Lincoln was born into poverty in a log cabin in Kentucky and was raised on the frontier, primarily in Indiana. His earliest memories were of this home and, in particular, of a flash flood that once washed away the corn and pumpkin seeds he had helped his father plant. His father, Thomas Lincoln, was the descendant of a weaver’s apprentice who had migrated from England to Massachusetts in 1637. Though much less prosperous than some of his Lincoln forebears, Thomas was a sturdy pioneer. On June 12, 1806, he married Nancy Hanks. The Hanks genealogy is difficult to trace, but Nancy appears to have been of illegitimate birth. She has been described as “stoop-shouldered, thin-breasted, sad,” and fervently religious. Thomas and Nancy Lincoln had three children: Sarah, Abraham, and Thomas, who died in infancy.

In December 1816, faced with a lawsuit challenging the title to his Kentucky farm, Thomas Lincoln moved with his family to southwestern Indiana. There, as a squatter on public land, he hastily put up a “half-faced camp”—a crude structure of logs and boughs with one side open to the weather—in which the family took shelter behind a blazing fire. Soon he built a permanent cabin, and later he bought the land on which it stood. Abraham helped to clear the fields and to take care of the crops but early acquired a dislike for hunting and fishing. In afteryears he recalled the “panther’s scream,” the bears that “preyed on the swine,” and the poverty of Indiana frontier life, which was “pretty pinching at times.” The unhappiest period of his boyhood followed the death of his mother in the autumn of 1818. As a ragged nine-year-old, he saw her buried in the forest, then faced a winter without the warmth of a mother’s love. Fortunately, before the onset of a second winter, Thomas Lincoln brought home from Kentucky a new wife for himself, a new mother for the children. Sarah Bush Johnston Lincoln, a widow with two girls and a boy of her own, had energy and affection to spare. She ran the household with an even hand, treating both sets of children as if she had borne them all; but she became especially fond of Abraham, and he of her. He afterward referred to her as his “angel mother.”

Lincoln was largely self-educated. His formal schooling was from itinerant teachers. It included two short stints in Kentucky, where he learned to read but probably not to write, at age seven, and in Indiana, where he went to school sporadically due to farm chores, for a total of fewer than 12 months in aggregate by the age of 15. He persisted as an avid reader and retained a lifelong interest in learning.Family, neighbors, and schoolmates recalled that his reading included the King James Bible, Aesop's Fables, John Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress, Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, and The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin.

As a teen, Lincoln took responsibility for chores and customarily gave his father all earnings from work outside the home until he was 21. Lincoln was tall, strong, and athletic, and became adept at using an ax. He was an active wrestler during his youth and trained in the rough catch-as-catch-can style (also known as catch wrestling). He became county wrestling champion at the age of 21. He gained a reputation for strength and audacity after winning a wrestling match with the renowned leader of ruffians known as "the Clary's Grove Boys".

In March 1830, fearing another milk sickness outbreak, several members of the extended Lincoln family, including Abraham, moved west to Illinois, a free state, and settled in Macon County. Abraham then became increasingly distant from Thomas, in part due to his father's lack of education. In 1831, as Thomas and other family prepared to move to a new homestead in Coles County, Illinois, Abraham struck out on his own. He made his home in New Salem, Illinois, for six years. Lincoln and some friends took goods by flatboat to New Orleans, Louisiana, where he was first exposed to slavery.

Speculation persists that Lincoln's first romantic interest was Ann Rutledge, whom he met when he moved to New Salem. Witness testimony, given decades afterward, showed a lack of any specific recollection of a romance between the two. Rutledge died on August 25, 1835, most likely of typhoid fever; saying that he could not bear the idea of rain falling on Ann's grave, Lincoln sunk into a serious episode of depression, and this gave rise to speculation that he had been in love with her.

In the early 1830s, he met Mary Owens from Kentucky. Late in 1836, Lincoln agreed to a match with Owens if she returned to New Salem. Owens arrived that November and he courted her for a time; however, they both had second thoughts. On August 16, 1837, he wrote Owens a letter saying he would not blame her if she ended the relationship, and she never replied.

In 1839, Lincoln met Mary Todd in Springfield, Illinois, and the following year they became engaged.She was the daughter of Robert Smith Todd, a wealthy lawyer and businessman in Lexington, Kentucky. A wedding set for January 1, 1841, was canceled at Lincoln's request, but they reconciled and married on November 4, 1842, in the Springfield mansion of Mary's sister. While anxiously preparing for the nuptials, he was asked where he was going and replied, "To hell, I suppose." In 1844, the couple bought a house in Springfield near his law office. Mary kept house with the help of a hired servant and a relative.

