Background

Ethnicity: His father, Thomas Lincoln, was the descendant of a weaver’s apprentice who had migrated from England to Massachusetts in 1637.

Abraham Lincoln was born on February 12, 1809, in a one-room, dirt-floor log cabin by Nolin Creek, near present-day Hodgenville, Kentucky, United States. His father, Thomas, was a skilled carpenter who was able to provide basic necessities for his family. Lincoln ancestors first arrived in Massachusetts from England in 1637, spreading to Pennsylvania and then to Virginia. Thomas Lincoln’s father, Abraham, took his family to Kentucky, where he was killed by an Indian while he was clearing his farmland. Lincoln’s mother, Nancy who never learned to read, had given birth to a daughter, Sarah, two years before Abraham was born. One more child, Thomas, died in infancy.

The family moved to a nearby farm on Knob Creek when the boy was two, and he began hunting, fishing, and doing farm chores as soon as he was old enough. The family crossed the Ohio River in 1816 and moved into a heavily forested area in southern Indiana. Another crude log cabin was built, and young Abe and his father began clearing land and establishing a farm near what is now Gentryville, Indiana.

Lincoln’s mother died of tremetol (milk sickness) when Abraham was nine years old. The event was devastating to him, and young Abe grew more alienated from his father and quietly resented the hard work placed on him at an early age. The following year, his father married Sarah Bush Johnston, a widow with three children. The two families mixed well, although Tom Lincoln had to build an extension on the cabin, and with his stepmother’s encouragement, young Abe learned to read and write and do arithmetic. He worked mostly on his own and had only about one year’s worth of formal schooling during his entire life.

Lincoln read the Bible, Aesop’s Fables, histories, and biographies. He was especially impressed by a biography of George Washington, and he went on to enjoy reading the plays of William Shakespeare. However, most of his time was spent chopping down trees, ploughing, planting, and harvesting, just like every other youngster growing up on the frontier, even though he disliked the hard labour associated with farm life and was called lazy for all his reading, scribbling, writing, ciphering, writing Poetry, etc. He also found a job: he piloted a ferryboat carrying passengers and their baggage to riverboats docked along the Ohio River.

Education

Much of Lincoln's erudition came from self-education. His formal schooling from itinerant teachers was intermittent, totalling less than 12 months, in three brief periods in local schools. "Still, somehow," he remembered, "I could read, write, and cypher to the Rule of Three; but that was all." However, Lincoln was an avid reader and retained a lifelong interest in learning. Especially, when he was working as a clerk at a general store in the town of New Salem, Lincoln had plenty of time to read - his favourite form of entertainment.

Family, neighbours, and schoolmates recalled that during his life Lincoln read and reread the King James Bible, Aesop's Fables, John Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress, Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, Mason Locke Weems's The Life of Washington, and The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, among others.

Although Lincoln had no higher education, during his career, he received honorary degrees from Knox College, Columbia University and the College of New Jersey.

Career

Lincoln was elected to the Illinois legislature in 1834. As a member of the Whig Party, he supported a strong federal government and business-friendly legislation. Democrats dominated the national scene at the time, and they were in favour of limited federal influence over states and policies more favourable to small farmers than to urban businesses. Meanwhile, Lincoln continued to study law. He became a licensed attorney and joined a law firm in Springfield, Illinois, where the state capital had recently moved. As a leader of the Illinois legislature, he was in on the ground floor during the time of transition.

In 1840, he met Mary Todd. Lincoln began devoting most of his attention on his law practice about two years after he got married. He attended court in Springfield and spent six months of the year in a circuit court that served fifteen Illinois counties. In those days, opportunities for entertainment were limited, to say the least, and people found stimulation in listening to court cases. Many national politicians built their careers in this way, and Lincoln also used the circuit court to make contacts he knew would help his national political career—if he’d ever have one. He tried several times to snag the Whigs’ nomination for national office and failed each time. When he finally did get their attention and won their nomination as a candidate for a U.S. congressional seat in 1846, he scored big in the general election.

Lincoln faced the same challenge most first-term congressmen did. He couldn’t get an opportunity to press issues he regarded as most important, and he was an unknown in Washington political and social circles.

