Lincoln, Abraham

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Lincoln, Abraham 1809-1865

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