Lincoln was an affectionate husband and father of four sons, though his work regularly kept him away from home. The oldest, Robert Todd Lincoln, was born in 1843 and was the only child to live to maturity. Edward Baker Lincoln (Eddie), born in 1846, died February 1, 1850, probably of tuberculosis. Lincoln's third son, "Willie" Lincoln was born on December 21, 1850, and died of a fever at the White House on February 20, 1862. The youngest, Thomas "Tad" Lincoln, was born on April 4, 1853, and survived his father but died of heart failure at age 18 on July 16, 1871. Lincoln "was remarkably fond of children" and the Lincolns were not considered to be strict with their own. In fact, Lincoln's law partner William H. Herndon would grow irritated when Lincoln brought his children to the law office. Their father, it seemed, was often too absorbed in his work to notice his children's behavior. Herndon recounted, "I have felt many and many a time that I wanted to wring their little necks, and yet out of respect for Lincoln I kept my mouth shut. Lincoln did not note what his children were doing or had done."

The deaths of their sons, Eddie and Willie, had profound effects on both parents. Lincoln suffered from "melancholy", a condition now thought to be clinical depression. Later in life, Mary struggled with the stresses of losing her husband and sons, and Robert committed her for a time to an asylum in 1875.

During 1831 and 1832, Lincoln worked at a general store in New Salem, Illinois. In 1832, he declared his candidacy for the Illinois House of Representatives, but interrupted his campaign to serve as a captain in the Illinois Militia during the Black Hawk War. When Lincoln returned home from the Black Hawk War, he planned to become a blacksmith, but instead formed a partnership with William Berry, 21, with whom he purchased a New Salem general store on credit. Because a license was required to sell customers single beverages, Berry obtained bartending licenses for $7 each for Lincoln and himself, and in 1833 the Lincoln-Berry General Store became a tavern as well. As licensed bartenders, Lincoln and Berry were able to sell spirits, including liquor, for 12 cents a pint. They offered a wide range of alcoholic beverages as well as food, including takeout dinners. But Berry became an alcoholic, was often too drunk to work, and Lincoln ended up running the store by himself. Although the economy was booming, the business struggled and went into debt, causing Lincoln to sell his share.

In his first campaign speech after returning from his military service, Lincoln observed a supporter in the crowd under attack, grabbed the assailant by his "neck and the seat of his trousers", and tossed him. In the campaign, Lincoln advocated for navigational improvements on the Sangamon River. He could draw crowds as a raconteur, but lacked the requisite formal education, powerful friends, and money, and lost the election. Lincoln finished eighth out of 13 candidates (the top four were elected), though he received 277 of the 300 votes cast in the New Salem precinct.

Lincoln served as New Salem's postmaster and later as county surveyor, but continued his voracious reading and decided to become a lawyer. Rather than studying in the office of an established attorney, as was the custom, Lincoln borrowed legal texts from attorneys John Todd Stuart and Thomas Drummond, purchased books including Blackstone's Commentaries and Chitty's Pleadings, and read law on his own. He later said of his legal education that "I studied with nobody."

When Lincoln first entered politics, Andrew Jackson was president. Lincoln shared the sympathies that the Jacksonians professed for the common man, but he disagreed with the Jacksonian view that the government should be divorced from economic enterprise. “The legitimate object of government,” he was later to say, “is to do for a community of people whatever they need to have done, but cannot do at all, or cannot do so well, for themselves, in their separate and individual capacities.” Among the prominent politicians of his time, he most admired Henry Clay and Daniel Webster. Clay and Webster advocated using the powers of the federal government to encourage business and develop the country’s resources by means of a national bank, a protective tariff, and a program of internal improvements for facilitating transportation. In Lincoln’s view, Illinois and the West as a whole desperately needed such aid for economic development. From the outset, he associated himself with the party of Clay and Webster, the Whigs.

As a Whig member of the Illinois State Legislature, to which he was elected four times from 1834 to 1840, Lincoln devoted himself to a grandiose project for constructing with state funds a network of railroads, highways, and canals. Whigs and Democrats joined in passing an omnibus bill for these undertakings, but the panic of 1837 and the ensuing business depression brought about the abandonment of most of them. While in the legislature he demonstrated that, though opposed to slavery, he was no abolitionist. 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.”

