Abraham Lincoln

Abraham Lincoln was born on February 12, 1809, in a log cabin on the Kentucky frontier. His parents were illiterate pioneer farmers, and his mother Nancy died of milk sickness when he was nine. His formal schooling lasted less than a year, but he read voraciously. After surveying land, postmastering and running a New Salem store, he taught himself law from Blackstone's Commentaries and was admitted to the Illinois bar.

Lincoln served four terms in the Illinois legislature and one in the U.S. House, where he opposed the Mexican-American War with his "spot resolutions." The Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 drew him into the new Republican Party, and his 1858 Senate debates with Stephen Douglas, though they ended in defeat, made him a national figure. He won the 1860 presidential election as the first Republican president, triggering secession and civil war.

The four-year war cost roughly 750,000 lives. Lincoln micromanaged Union strategy, cycled through commanders until he found Ulysses Grant, and on January 1, 1863, issued the Emancipation Proclamation. His 272-word Gettysburg Address that November redefined the war as a test of whether "government of the people, by the people, for the people" could endure. His wartime record is not without controversy: he suspended habeas corpus, tolerated press censorship, and approved the December 1862 execution of 38 Dakota men in Minnesota, the largest mass execution in U.S. history.

He won re-election in 1864. His Second Inaugural called for reconstruction "with malice toward none, with charity for all." Six days after Lee's surrender at Appomattox, on April 14, 1865, he was shot at Ford's Theatre by John Wilkes Booth and died the next morning. His rhetorical mastery and personal humility — he was widely called "Honest Abe" — made him a touchstone for American political identity, even as historians weigh his expansions of power against his preservation of the Union and abolition of slavery.