Once he was able to get himself noticed, Lincoln made his mark in Congress in two areas. But it was a good news-bad news situation. The United States was involved in the Mexican War, which President James K. Polk had asked Congress to declare after Mexican soldiers had fired on American soldiers inside the U.S. territory of Texas. Lincoln claimed that the war was unconstitutional and he challenged Polk to show him the exact spot where the alleged attack had taken place. The Mexican War was generally unpopular, but not in Illinois, and Lincoln’s opposition was widely denounced back home.

As the United States moved toward victory over Mexico, the expansion of slavery became a heated issue. The bill was passed in the House of Representatives twice, but it was defeated both times in the Senate. Nevertheless, a strong abolitionist faction in the Northeast demanded that the new territories must be free states as they continued to press for an end to all slavery.

His term in Congress came to an end in 1849. He had campaigned for Whig presidential candidate Zachary Taylor, who, although he won the 1848 election, didn’t carry the state of Illinois largely because Lincoln had lost his vote-getting power for his stand against the Mexican War. After being turned down for any worthwhile government job from the Taylor administration, Abraham Lincoln gave up politics. Back in Illinois, he picked up his law practice where he had left off and he quickly became a celebrated attorney.

When the Kansas-Nebraska Bill became law in 1854, he was redrawn to the idea of public life. The bill, written by Illinois senator Stephen Douglas, allowed voters in the territories of Kansas and Nebraska to decide for themselves whether to permit slavery. In effect, it repealed the Missouri Compromise, which had set the southern border of Missouri as a dividing line between slave and free states to keep an equal balance between them.

Lincoln was worried that slavery would be expanded farther, and he campaigned vigorously for fellow Whig Candidates for Congress.

With his popularity expanding rapidly, Lincoln ran for the U.S. Senate in 1855, but he lost. He lost in the balloting for a presidential candidate at the party’s 1856 national convention and he campaigned vigorously for the man who took the nomination, John C. Fremont. Fremont lost to James Buchanan, a Northern politician who had no intention of forcefully challenging the institution of slavery.

During Lincoln’s 1858 Senate campaign against Douglas, he participated in seven debates held in different cities across Illinois. The two candidates didn't disappoint the public, giving stirring debates on issues ranging from states' rights to western expansion, but the central issue was slavery. Newspapers intensely covered the debates, often times with partisan commentary. In the end, the state legislature elected Douglas, but the exposure vaulted Lincoln into national politics.

In 1860, political operatives in Illinois organized a campaign to support Abraham Lincoln for the presidency. On May 18, at the Republican National Convention in Chicago, Lincoln surpassed better-known candidates such as William Seward of New York and Salmon P. Chase of Ohio. Lincoln's nomination was due in part to his moderate views on slavery, his support for improving the national infrastructure, and the protective tariff.

In the general election, Lincoln faced his friend and rival, Stephen Douglas, this time beating him in a four-way race that included John C. Breckinridge of the Northern Democrats and John Bell of the Constitution Party. Lincoln received not quite 40 per cent of the popular votes but carried 180 of 303 Electoral votes.

By the time Lincoln was inaugurated as 16th U.S. president in March 1861, seven southern states had seceded from the Union and formed the Confederate States of America. In the early morning hours of April 12, 1861, the guns stationed to protect the harbour blazed toward the fort signalling the start of America’s costliest and most deadly war.

While the Confederate leader Jefferson Davis was a West Point graduate, Mexican War hero and former secretary of war, Lincoln had only a brief and undistinguished period of service in the Black Hawk War (1832) to his credit. He surprised many when he proved to be a capable wartime leader, learning quickly about strategy and tactics in the early years of the Civil War, and about choosing the ablest commanders. He distributed $2 million from the Treasury for war material without an appropriation from Congress; he called for 75,000 volunteers into military service without a declaration of war; and he suspended the writ of habeas corpus, arresting and imprisoning suspected Confederate sympathizers without a warrant.