During his single term in Congress (1847–49), Lincoln, as the lone Whig from Illinois, gave little attention to legislative matters. He proposed a bill for the gradual and compensated emancipation of enslaved people in the District of Columbia, but, because it was to take effect only with the approval of the “free white citizens” of the district, it displeased abolitionists as well as slaveholders and never was seriously considered.

Lincoln devoted much of his time to presidential politics—to unmaking one president, a Democrat, and making another, a Whig. He found an issue and a candidate in the Mexican War. With his “spot resolutions,” he challenged the statement of President James K. Polk that Mexico had started the war by shedding American blood upon American soil. Along with other members of his party, Lincoln voted to condemn Polk and the war while also voting for supplies to carry it on. At the same time, he laboured for the nomination and election of the war hero Zachary Taylor. After Taylor’s success at the polls, Lincoln expected to be named commissioner of the general land office as a reward for his campaign services, and he was bitterly disappointed when he failed to get the job. His criticisms of the war, meanwhile, had not been popular among the voters in his own congressional district. At the age of 40, frustrated in politics, he seemed to be at the end of his public career.

The coming of the railroads, especially after 1850, made travel easier and practice more remunerative. Lincoln served as a lobbyist for the Illinois Central Railroad, assisting it in getting a charter from the state, and thereafter he was retained as a regular attorney for that railroad. After successfully defending the company against the efforts of McLean county to tax its property, he received the largest single fee of his legal career—$5,000. (He had to sue the Illinois Central in order to collect the fee.) He also handled cases for other railroads and for banks, insurance companies, and mercantile and manufacturing firms. In one of his finest performances before the bar, he saved the Rock Island Bridge, the first to span the Mississippi River, from the threat of the river transportation interests that demanded the bridge’s removal. His business included a number of patent suits and criminal trials. One of his most effective and famous pleas had to do with a murder case. A witness claimed that, by the light of the moon, he had seen Duff Armstrong, an acquaintance of Lincoln’s, take part in a killing. Referring to an almanac for proof, Lincoln argued that the night had been too dark for the witness to have seen anything clearly, and with a sincere and moving appeal he won an acquittal.

For about five years Lincoln took little part in politics, and then a new sectional crisis gave him a chance to reemerge and rise to statesmanship. In 1854 his political rival Stephen A. Douglas maneuvered through Congress a bill for reopening the entire Louisiana Purchase to slavery and allowing the settlers of Kansas and Nebraska (with “popular sovereignty”) to decide for themselves whether to permit slaveholding in those territories. The Kansas-Nebraska Act provoked violent opposition in Illinois and the other states of the old Northwest. It gave rise to the Republican Party while speeding the Whig Party on its way to disintegration. Along with many thousands of other homeless Whigs, Lincoln soon became a Republican (1856). Before long, some prominent Republicans in the East talked of attracting Douglas to the Republican fold, and with him his Democratic following in the West. Lincoln would have none of it. He was determined that he, not Douglas, should be the Republican leader of his state and section.

Lincoln challenged the incumbent Douglas for the Senate seat in 1858, and the series of debates they engaged in throughout Illinois was political oratory of the highest order. Both men were shrewd debaters and accomplished stump speakers, though they could hardly have been more different in style and appearance—the short and pudgy Douglas, whose stentorian voice and graceful gestures swayed audiences, and the tall, homely, almost emaciated-looking Lincoln, who moved awkwardly and whose voice was piercing and shrill. Lincoln’s prose and speeches, however, were eloquent, pithy, powerful, and free of the verbosity so common in communication of his day. The debates were published in 1860, together with a biography of Lincoln, in a best-selling book that Lincoln himself compiled and marketed as part of his campaign.

In their basic views, Lincoln and Douglas were not as far apart as they seemed in the heat of political argument. Neither was abolitionist or proslavery. But Lincoln, unlike Douglas, insisted that Congress must exclude slavery from the territories. He disagreed with Douglas’s belief that the territories were by nature unsuited to the slavery-based economy and that no congressional legislation was needed to prevent the spread of slavery into them. In one of his most famous speeches, he said: “A house divided against itself cannot stand. I believe the government cannot endure permanently half slave and half free.” He predicted that the country eventually would become “all one thing, or all the other.” Again and again he insisted that the civil liberties of every U.S. citizen, white as well as Black, were at stake. The territories must be kept free, he further said, because “new free states” were “places for poor people to go and better their condition”.

