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. The government will not assail
you.... You have no oath
registered in Heaven
to destroy the government, while I shall have the most solemn
one to preserve, protect and defend it."
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. Four more
slave states joined the Confederacy but four remained within
the Union. The Civil War had begun.
The son of a Kentucky frontiersman, Lincoln had to struggle
for a living and for learning. Five months before receiving
his party's nomination
for President, he sketched his life:
"I was born Feb. 12, 1809, in Hardin County, Kentucky.
My parents were both born in Virginia, of undistinguished
families--second families, perhaps I should say. My mother,
who died in my tenth year, was of a family of the name of
Hanks.... My father ... removed from Kentucky to ... Indiana,
in my eighth year.... It was a wild region, with many bears
and other wild animals still in the woods. There I grew
up.... Of course when I came of age I did not know much.
Still somehow, I could read, write, and cipher
... but that was all."
Lincoln made extraordinary efforts to attain knowledge
while working on a farm, splitting rails for fences, and
keeping store at New Salem, 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. His law partner
said of him, "His ambition was a little engine that
knew no rest."
He married Mary Todd, and they had four boys, only one
of whom lived to maturity.
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. Further, he rallied most of the northern
Democrats to the Union cause. On January 1, 1863, he issued
the Emancipation
Proclamation
that declared forever free those slaves within the Confederacy.
Lincoln never let the world forget that the Civil War
involved an even larger issue. This he stated most movingly
in dedicating the military cemetery
at Gettysburg: "that 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."
Lincoln 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.
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