In April of 1862, 13,000 Union soldiers died in the Battle of Shiloh in Virginia, and during the summer, Union forces were defeated again in two more Virginia encounters, the Seven Days’ Battle and the Second Battle of Bull Run (Manassas). But they weren’t the only problems Lincoln faced. A group of radical Republicans in Congress regarded the war as a holy crusade, and they were agitating for a more vigorous offensive against the South, punishment for leaders of the Confederacy, and immediate emancipation of slaves. Lincoln had already sidetracked his secretary of state, William H. Seward, who had begun enacting policies the radical Republicans supported without the president’s permission, but they were scheming to undermine him and gain national control in time for the next presidential election. In a meeting involving Lincoln’s entire Cabinet and all of the radical Republicans, Lincoln was able to assert his authority as president, and, reluctantly or not, they decided to back him. It cleared the air, and from then on the conduct of the war was firmly in Lincoln’s hands as commander in chief.

Lincoln was prepared to issue a proclamation during the summer of 1862 that would free all slaves in states that had seceded from the Union. Waiting for a moment of strength, he finally released his Emancipation Proclamation on September 22, 1862, on the heels of a show of Union strength in the Battle of Antietam.

The Proclamation was scheduled to go into effect on January 1, 1863, and in the meantime slave states that had not seceded were encouraged, but not forced, to free slaves voluntarily. Lincoln also pressed Congress to pass a Constitutional amendment barring slavery throughout the country. It would have to be ratified by three-fourths of the states, and it took until late in 1865 for the Thirteenth Amendment to become part of the Constitution. States that had seceded were required to ratify it before they would be admitted back.

With many new immigrants entering the United States, Lincoln signed the Homestead Act, which gave settlers in Western lands a 160-acre farm for a small fee, provided they stayed on the land for five years. Other new laws provided free federal land for states to help them establish agricultural and technical colleges. New railroads were being built to open up the West, and two new states— Nevada and West Virginia (a part of Virginia that hadn’t seceded)—were welcomed into the Union during the Lincoln administration.

The Grand Army of the Republic, as the Union forces were called, continued to be battered into the spring of 1863. Then two pivotal events on July 4 changed the war’s momentum dramatically. After several discouraging attempts, Union troops under General Ulysses S. Grant routed the Rebel defenders in the Battle of Vicksburg in Mississippi, which gave them control of the Mississippi River, not to mention possession of an important Confederate stronghold. Meanwhile, a steady advance into Pennsylvania by Confederate general Robert E. Lee was halted at Gettysburg. After an unusually bloody battle, Lee’s forces retreated, but they were stopped by the flooding of the Potomac River. Lincoln ordered General George Meade to attack them with force, but Meade responded too slowly, and Lee’s men managed to escape back into Virginia.

Lincoln made one of his most moving speeches at the consecration of the Gettysburg battlefield on November 19, 1863. But the war still wasn’t over. During that same month, General Grant’s forces won a decisive battle at Chattanooga, Tennessee, and by the following spring, Lincoln had named him his supreme field commander. Lincoln had changed commanders several times up to that point. George McClellan had been replaced by Ambrose Burnside in November 1862, and he, in turn, was succeeded by Joseph Hooker the following January- Hooker was replaced in June of 1863 by Meade, who lost Lincoln’s favour by moving too slowly against the trapped Confederate army retreating from Gettysburg.

Grant ultimately led the Union forces to victory, but not without heavy losses. He began what was called the Wilderness Campaign against Lee’s army, in May 1864, and close to 60,000 Union soldiers were killed during that spring alone. General George H.Thomas crushed Confederate forces at Nashville, Tennessee, and General Philip H. Sheridan systematically swept through the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia while General William Tecumseh Sherman was marching through Georgia and South Carolina. Finally, on April 9, 1865, General Lee surrendered at Appomattox Court House, Virginia, and the Civil War was over.

Lincoln was reelected president the previous November by 400,000 votes out of about 4 million cast. The Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution, barring slavery throughout the country, passed the House of Representatives in January of 1865, following Senate approval eight months earlier. His second inaugural address was given just weeks before the end of the war, and it concluded on a soothing note, and an expression of hope for lasting peace.

