Zofia Stone - Abraham Lincoln: A Biography

Abraham Lincoln

A Biography

Zofia Stone

Alpha Editions

Copyright 2017

ISBN : 9789386367273

Design and Setting By

Alpha Editions

email : alphaedis@gmail.com

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

The views and characters expressed in the book are of the author and his/her imagination and do not represent the views of the Publisher.

Contents

Early life and Career

Black Hawk War

Abraham Lincoln and slavery

Presidency

Assassination of Abraham Lincoln

References

About the Author

Introduction

Abraham Lincoln was an American politician and lawyer who served as the 16th President of the United States from March 1861 until his assassination in April 1865. Lincoln led the United States through its Civil Warits bloodiest war and perhaps its greatest moral, constitutional, and political crisis. In doing so, he preserved the Union, abolished slavery, strengthened the federal government, and modernized the economy.

Born in Hodgenville, Kentucky, Lincoln grew up on the western frontier in Kentucky and Indiana. Largely self-educated, he became a lawyer in Illinois, a Whig Party leader, and was elected to the Illinois House of Representatives, in which he served for eight years. Elected to the United States House of Representatives in 1846, Lincoln promoted rapid modernization of the economy through banks, tariffs, and railroads. Because he had originally agreed not to run for a second term in Congress, and because his opposition to the MexicanAmerican War was unpopular among Illinois voters, Lincoln returned to Springfield and resumed his successful law practice. Reentering politics in 1854, he became a leader in building the new Republican Party, which had a statewide majority in Illinois. In 1858, while taking part in a series of highly publicized debates with his opponent and rival, Democrat Stephen A. Douglas, Lincoln spoke out against the expansion of slavery, but lost the U.S. Senate race to Douglas.

In 1860, Lincoln secured the Republican Party presidential nomination as a moderate from a swing state. Though he gained very little support in the slaveholding states of the South, he swept the North and was elected president in 1860. Lincoln's victory prompted seven southern slave states to form the Confederate States of America before he moved into the White House - no compromise or reconciliation was found regarding slavery and secession. Subsequently, on April 12, 1861, a Confederate attack on Fort Sumter inspired the North to enthusiastically rally behind the Union. As the leader of the moderate faction of the Republican Party, Lincoln confronted Radical Republicans, who demanded harsher treatment of the South, War Democrats, who called for more compromise, anti-war Democrats (called Copperheads), who despised him, and irreconcilable secessionists, who plotted his assassination. Politically, Lincoln fought back by pitting his opponents against each other, by carefully planned political patronage, and by appealing to the American people with his powers of oratory. His Gettysburg Address became an iconic endorsement of the principles of nationalism, republicanism, equal rights, liberty, and democracy.

Lincoln initially concentrated on the military and political dimensions of the war. His primary goal was to reunite the nation. He suspended habeas corpus, leading to the controversial ex parte Merryman decision, and he averted potential British intervention in the war by defusing the Trent Affair in late 1861. Lincoln closely supervised the war effort, especially the selection of top generals, including his most successful general, Ulysses S. Grant. He also made major decisions on Union war strategy, including a naval blockade that shut down the South's normal trade, moves to take control of Kentucky and Tennessee, and using gunboats to gain control of the southern river system. Lincoln tried repeatedly to capture the Confederate capital at Richmond; each time a general failed, Lincoln substituted another, until finally Grant succeeded. As the war progressed, his complex moves toward ending slavery included the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863; Lincoln used the U.S. Army to protect escaped slaves, encouraged the border states to outlaw slavery, and pushed through Congress the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, which permanently outlawed slavery.

An exceptionally astute politician deeply involved with power issues in each state, Lincoln reached out to the War Democrats and managed his own re-election campaign in the 1864 presidential election. Anticipating the war's conclusion, Lincoln pushed a moderate view of Reconstruction, seeking to reunite the nation speedily through a policy of generous reconciliation in the face of lingering and bitter divisiveness. On April 14, 1865, five days after the April 9th surrender of Confederate commanding general Robert E. Lee, Lincoln was assassinated by John Wilkes Booth, a Confederate sympathizer.

Early life and Career

Abraham Lincoln was born on February 12, 1809, in a one-room log cabin at Sinking Spring farm, south of Hodgenville, in Hardin County, Kentucky. After a land title dispute forced the family to leave, they relocated to Knob Creek farm, eight miles to the north. By 1814 Thomas Lincoln, Abraham's father, had lost most of his land in Kentucky in legal disputes over land titles. In 1816 Thomas and Nancy Lincoln, their nine-year-old daughter, Sarah, and seven-year-old Abraham moved to Indiana, where they settled in Hurricane Township, Perry County, Indiana. (Their land became part of Spencer County, Indiana, when it was formed in 1818.)

Abraham spent his formative years, from the age of 7 to 21, on the family farm in Southern Indiana. As was common on the frontier, Lincoln received a meager formal education, the aggregate of which may have been less than twelve months. However, Lincoln continued to learn on his own from life experiences and through reading and reciting what he had read or heard from others. In 1818, two years after their arrival in Indiana, nine-year-old Lincoln lost his birth mother, Nancy, who died after a brief illness. Thomas returned to Kentucky the following year and married Sarah Bush Johnson. Abraham's new step-mother and her three children joined the Lincoln family in Indiana in 1819. A second tragedy befell the family in 1828, when Abraham's sister, Sarah, died in childbirth.

Lincoln's first known ancestor in America was Samuel Lincoln, who migrated from England to Hingham, Massachusetts, in 1638. Samuel's son, Mordecai, remained in Massachusetts, but Samuel's grandson, who was also named Mordecai, began the family's western migration. John Lincoln, Samuel's great-grandson, continued the westward journey. Born in New Jersey, John moved to Pennsylvania, then brought his family to Virginia. John's son, Captain Abraham Lincoln, who earned that rank for his service in the Virginia militia, was the future president's paternal grandfather and namesake. Born in Pennsylvania, he moved with his father and other family members to Virginia's Shenandoah Valley around 1766. The family settled near Linville Creek, in Augusta County, now Rockingham County, Virginia. Captain Lincoln bought the Virginia property from his father in 1773.

Thomas Lincoln, the future president's father, was Captain Lincoln's son. Thomas was born in Virginia and moved west to Jefferson County, Kentucky, with his father, mother, and siblings in the 1780s, when he was about five years old. In 1786, at the age of forty-two, Captain Abraham was killed in an Indian ambush while working his field in Kentucky. Eight-year-old Thomas witnessed his father's murder and may have ended up a victim if his brother, Mordecai, had not shot the attacker. After Captain Lincoln's death, Thomas's mother moved to Washington County, Kentucky, while Thomas worked at odd jobs in several Kentucky locations. Thomas also spent a year working in Tennessee, before settling with members of his family in Hardin County, Kentucky, in the early 1800s.