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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 War—its 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 Mexican American 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.[4]^ 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.
Lincoln has been consistently ranked both by scholars and the public as among the three greatest U.S. presidents.
The Gettysburg Address is a speech delivered by Abraham Lincoln at the November 19, 1863, dedication of Soldier’s National Cemetery, a cemetery for Union soldiers killed at the Battle Of Gettysburg during the American Civil War.
Invited to give a "few appropriate remarks," Lincoln was not the featured speaker at the dedication; Edward Everett, a famous orator and former politician and educator, was. Everett spoke for two hours, from memory, before Lincoln took the podium. In about 260 words, beginning with the famous phrase, "Four score and seven years ago," Lincoln honored the Union dead and reminded the listeners of the purpose of the soldier’s sacrifice: equality, freedom, and national unity. The following day, Everett wrote to Lincoln: "I should be glad, if I could flatter myself that I came as near to the central idea of the occasion, in two hours, as you did in two minutes." Lincoln’s speech did not garner (obtener) much attention during his lifetime; in many ways, it was forgotten and lost to popular memory until the U.S. centennial in 1876, when its significance was reconsidered in light of the war’s outcome and in the larger context of the young country’s history. The Gettysburg Address is now recognized as one of Lincoln’s greatest speeches and as one of the most famous speeches in U.S. history. Read the full transcript of the Gettysburg Address Text to appreciate Lincoln’s eloquence, brevity, and the significance of the Battle Of Gettysburg.
In the years to come, the Gettysburg Address would endure as arguably the most-quoted, most-memorized piece of oratory in American history. After Lincoln’s assassination in April 1865, Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts wrote of the address, “That speech, uttered at the field of Gettysburg…and now sanctified by the martyrdom of its author, is a monumental act. In the modesty of his nature he said ‘the world will little note, nor long remember what we say here; but it can never forget what they did here.’ He was mistaken. The world at once noted what he said, and will never cease to remember it.”
Practice Quiz, Abraham Lincoln’s “Gettysburg Address” 1The orderly fashion with which the new states came into being in the newly acquired from France Louisiana Territory was undone by the controversy over slavery in Missouri, in the upper Louisiana Territory, where many slave holders had already settled. The Northern states were determined to stop the westward expansion of slave states, which the South was determined to maintain in the new states in the west. Missouri’s request for statehood in 1819 provoked a clash which was defused by the so-called Missouri compromise. Missouri was admitted as a slave state in 1821 under the agreement that no state west of Missouri would become a slave state. It was, however, only a temporary appeasement. (true) 2 The conquest of the Northwest in 1846 only deepened the divide between the North and South. The main question was whether Congress had the authority to determine whether or not slavery might exist in territory obtained by the United States. In the early 1850 the state constitutions of three territories in the Southwest banned slavery. As a result, there was much talk of secessionism in the Southern states rather than accept exclusion of slavery from the southwestern territories. The secessionist crisis was temporarily forestalled, however, when Congress voted to enact a stricter Fugitive-Slave law. (false, conquest of the Southwest) 3In the presidential election of 1860, the Democratic Party’s campaign platform denied “the authority of Congress, of a territorial legislature, or of any individuals to give legal existence to Slavery in any Territory of the United States.” The party’s candidate was Abraham Lincoln. In the election, ten southern states did not even place his name on the ballot. In the end, although Lincoln won a decisive majority in the electoral college, he carried less than 40% of the popular vote. The election was held in November. By December Southern secessionist measures were already underway. On 4 March 1861, the day Lincoln was sworn in as the 16th President of the United States, secession of the Cotton South was already an accomplished fact. (false, the Republican Party) 4In the Gettysburg Address, Lincoln with eloquent simplicity articulated what his interpretation of the American Civil War (1861-1865) was. In his view, the war was being fought to defend the freed slaves. The war raised a fundamental question of whether republics were inherently too weak to exist. Lincoln suggested that
the workability of republican institutions was what was at stake. (false, not to defend freed slaves but to defend the American experiment in constitutional democracy.) 5In the first years of the war Lincoln never mentioned that the war was being waged to abolish slavery. The purpose of the war was to preserve the Union, and not to undermine the institutions of the Southern states. But as the bloody armed conflict drew on, Lincoln began to heed abolitionists in the South who demanded that emancipation clearly be adopted as the aim of the war, arguing that to reconstitute the Union without eliminating slavery would only lead to tragic consequences in the future. On 1 January, 1863, Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, declaring free the slaves living in the rebel states. The Gettysburg battle took place six months later. (false, abolitionists in the North) 6The Battle of Gettysburg was fought in Pennsylvania, in early July,
- Considered the turning point of the war, the battle lasted three days, and the horrendous amount of carnage (estimated at between 46,000 and 51,000 casualties), was such that many months afterward, thousands of bodies still lay unburied. A call for a national cemetery was made in honor of the dead. It was at the dedication ceremony that Abraham Lincoln delivered the Gettysburg Address. (true) 7Lincoln, born in Kentucky to barely literate parents, was self- educated. He was a good storyteller and an excellent prose stylist. He effectively used ordinary speech and rural humor in much of his discourse. Yet he only had a year of formal schooling. He had a formidable memory and a love for reading. In his early twenties, he decided to study medicine independently, and passed the state bar examination in 1836. (false, law) 8At the time, a central political issue in the country was whether slavery should be allowed in the new territories, which would eventually become states. Lincoln was elected to Congress in 1846. He voted against the war against Mexico but not against abolitionist measures because he thought they would only threaten the Union. Ten years later a compromise had been reached, and in 1858 the Kansas-Nebraska Bill was passed allowing new states to decide on the matter on their own. In 1860, Lincoln disputed the notion that slavery was endorsed by the Founding Fathers. Shortly afterwards, at the Republican Convention, he won the presidential nomination and, afterwards, the presidential election. Even before he took office, seven Southern states had seceded from the Union, and a month after his inauguration the Civil War began. (false, he voted against abolitionist measures) 9Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address last only two minutes. People still marvel at the way his speech, comprised of only ten sentences and 272 words, still resonates through time. (true)
10Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.
nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom — and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.
Those now present have been given by the dead a great task, which is to prevent their tremendous, noble sacrifice from coming to nothing and to continue further with the struggle, so that freedom will perpetually reign in the nation, ruled by the creator and sovereign of the universe, where the people choose their own their leaders, who with that mandate will loyally serve them. (true)