The terms of surrender for the Confederacy were generous. There were to be no punishing moves against rebel soldiers once they pledged allegiance to the U.S. Constitution. The president proclaimed the end of the war on April 11, and he expressed hope that the United States would be unified again as quickly as possible. Three days later, on Good Friday, April 14, 1865, the president met with his cabinet to plan the policy Reconstruction.

At around ten o’clock, a pro-slavery extremist, actor John Wilkes Booth, entered the box where the Lincolns were seated and bolted the door behind him. He shot the president in the back of the head. Lincoln died the following morning, April 15. Lincoln's final journey ended on May 4 at Oak Ridge Cemetery in Springfield, Illinois, where he was buried.

Achievements

• 

  Among American heroes, Abraham Lincoln, the 16th president of the United States, continues to have a unique appeal for his fellow countrymen and also for people of other lands. This charm derives from his remarkable life story—the rise from humble origins, the dramatic death—and from his distinctively human and humane personality. During his term as the president, he guided his country through the most devastating experience in its national history - the Civil War and is remembered as America's martyr hero. He is consistently ranked both by scholars and the public as among the greatest U.S. presidents.
  
  Among Lincoln's other major accomplishments, one can name the Emancipation Proclamation, the Homestead Act and the establishment of the United States Department of Agriculture.
  
  The Emancipation Proclamation, issued by Abraham Lincoln on January 1, 1863, started the process for the abolishing of slavery in the United States. The proclamation also allowed black soldiers to fight in the Union Army against the Confederacy during the Civil War. The Emancipation Proclamation also lead to the 13th Amendment, which made indentured servitude and slavery illegal in the United States.
  
  Abraham Lincoln's passing of the Homestead Act of 1862 allowed the poor to obtain land for the first time in the United States. Applicants who were 21 or older, had never held arms against the United States government, or were the head of a household were qualified to obtain a federal land grant, including women and freed slaves. Occupants had to live on the land for at least five years and prove that they made improvements.
  
  The United States Department of Agriculture was established by Abraham Lincoln on May 15, 1862. Lincoln wanted it to be lead by a Commissioner who did not have Cabinet status because he wanted it to be a "people's department" and not an entirely government-run entity. As of November 2015, the USDA remains in charge of food laws and is responsible for federal government policies and actions on farming, forestry and agriculture.
  
  The most famous and most visited memorials are Lincoln's sculpture on Mount Rushmore; Lincoln Memorial, which was dedicated to him on May 30, 1922, Ford's Theatre, and Petersen House (where he died) in Washington, D.C.; and the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum in Springfield, Illinois, not far from Lincoln's home, as well as his tomb.
  
  In commemoration of Lincoln's 100th birthday, his image was issued on the Lincoln penny in 1909, and it was the first coin issued bearing a president's image. Currently, Lincoln's portrait appears on two denominations of United States currency, the penny and the $5 bill. His likeness also appears on many postage stamps and he has been memorialized in many town, city, and county names, including the capital of Nebraska. While he is usually portrayed bearded, he first grew a beard in 1860 at the suggestion of 11-year-old Grace Bedell.
  
  The United States Navy Nimitz-class aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln (CVN-72) is named after Lincoln, the second Navy ship to bear his name.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Abraham Lincoln: Selected Speeches and Writings 2009
  • Abraham Lincoln: Quotes, Quips, and Speeches 2009
  • Lincoln: Speeches and Writings: 1859-1865 2014
  • Lincoln Speeches 2012
  • Gettysburg Address 2010
  • The Lincoln-Douglas Debates of 1858 2014
  • The Emancipation Proclamation 2012
  • The Complete Papers and Writings of Abraham Lincoln 2017
  • The Autobiography of Abraham Lincoln 1905
  • Abraham Lincoln's First Inaugural Address 2011
  • Selected Speeches and Writings 1992
  • The Wit and Wisdom of Abraham Lincoln: As Reflected in His Briefer Letters and Speeches 2018
  • Abraham Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address 2011
  • State of the Union Address 2012
  • The Papers of Abraham Lincoln: Legal Documents and Cases 2008
  • Lincoln's Inaugurals, Addresses and Letters 2011
  • Abe Lincoln's Anecdotes and Stories: By Abraham Lincoln 2017
  • Lincoln: Speeches and Writings 1832-1858 1989

