), which allowed Kansas to decide whether it would have slavery and sparked a virtual civil war within the territory, reengaged Lincoln. He won his fifth legislative term but resigned to run for the U.S. Senate, a campaign he lost in 1855.

The following year, he joined the Republican Party, which positioned him for his most dramatic campaign to date: his 1858 race for the Senate against one of the country’s best-known Democrats, Stephen A. Douglas (1813–1861). Lincoln’s acceptance of the nomination has come to be known as his “House Divided” speech. Equally famous is the series of debates he had with Douglas in seven different towns across the state. The Lincoln-Douglas debates drew thousands of observers and national press attention as the two men argued about whether or under what circumstances slavery should be allowed to spread into the territories. Douglas tried to undermine Lincoln by painting him as an abolitionist (Lincoln actually did not target slavery in the states where it already existed; his goal was to keep it from moving into the territories), and Lincoln pressed on the moral aspect of slavery and Douglas’s position. Lincoln lost the contest, but gained nationwide recognition, which he leveraged in a prominent 1859 speech at New York’s Cooper Union.

Despite Lincoln’s rising prominence, he remained a man with little political baggage. That made him an appealing compromise candidate for the Republicans at their 1860 convention. In November Lincoln ran against three other candidates, including his old nemesis, Douglas. Lincoln won with just 39.8 percent of the popular vote, but a clear majority of electoral votes.

Despite Lincoln’s repeated assertions that he was interested only in keeping slavery out of the territories, southerners were convinced that he wanted to abolish it completely and immediately. South Carolina was the first state to secede from the Union, on December 20, 1860. Six states followed shortly thereafter, and four more joined after the rebels opened fire on Fort Sumter on April 12, 1861.

Lincoln initially believed that a number of Unionists in the South would rise up against the Confederate government, so for the first year of the war he favored a strategy that avoided targeting slavery. As late as the spring of 1862, Lincoln believed in trying to compensate slaveowners in places such as the border state of Kentucky for their property, and he thought freed blacks should be sent to colonies elsewhere, on the grounds that blacks and whites could not live together. By July 1862, Lincoln realized that the Confederacy did not have a critical mass of Union supporters, and he decided to hit at the rebels’ point of vulnerability. In issuing the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863 (he had issued a preliminary version the previous September), he believed he was striking at the Confederates in two ways: First, the proclamation would deny southerners their slaves, and second, it would also deny them the workforce that kept the Confederate army going. The proclamation was limited, however, affecting only those parts of the South that were in rebellion and out of the Federals’ reach.

Lincoln was fundamentally moderate. He was also a man of his times. Both these points account for his approach to the slavery question as president. Critics have assailed Lincoln’s slowness on emancipation, but he believed the Constitution limited his powers in this regard. Because of these constitutional concerns, he issued the proclamation as a military measure. One thing is clear from the historical record, however, and that is that Lincoln was always personally opposed to slavery. He was also willing to change, and he did. In fact, it is difficult to generalize about most of Lincoln’s policies because he underwent such transformation in office. For instance, Lincoln abandoned his positions on compensation and colonization and, in the summer of 1864, when he was under great pressure to abandon emancipation as a condition for peace, he staked his career on protecting freed-men, saying he would be “damned” if he abandoned them. He also approved of Sherman’s March through Georgia and later into the Carolinas, a maneuver that amounted to hard, if not total, war—a far cry from his gentler approach at the war’s outset.

Even as he moved toward harder war, Lincoln wanted a soft peace. His early efforts at reconstruction called for Louisiana to establish a new state government when just 10 percent of the voters in the 1860 election took a loyalty oath and accepted emancipation. Many in Congress deemed this to be too lenient, but Lincoln at the end of his life appeared to be determined to return the rebel states to the fold with as little rancor as possible, while simultaneously protecting and advancing the rights of blacks. This included extending the vote to at least some African Americans. Lincoln was preparing a new reconstruction plan when he was assassinated April 14, 1865—Good Friday—while watching a play. He died the next morning.

While we will never know Lincoln’s precise plans for Reconstruction or how they would have changed in response to the contingencies of the day, it seems fair to say that Reconstruction would have been markedly different under Lincoln. Instead, his successor, Andrew Johnson (1808-1875), proved to be a white supremacist who easily bent to the wishes of southern elites. This led to such tragic consequences as the Black Codes, laws that all but reinstated slavery in many parts of the South. Johnson’s ready acquiescence to southern demands prompted Congress to wrest control of Reconstruction from the president and impose its own plan on the South, which proved to be to the short-term benefit of black southerners but provoked a bitter and violent response from whites in the region.

SEE ALSO Slavery; U.S. Civil War

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Carwardine, Richard. 2006. Lincoln. New York: Knopf.

Donald, David Herbert. 1995. Lincoln. New York: Simon and Schuster.

Gienapp, William E. 2002. Abraham Lincoln and Civil War America: A Biography. New York: Oxford University Press.