In the end, Lincoln lost the election to Douglas. Although the outcome did not surprise him, it depressed him deeply. Lincoln had, nevertheless, gained national recognition and soon began to be mentioned as a presidential prospect for 1860.

On May 18, 1860, after Lincoln and his friends had made skillful preparations, he was nominated on the third ballot at the Republican National Convention in Chicago. He then put aside his law practice and, though making no stump speeches, gave full time to the direction of his campaign. His “main object,” he had written, was to “hedge against divisions in the Republican ranks,” and he counseled party workers to “say nothing on points where it is probable we shall disagree.” With the Republicans united, the Democrats divided, and a total of four candidates in the field, he carried the election on November 6. Although he received no votes from the Deep South and no more than 40 out of 100 in the country as a whole, the popular votes were so distributed that he won a clear and decisive majority in the electoral college.

After Lincoln’s election and before his inauguration, the state of South Carolina proclaimed its withdrawal from the Union. To forestall similar action by other Southern states, various compromises were proposed in Congress. The most important, the Crittenden Compromise, included constitutional amendments guaranteeing slavery forever in the states where it already existed and dividing the territories between slavery and freedom. Although Lincoln had no objection to the first of these amendments, he was unalterably opposed to the second and indeed to any scheme infringing in the slightest upon the free-soil plank of his party’s platform. “I am inflexible,” he privately wrote. He feared that a territorial division, by sanctioning the principle of slavery extension, would only encourage planter imperialists to seek new territory for slavery south of the American border and thus would “put us again on the highroad to a slave empire.” From his home in Springfield he advised Republicans in Congress to vote against a division of the territories, and the proposal was killed in committee. Six additional states then seceded and, with South Carolina, combined to form the Confederate States of America.

Thus, before Lincoln had even moved into the White House, a disunion crisis was upon the country. Attention, North and South, focused in particular upon Fort Sumter, in Charleston Harbor, South Carolina. This fort, still under construction, was garrisoned by U.S. troops under Major Robert Anderson. The Confederacy claimed it and, from other harbour fortifications, threatened it. Foreseeing trouble, Lincoln, while still in Springfield, confidentially requested Winfield Scott, general in chief of the U.S. Army, to be prepared “to either hold, or retake, the forts, as the case may require, at, and after the inauguration.” In his inaugural address (March 4, 1861), besides upholding the Union’s indestructibility and appealing for sectional harmony, Lincoln restated his Sumter policy as follows:

“The power confided to me, will be used to hold, occupy, and possess the property, and places belonging to the government, and to collect the duties and imposts; but beyond what may be necessary for these objects, there will be no invasion—no using of force against, or among the people anywhere.”

Then, near the end, addressing the absent Southerners: “You can have no conflict, without being yourselves the aggressors.”

No sooner was he in office than Lincoln received word that the Sumter garrison, unless supplied or withdrawn, would shortly be starved out. Still, for about a month, Lincoln delayed acting. He was beset by contradictory advice. On the one hand, General Scott, Secretary of State William H. Seward, and others urged him to abandon the fort; and Seward, through a go-between, gave a group of Confederate commissioners to understand that the fort would in fact be abandoned. On the other hand, many Republicans insisted that any show of weakness would bring disaster to their party and to the Union. Finally Lincoln ordered the preparation of two relief expeditions, one for Fort Sumter and the other for Fort Pickens, in Florida. (He afterward said he would have been willing to withdraw from Sumter if he could have been sure of holding Pickens.) Before the Sumter expedition, he sent a messenger to tell the South Carolina governor:

“I am directed by the President of the United States to notify you to expect an attempt will be made to supply Fort-Sumpter [sic] with provisions only; and that, if such attempt be not resisted, no effort to throw in men, arms, or ammunition, will be made, without further notice, or in case of an attack upon the Fort”.

Without waiting for the arrival of Lincoln’s expedition, the Confederate authorities presented to Major Anderson a demand for Sumter’s prompt evacuation, which he refused. On April 12, 1861, at dawn, the Confederate batteries in the harbour opened fire.

“Then, and thereby,” Lincoln informed Congress when it met on July 4, “the assailants of the Government, began the conflict of arms.” The Confederates, however, accused him of being the real aggressor. They said he had cleverly maneuvered them into firing the first shot so as to put upon them the onus of war guilt. Although some historians have repeated this charge, it appears to be a gross distortion of the facts. Lincoln was determined to preserve the Union, and to do so he thought he must take a stand against the Confederacy. He concluded he might as well take this stand at Sumter.