• ищщл

  • Abraham Lincoln: Great Speeches 1991

Religion

Abraham Lincoln's religious beliefs are a matter of interest among scholars and the public. Lincoln grew up in a highly religious family but never joined any church. As a young man, he was a sceptic. He frequently referenced God. He had a deep knowledge of the Bible and quoted it often. He attended Protestant church services with his wife and children, and after the deaths of two children became more intensely concerned with religion. He was private about his beliefs and respected the beliefs of others. Although Lincoln never made an unambiguous public profession of Christian belief, several people who knew him personally, such as Chaplain of the Senate Phineas Gurley and Mary Todd Lincoln herself, stated that he believed in Christ in the religious sense. However, some men who had known Lincoln for years, such as Ward Hill Lamon and William Herndon, rejected the idea that he was a believing Christian.

During his 1846 run for the House of Representatives, in order to dispel accusations concerning his religious beliefs, Lincoln issued a handbill stating that he had "never denied the truth of the Scriptures." Without question, he believed in an all-powerful God who shaped events and, by 1865, was expressing those beliefs in major speeches.

Politics

According to politics, Abraham Lincoln was very similar to Henry Clay. He was a Westerner who believed that the frontier should remain land open to white settlers free from the economic competition posed by plantation-based chattel slavery. He also believed that the federal government had an obligation to directly support expansion westward by passing the Homestead Act which sold millions of acres of federally-owned Western land for the virtual equivalent of pennies. Most of his other domestic policies tended to echo the American System. Lincoln passed protective industrial tariffs in the form of the Morrill Tariff, created a system of national banks in the National Banking Act, and passed the first of a series of Pacific Railroad acts designed to encourage the construction of a transcontinental railroad: tariffs, banks, and infrastructure—all hallmarks of Henry Clay’s American System.

On foreign and military policy, Lincoln spoke out against the Mexican–American War, which he attributed to President Polk's desire for "military glory—that attractive rainbow, that rises in showers of blood". Lincoln supported the Wilmot Proviso, which, if it had been adopted, would have banned slavery in any U.S. territory won from Mexico.

As for slavery, Lincoln, who consistently thought of slavery as evil, was no abolitionist—at least at first. He actually was much less radical on the issue of slavery than many leading of Republicans—many of whom like Seward and Chase were in his own cabinet. In 1837, in response to the mob murder of Elijah Lovejoy, an antislavery newspaperman of Alton, the legislature introduced resolutions condemning abolitionist societies and defending slavery in the Southern states as “sacred” by virtue of the federal Constitution. Lincoln refused to vote for the resolutions. Together with a fellow member, he drew up a protest that declared, on the one hand, that slavery was “founded on both injustice and bad policy” and, on the other, that “the promulgation of abolition doctrines tends rather to increase than to abate its evils.”

Views

Abraham Lincoln’s personal philosophy was based on reason and respect for the law. There were no accidents in his philosophy. Every event had its cause. The past to him was the cause of the present and the present including the past will be the cause of the grand future and all are one, links in the endless chain, stretching from the infinite to the finite. Everything to him was the result of the forces of Nature, playing on matter and mind from the beginning of time and will to the end of it, play on matter and mind giving the world other, further, and grander results. Because of its basis in reason, there was a consistency to Mr Lincoln’s moral philosophy and a consistent focus on morality.

Abraham Lincoln never drank, smoked, or chewed and was also a great animal lover. He would preach sermons to his family against cruelty to animals, “contending that an ant’s life was, to it, as sweet as ours”. Lincoln refused to ever hunt animals, which was extremely contrary to frontier mores and “manliness” of the time. “I care not for a man’s religion”, Lincoln once stated, “whose cat or dog is not the better for it… I am in favour of animal rights as well as human rights. That is the way of a whole human being.”

Quotations: “A house divided against itself cannot stand. I believe this government cannot endure permanently half-slave and half-free.”

“Things may come to those who wait, but only the things left by those who hustle.”

“Leave nothing for tomorrow which can be done today.”

“Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man’s character, give him power.”

“I do the very best I know how, the very best I can, and I mean to keep on doing so until the end.”