McPherson, James M. 1990. Abraham Lincoln and the Second American Revolution. New York: Oxford University Press.

Thomas, Benjamin P. 1952. Abraham Lincoln: A Biography. New York: Knopf.

Jennifer L. Weber

Lincoln, Abraham (1809–1865), sixteenth president of the United States.Born into a poor family in Hardin County, Kentucky, Lincoln moved with his family to Indiana in 1816 and to Illinois in 1830. In 1831, he settled in New Salem, near Springfield; in 1842, he married Mary Todd, daughter of a prominent family. Lincoln pursued the law and politics, both successfully. As a Whig he served in the state legislature (1834–41) and in the House of Representatives (1847–49), where he criticized the Mexican War. The slavery expansion controversy prompted his reentry into public life in 1854, now in the new Republican Party. His national stature was enhanced when he challenged and lost to Stephen A. Douglas for the U.S. Senate in 1858.

In 1860, Lincoln won the Republican presidential nomination because of his reputation for public honesty, his availability, and because his rivals had too many political enemies. Winning popular votes only in the North, Lincoln carried the electoral vote against three opponents (including Douglas) and took office on 4 March 1861. The country was divided by the secession of seven Southern states, whose white population believed that Lincoln's election portended the death of slavery. In his inaugural address, Lincoln tried to reassure his “dissatisfied fellow countrymen” that he would not attack slavery where it existed, but neither would he allow the Union to be destroyed. The Southern capture of Fort Sumter in April 1861 did lead to war, to the secession of additional Southern states, and ultimately to the end of slavery.

Thus, Abraham Lincoln addressed two mortal public issues: war and freedom. He addressed them with a political skill never before demanded of a U.S. president and never matched thereafter. Lincoln understood his limitations and his strengths, at once willing to defer to men of demonstrably greater knowledge or ability yet willing to impose his authority over them. As commander in chief, Lincoln understood that mobilizing an effective military force was similar to forming a political coalition, that political goals were akin to grand strategy. He also promoted professional soldiers, usually West Pointers, to significant commands, but he was chided too for appointing “political generals,” which he believed necessary in order to gain popular support for the war. Some of the most egregious tactical blunders on both sides—from Malvern Hill to Cold Harbor to Franklin—occurred under the command of West Pointers.

During 1862–63, when Lincoln effectively acted as general in chief, he tried to impress upon his generals the need for precise aims and energetic execution of plans. Most notable was his frustration with George B. McClellan, a general of ability who seemed reluctant to engage the enemy even when he held a military advantage, which he always did. When McClellan refused to press Robert E. Lee after the Battle of Antietam, Lincoln removed him from command. He also removed another general given to inertia, Don Carlos Buell, Union commander in Kentucky. Only days later, Lincoln wondered if the problem was “in our case” and not in the generals. Their successors (Ambrose Burnside and William S. Rosecrans) could do no better. Hard facts of terrain, distance, and a determined enemy would dictate military progress or the lack of it.

The Union army did know success, however, notably in the major Battle of Gettysburg (July 1863) and the siege of Vicksburg (which ended with Vicksburg's surrender on 4 July 1863). Yet there was no decisive, or Napoleonic victory, nor could there be, as Lincoln came to understand; there would be only a remorseless and bloody struggle until the Confederate army and the Southern will were broken, as they finally were in 1864–65. Victories in Virginia and Georgia were achieved by veteran armies led by redoubtable soldiers, Grant and Sherman, men of ability and determination, educated by their victories and their defeats. In order to overcome criticism of his wartime policies—the Habeas Corpus Act, the establishment of martial law, censorship of opposition newspapers, and arrests of vocal opponents of the war—and to gain the support of War Democrats, Lincoln led a Union Party in 1864 and named Andrew Johnson of Tennessee as his vice president. The Democrats nominated George B. McClellan, but military success, especially after the Battle of Atlanta in September 1864, assured Lincoln's reelection.

Emancipation is the event most associated with Lincoln next to the preservation of the Union. His enemies, North and South, resisted freedom for the slaves during the Civil War; his public friends thought that he was a reluctant emancipator, too calculating in advancing the great cause. A politician of Lincoln's time and place could not be unaware of the depths of racial animosity in the North, a social bias offset only by an intensity of feeling for the Union; yet this should not obscure the time and thought Lincoln gave to emancipation. He commented favorably on various options: colonization; gradual and compensated emancipation; and in 1862, he proposed an amendment to the Constitution that would abolish slavery. On 22 September 1862, after Antietam, he announced the Emancipation Proclamation, a war measure grounded in his constitutional mandate as commander in chief, to take effect on 1 January 1863. Lincoln's eloquence of advocacy thereafter elevated political rhetoric to levels unequaled before or since. The Union could be saved only through military force, he said, and emancipation was a necessary corollary to military action. Thus were joined the great issues of war and freedom. Lincoln had effected a revolution and said as much in his immortal speech at Gettysburg.