Lincoln’s primary aim was neither to provoke war nor to maintain peace. In preserving the Union, he would have been glad to preserve the peace also, but he was ready to risk a war that he thought would be short.

After the firing on Fort Sumter, Lincoln called upon the state governors for troops (Virginia and three other states of the upper South responded by joining the Confederacy). He then proclaimed a blockade of the Southern ports. These steps—the Sumter expedition, the call for volunteers, and the blockade—were the first important decisions of Lincoln as commander in chief of the army and navy. But he still needed a strategic plan and a command system for carrying it out.

General Scott advised him to avoid battle with the Confederate forces in Virginia, to get control of the Mississippi River, and by tightening the blockade to hold the South in a gigantic squeeze. Lincoln had little confidence in Scott’s comparatively passive and bloodless “Anaconda” plan. He believed the war must be actively fought if it ever was to be won. Overruling Scott, he ordered a direct advance on the Virginia front, which resulted in defeat and rout for the federal forces at Bull Run (July 21, 1861). After a succession of more or less sleepless nights, Lincoln produced a set of memorandums on military policy. His basic thought was that the armies should advance concurrently on several fronts and should move so as to hold and use the support of Unionists in Missouri, Kentucky, western Virginia, and eastern Tennessee. As he later explained:

“I state my general idea of this war to be that we have the greater numbers, and the enemy has the greater facility of concentrating forces upon points of collision; that we must fail, unless we can find some way of making our advantage an over-match for his; and that this can only be done by menacing him with superior forces at different points, at the same time”.

This, with the naval blockade, comprised the essence of Lincoln’s strategy.

As a war leader, Lincoln employed the style that had served him as a politician—a description of himself, incidentally, that he was not ashamed to accept. He preferred to react to problems and to the circumstances that others had created rather than to originate policies and lay out long-range designs. In candour he would write: “I claim not to have controlled events, but confess plainly that events have controlled me.” His guiding rule was: “My policy is to have no policy.” It was not that he was unprincipled; rather, he was a practical man, mentally nimble and flexible, and, if one action or decision proved unsatisfactory in practice, he was willing to experiment with another.

From 1861 to 1864, while hesitating to impose his ideas upon his generals, Lincoln experimented with command personnel and organization. Accepting the resignation of Scott (November 1861), he put George B. McClellan in charge of the armies as a whole. After a few months, disgusted by the slowness of McClellan (“He has the slows,” as Lincoln put it), he demoted him to the command of the Army of the Potomac alone. He questioned the soundness of McClellan’s plans for the Peninsular Campaign, repeatedly compelled McClellan to alter them, and, after the Seven Days’ Battles to capture Richmond, Virginia (June 25–July 1, 1862), failed, ordered him to give them up. Then he tried a succession of commanders for the army in Virginia—John Pope, McClellan again, Ambrose E. Burnside, Joseph Hooker, and George Gordon Meade—but was disappointed with each of them in turn. Meanwhile, he had in Henry W. Halleck a general in chief who gave advice and served as a liaison with field officers but who shrank from making important decisions. For nearly two years the Federal armies lacked effective unity of command. President Lincoln, General Halleck, and War Secretary Edwin M. Stanton acted as an informal council of war. Lincoln, besides transmitting official orders through Halleck, also communicated directly with the generals, sending personal suggestions in his own name. To generals opposing Robert E. Lee, he suggested that the object was to destroy Lee’s army, not to capture Richmond or to drive the invader from Northern soil.

Finally Lincoln looked to the West for a top general. He admired the Vicksburg Campaign of Ulysses S. Grant in Mississippi. Nine days after the Vicksburg surrender (which occurred on July 4, 1863), he sent Grant a “grateful acknowledgment for the almost inestimable service” he had done the country. Lincoln sent also an admission of his own error. He said he had expected Grant to bypass Vicksburg and go on down the Mississippi, instead of crossing the river and turning back to approach Vicksburg from the rear. “I feared it was a mistake,” he wrote in his letter of congratulations. “I now wish to make the personal acknowledgment that you were right, and I was wrong.”