“The best way to predict your future is to create it.”

“Those who look for the bad in people will surely find it.”

“Every man’s happiness is his own responsibility.”

“Whenever I hear anyone arguing for slavery, I feel a strong impulse to see it tried on him personally.”

“I am not bound to win, but I am bound to be true. I am not bound to succeed, but I am bound to live up to what light I have.”

“I like to see a man proud of the place in which he lives. I like to see a man live so that his place will be proud of him.”

“Get books, sit yourself down anywhere, and go to reading them yourself.”

“When I get ready to talk to people, I spend two-thirds of the time thinking what they want to hear and one-third thinking about what I want to say.”

“My concern is not whether God is on our side; my greatest concern is to be on God’s side, for God is always right.”

“I’m a success today because I had a friend who believed in me and I didn’t have the heart to let him down.”

“Always bear in mind that your own resolution to succeed is more important than any one thing.”

“You can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time.”

“I don’t know who my grandfather was; I am much more concerned to know what his grandson will be.”

“Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak out and remove all doubt.”

“Let not him who is houseless pull down the house of another, but let him work diligently and build one for himself, thus by example assuring that his own shall be safe from violence when built.”

“The things I want to know are in books; my best friend is the man who’ll get me a book I ain’t read.”

“In this sad world of ours sorrow comes to all and it often comes with bitter agony. Perfect relief is not possible except with time. You cannot now believe that you will ever feel better. But this is not true. You are sure to be happy again. Knowing this, truly believing it will make you less miserable now. I have had enough experience to make this statement.”

Membership

During his early career, Abraham Lincoln was a member of the New Salem Debating Society and supported the American Colonization Society. In 1863, he also became an honorary member of the Union League of Philadelphia and the Phi Alpha Society in Illinois.

Personality

By all accounts, Lincoln was disarmingly unpretentious, a plain-spoken man genuinely interested in people and their problems. A good listener, he typically sat in silence rubbing his chin while a visitor explained his point of view. He was at his best in relaxed conversation with small groups. His ready wit, down-home logic, and a seemingly endless store of anecdotes delighted those present.

However, among the many who remembered Lincoln from personal acquaintance, one was sure he had known him more intimately than any of the rest and influenced the world’s conception of him more than all the others put together. That one was his former law partner William Herndon. According to him, Lincoln was modest, quiet and unobtrusive in manner, sympathetic and cordial in social contact. He was commonplace and winsome, yet dignified, but not repelling, and was entirely assimilated: no person could feel any restraint or backwardness in his presence: the latch-string to his sympathy was always out, and, when not handicapped with melancholy, the door to his genial, hearty and sunshiny nature was always wide open. His sad countenance aroused universal sympathy: his bonhomie, geniality and humour drew all men involuntarily to him: his physiognomy was indicative both of great perception and equally of great reflection: his wonderfully expressive eyes indicated keen, shrewd discernment, deep penetration and patient and continuous reflection, as well as life-long and earnest sorrow.

It is also known, that Lincoln spoke in a high pitched voice with a marked frontier accent, pronouncing such words as get, there, and chair as git, thar, and cheer and saying haint for haven’t.

Physical Characteristics: Lincoln, the tallest president, stood 6 feet 4 inches tall, weighed about 180 pounds, and had long, gangling limbs and a rather sunken chest. His coarse black hair was grey at the temples while he was president. His eyes were grey, the left one being slightly higher than the right. He began wearing reading glasses at age 48. He had a wart on his right cheek above the corner of his mouth. He also had a white scar on his thumb from an accident with an axe and a scar over his right eye from a fight with a gang of thieves. Long hours swinging an axe had given him muscular arms and shoulders. For his part, Lincoln was comfortable with his homely appearance and readily poked fun at himself. His careless dress habits further detracted from his appearance.