In his second inaugural address, Lincoln suggested that the Civil War was God's punishment for the great sin of slavery, and that even if it continued “until every drop of blood drawn with the lash, shall be paid by another with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said, ‘the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether,’” Five days after the war ended, Lincoln was shot by John Wilkes Booth while watching a play at Ford's Theatre. He died on Good Friday, 15 April 1865.
[See also Civil War: Military and Diplomatic Course; Civil War: Domestic Course; Commander in Chief, President as.]

Bibliography

Godfrey R. B. Charnwood , Abraham Lincoln, 1916.
John G. Nicolay and and John Hay , Abraham Lincoln: A History, 1890; rev. ed. 1917.
James G. Randall , Lincoln the President, 4 vols., 1945–55.
Roy P. Basler, ed., Abraham Lincoln: Collected Works, 9 vols., 1953–55.
Mark E. Neely , Abraham Lincoln and the Promise of America, 1993.
David Herbert Donald , Lincoln, 1995.
James A. Rawley , Abraham Lincoln and a Nation Worth Fighting For, 1996.

John T. Hubbell

Lincoln, Abraham (1809–65) 16th president of the United States (1861–65), born in Hardin County, Kentucky. In Illinois, where he later settled, Lincoln pursued law and politics (as a Whig), serving in the state legislature (1834–41) and in the U.S. House of Representatives (1847–49), where he spoke out against the Mexican War (1846–48). Prompted by the controversy over the expansion of slavery into the territories, he returned to public life in 1854. In 1858, though he lost the election, he gained national prominence when he challenged Stephen A. Douglas for the U.S. Senate and engaged him in a series of debates that brought the issue to a head. Nominated in 1860 for president on the Republican ticket, Lincoln carried the electoral vote despite winning slightly under 40 percent of the popular vote. Before his inauguration, in March 1861, seven of the ten states that would form the Confederacy had already seceded. One month later, with the Southern capture of Fort Sumter, the Civil War had begun. Lincoln's intention, he said, was to preserve the Union and to stop the spread of slavery, not to attack it where it existed. Lincoln devoted most of his time to his duties as commander in chief, studying military history and strategy and frequently visiting troops at the front. He grew impatient with the failures of Union generals to act with the aggressiveness he believed necessary. Though Confederate successes (First and Second Bull Run, 1861–62) in the first two years of the war gave way to Union victories atGettysburg and Vicksburg (both 1863), the conflict dragged on. Lincoln came to see that his hoped-for decisive victory that would end the war was not to be; the bloody and remorseless struggle would end only when the will of the South was broken. Weary of war and its costly human sacrifice, Northerners appeared ready in early 1864 to turn Lincoln out of office. But the victory at Atlanta that year, followed by successes in the Shenandoah Valley, restored their faith in the commander in chief and ensured his reelection on the Union ticket. The changes in fortune had come about with Lincoln's appointment of Ulysses S. Grant as general in chief of all Union armies. Grant's strategy of attacking on several fronts at once was to be the key to the Union victory, which was effectively sealed with the surrender of Robert E. Lee and his Army of Northern Virginia at Appomattox in April 1865. Five days later Lincoln was shot, the first president to be assassinated. He died the following morning (April 15). Though Lincoln has been criticized for exceeding his powers in curtailing civil liberties during the war, he remains a figure revered as the preserver of the republic and the destroyer of slavery. Though the Emancipation Proclamation (1863) did not itself end that institution, it set the wheels in motion; and Lincoln himself proposed, but did not live to see enacted, a constitutional amendment to abolish slavery.

Lincoln, Abraham (1809–65) Sixteenth US President (1861–65). Elected to the Illinois legislature for the Whig Party in 1834, he studied to become a lawyer. Lincoln served (1847–49) in the House of Representatives and unsuccessfully ran for the Senate for the new Republican Party against Stephen A. Douglas in 1858. He was Republican candidate for president in 1860. Lincoln's victory made the secession of the Southern, slave-owning states inevitable, and his determination to defend Fort Sumter began the Civil War. A strong commander-in-chief, he played a leading role in military planning. In September 1862, he issued the Emancipation Proclamation, and in November 1863 delivered his famous Gettysburg Address. Re-elected in 1864, Lincoln saw the war to a successful conclusion. On April 14, 1865, five days after the surrender of Robert E. Lee, Lincoln was shot by John Wilkes Booth, a Southern sympathizer. He died the next day.

http://www.whitehouse.gov/history/presidents

Lincoln, Abraham (1809–65) US Republican statesman, 16th President of the USA (1861–65). His election as President on an anti-slavery platform antipathetic to the interests of the southern states helped precipitate the American Civil War. He eventually managed to unite the Union side behind the anti-slavery cause and emancipation was formally proclaimed on New Year's Day, 1864. Lincoln won re-election in 1864, but was assassinated shortly after the surrender of the main Confederate army had ended the war. During his lifetime Lincoln was noted for his succinct, eloquent speeches, including the Gettysburg address of 1863.