ABRAHAM LINCOLN | 1861-1865
Abraham Lincoln warned the South in his inaugural address: "In your hands, my dissatisfied fellow countrymen, and not in mine, is the momentous issue of civil war."
Lincoln thought secession illegal, and was willing to use force to defend federal law and the Union. When Confederate batteries fired on Fort Sumter and forced its surrender, he called on the states for 75,000 volunteers. The Civil War had begun.
Born February 12, 1809, in Hardin County, Kentucky, Lincoln was a frontiersman’s son, and had to struggle for a living. He made extraordinary efforts to attain knowledge while working on a farm and keeping a store in Illinois. He was a captain in the Black Hawk War, spent eight years in the Illinois legislature, and rode the circuit of courts for many years. In 1858 Lincoln ran against Stephen A. Douglas for senator. He lost the election, but in debating with Douglas he gained a national reputation that won him the Republican nomination for president in 1860.
As president, he built the Republican Party into a strong national organization. He rallied northern Democrats to the Union cause. On Jan. 1, 1863, he issued the Emancipation Proclamation that declared slaves forever free. In dedicating the military cemetery at Gettysburg, Lincoln stated, "we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain - that this 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."
He won re-election in 1864, as Union military triumphs heralded an end to the war. In his planning for peace, the president was flexible and generous, encouraging southerners to lay down their arms and join speedily in reunion. The spirit that guided him was clearly that of his second inaugural address, now inscribed on one wall of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D. C.:
"With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation's wounds . . .. "
On Good Friday, April 14, 1865, Lincoln was assassinated at Ford's Theatre in Washington by John Wilkes Booth, an actor who somehow thought he was helping the South. The opposite was the result, for with Lincoln's death, the possibility of peace with magnanimity died.