During his term as president, Lincoln complained of frequent fatigue, severe headaches, and cold hands and feet. Several claims have been made that Lincoln's health was declining before the assassination. These are often based on photographs appearing to show weight loss and muscle wasting. One such claim is that he suffered from a rare genetic disorder, MEN2b, which manifests with medullary thyroid carcinoma, mucosal neuromas and a Marfanoid appearance. Others simply claim he had Marfan syndrome, based on his tall appearance with spindly fingers, and the association of possible aortic regurgitation, which can cause bobbing of the head (DeMusset's sign) – based on blurring of Lincoln's head in photographs, which required long exposure times. Confirmation of this and other diseases could possibly be obtained via DNA analysis of a pillowcase stained with Lincoln's blood, currently in possession of the Grand Army of the Republic Museum & Library in Philadelphia, but as of 2009, the museum refused to provide a sample for testing.

Quotes from others about the person

• “I did more for the Russian serf in giving him land as well as personal liberty, than America did for the negro slave set free by the proclamation of President Lincoln. I am at a loss to understand how you Americans could have been so blind as to leave the negro slave without tools to work out his salvation. In giving him personal liberty, you have him an obligation to perform to the state which he must be unable to fulfill. Without property of any kind he cannot educate himself and his children. I believe the time must come when many will question the manner of American emancipation of the negro slaves in 1863. The vote, in the hands of an ignorant man, without either property or self respect, will be used to the damage of the people at large; for the rich man, without honor or any kind of patriotism, will purchase it, and with it swamp the rights of a free people.” – Alexander II
  
  “The Illinois State Republican Convention met at Bloomington on May 29, 1856. It furnished the setting for one of the most dramatic episodes of Lincoln's life … A speech by Lincoln was rarely an ordinary occurrence, but on this occasion he made one of the really great efforts of his life. So powerful was his eloquence that the reporters forgot to take notes of what he was saying. Several commenced, but in a few minutes they were entirely captured by the speaker's power, and their pencils were still.” – Paul M. Angle
  
  “What will be the result to the institution of slavery, which will follow submission to the inauguration and administration of Mister Lincoln as the President of one section of the Union? My candid opinion is, that it will be the total abolition of slavery... I do not doubt, therefore, that submission to the administration of Mister Lincoln will result in the final abolition of slavery. If we fail to resist now, we will never again have the strength to resist.” – Joseph E. Brown
  
  “I don't know whether Abraham Lincoln knew exactly what he was doing when he freed the slaves. Perhaps he did it only as a war measure. The war, you remember, dragged along without any heart in it. Nobody seemed to want to fight. There was everything to fight for- the Union, the preservation of a country whole- but the idea of union, even of country, did not seem enough to make men want to fight... There were even plenty of people, accustomed to the small compact nations of Europe, who thought that perhaps this great expanse of America should not be one country, that it might be better if it were divided into nations instead of states. But others were determined that the continual bickering and quarreling between the little nations of Europe should not be repeated here and they were determined to keep the country whole and large, and among these was Abraham Lincoln.” – Pearl S. Buck
  
  “Perhaps nowhere do we learn more about Lincoln even now than in a portrait that I talked about last month off the coast of Malta before meeting Chairman Gorbachev. It is, as this one is, by George Healy, and hangs on the wall of my office upstairs. And in it you see the agony and the greatness of a man who nightly fell on his knees to ask the help of God. The painting shows two of his generals and an admiral meeting near the end of a war that pitted brother against brother. And outside at the moment a battle rages. And yet what we see in the distance is a rainbow — a symbol of hope, of the passing of the storm. The painting's name:The Peacemakers. And for me, this is a constant reassurance that the cause of peace will triumph and that ours can be the future that Lincoln gave his life for: a future free of both tyranny and fear.” – George H. W. Bush
  
  “One space on the wall was reserved for the president's most influential predecessor. I chose Lincoln. He'd had the most trying job of any president, preserving the Union. Some asked why I didn't put Dad's portrait in that spot. "Number forty-one hangs in my heart," I said. "Sixteen is on the wall."” – George W. Bush
  
  “Abraham Lincoln, President of the United States, walked through the streets of Richmond and respectfully lifted his hat to the men who blacked Louis Wigfall's boots and curried his horse. What did it mean? It meant that the truest American president we have ever had, the companion of Washington in our love and honor, recognized that the poorest man, however outraged, however ignorant, however despised, however black, was, as a man, his equal.” – George William Curtis
  
  “The characteristic which struck me most was his superabundance of common sense. His power of managing men, of deciding and avoiding difficult questions, surpassed that of any man I ever met.” – Chauncey Depew
  
  “Mr. Lincoln was not only a great President, but a great man — too great to be small in anything. In his company I was never in any way reminded of my humble origin, or of my unpopular color.” – Frederick Douglass
  
  “When Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation it was not the act of an opportunistic politician issuing a hollow pronouncement to placate a pressure group. Our truly great presidents were tortured deep in their hearts by the race question....Lincoln’s torments are well known, his vacillations were facts.” – Martin Luther King, Jr.
  
  “The new world has never achieved a greater triumph than by this demonstration that, given its political and social organisation, ordinary people of good will can accomplish feats which only heroes could accomplish in the old world!” – Karl Marx
  
  “It seldom helps to wonder how a statesman of one generation would surmount the crisis of another. A statesman deals with concrete difficulties — with things which must be done from day to day. Not often can he frame conscious patterns for the far off future. But the fullness of the stature of Lincoln's nature and the fundamental conflict which events forced upon his Presidency invite us ever to turn to him for help.” – Franklin D. Roosevelt

Interests

• Walking, reading, working, writing, listening to music, theatre

• Politicians

  George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Henry Clay, Daniel Webster

• Writers

  Shakespeare, Edgar Allan Poe, John Bunyan, Daniel Defoe, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Robert Burns, Lord Byron

• Sport & Clubs

  Wrestling, handball, town ball (baseball)

• Music & Bands

  Opera, funny short songs

Connections

Abraham Lincoln was married to Mary Todd on November 4, 1842. Todd was a high-spirited, well-educated woman from a distinguished Kentucky family. When the couple became engaged in 1840, many of their friends and family couldn't understand Mary’s attraction; at times Lincoln questioned it himself. In 1841, the engagement was suddenly broken off, most likely at Lincoln's initiative. Mary and Abraham met later at a social function and eventually married in 1842. The couple had four children, of which only one, Robert, survived to adulthood.

Before marrying Todd, Lincoln was involved with other potential matches. Around 1837, he purportedly met and became romantically involved with Anne Rutledge. Before they had a chance to be engaged, a wave of typhoid fever came over New Salem and Anne died at age 22. About a year after the death of Rutledge, Lincoln courted Mary Owens. The two saw each other for a few months and marriage was considered. But in time, Lincoln called off the match.

Father:

Thomas Lincoln

(January 6, 1778 – January 17, 1851)

Mother:

Nancy Hanks Lincoln

(February 5, 1784 – October 5, 1818)

first child:

Robert Todd Lincoln

second child:

Edward Baker Lincoln

(March 10, 1846 – February 1, 1850)

third child:

William Wallace Lincoln

(December 21, 1850 – February 20, 1862)

fourth child:

Thomas "Tad" Lincoln III

(April 4, 1853 – July 15, 1871)

Wife:

Mary Lincoln

(December 13, 1818 – July 16, 1882)

ex-partner:

Ann Rutledge

(January 7, 1813 – August 25, 1835)

ex-partner:

Mary Owens

References

• Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln
  2006
• Lincoln
  1996
• Who Was Abraham Lincoln?
  2008
• A. Lincoln: A Biography
  2009
• Lincoln's Last Trial: The Murder Case That Propelled Him to the Presidency
  2018
• The Black Heavens: Abraham Lincoln and Death
  2019
• I am Abraham Lincoln
  2014
• Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years and The War Years
  2013
• Abe Lincoln: The Boy Who Loved Books
  2006
• The Real Lincoln: A New Look at Abraham Lincoln, His Agenda, and an Unnecessary War
  2003
• Abraham Lincoln: A Concise History of the Man Who Transformed the World
  2016
• Abraham Lincoln: The American Presidents Series: The 16th President, 1861-1865
  2008
• Abraham Lincoln
  2009
• Abraham Lincoln and Making a Case: The Story of a Master
  2018
• Biography of Abraham Lincoln: A Photographic Story of a Life
  2005
• With Malice Toward None: The Life of Abraham Lincoln
  2009