In March 1864 Lincoln promoted Grant to lieutenant general and gave him command of all the federal armies. At last Lincoln had found a man who, with such able subordinates as William T. Sherman, Philip Sheridan, and George H. Thomas, could put into effect those parts of Lincoln’s concept of a large-scale, coordinated offensive that still remained to be carried out. Grant was only a member, though an important one, of a top-command arrangement that Lincoln eventually had devised. Overseeing everything was Lincoln himself, the commander in chief. Taking the responsibility for men and supplies was Secretary of War Stanton. Serving as a presidential adviser and as a liaison with military men was Halleck, the chief of staff. And directing all the armies, while accompanying Meade’s Army of the Potomac, was Grant, the general in chief. Thus Lincoln pioneered in the creation of a high command, an organization for amassing all the energies and resources of a people in the grand strategy of total war. He combined statecraft and the overall direction of armies with an effectiveness that increased year by year. His achievement is all the more remarkable in view of his lack of training and experience in the art of warfare. This lack may have been an advantage as well as a handicap. Unhampered by outworn military dogma, Lincoln could all the better apply his practical insight and common sense—some would say his military genius—to the winning of the Civil War.

There can be no doubt of Lincoln’s deep and sincere devotion to the cause of personal freedom. Before his election to the presidency he had spoken often and eloquently on the subject. In 1854, for example, he said he hated the Douglas attitude of indifference toward the possible spread of slavery to new areas. “I hate it because of the monstrous injustice of slavery itself,” he declared. “I hate it because it deprives our republican example of its just influence in the world; enables the enemies of free institutions with plausibility to taunt us as hypocrites….” In 1855, writing to his friend Joshua Speed, he recalled a steamboat trip the two had taken on the Ohio River 14 years earlier. “You may remember, as I well do,” he said, “that from Louisville [Kentucky] to the mouth of the Ohio there were, on board, ten or a dozen slaves, shackled together with irons. That sight was a continual torment to me; and I see something like it every time I touch the Ohio, or any other slave-border.”

Yet, as president, Lincoln was at first reluctant to adopt an abolitionist policy. There were several reasons for his hesitancy. He had been elected on a platform pledging no interference with slavery within the states, and in any case he doubted the constitutionality of federal action under the circumstances. He was concerned about the possible difficulties of incorporating nearly four million African Americans, once they had been freed, into the nation’s social and political life. Above all, he felt that he must keep the border slaveholding states in the Union, and he feared that an abolitionist program might impel them, in particular his native Kentucky, toward the Confederacy. So he held back while others went ahead. When General John C. Frémont and General David Hunter, within their respective military departments, proclaimed freedom for the enslaved people of disloyal masters, Lincoln revoked the proclamations. When Congress passed confiscation acts in 1861 and 1862, he refrained from a full enforcement of the provisions authorizing him to seize enslaved property. And when Horace Greeley in the New York Tribune appealed to him to enforce these laws, Lincoln patiently replied (August 22, 1862):

“My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone, I would also do that.”

Meanwhile, in response to the rising antislavery sentiment, Lincoln came forth with an emancipation plan of his own. According to his proposal, the enslaved were to be freed by state action, the slaveholders were to be compensated, the federal government was to share the financial burden, the emancipation process was to be gradual, and the freedmen were to be colonized abroad. Congress indicated its willingness to vote the necessary funds for the Lincoln plan, but none of the border slaveholding states were willing to launch it, and in any case few Black American leaders desired to see their people sent abroad.

While still hoping for the eventual success of his gradual plan, Lincoln took quite a different step by issuing his preliminary (September 22, 1862) and his final (January 1, 1863) Emancipation Proclamation. This famous decree, which he justified as an exercise of the president’s war powers, applied only to those parts of the country actually under Confederate control, not to the loyal enslaving states nor to the federally occupied areas of the Confederacy. Directly or indirectly the proclamation brought freedom during the war to fewer than 200,000 enslaved persons. Yet it had great significance as a symbol. It indicated that the Lincoln government had added freedom to reunion as a war aim, and it attracted liberal opinion in England and Europe to increased support of the Union cause.

Lincoln himself doubted the constitutionality of his step, except as a temporary war measure. After the war, the enslaved people freed by the proclamation would have risked re-enslavement had nothing else been done to confirm their liberty. But something else was done: the Thirteenth Amendment was added to the Constitution, and Lincoln played a large part in bringing about this change in the fundamental law. Through the chairman of the Republican National Committee he urged the party to include a plank for such an amendment in its platform of 1864. The plank, as adopted, stated that slavery was the cause of the rebellion, that the president’s proclamation had aimed “a death blow at this gigantic evil,” and that a constitutional amendment was necessary to “terminate and forever prohibit” it. When Lincoln was reelected on this platform and the Republican majority in Congress was increased, he was justified in feeling, as he apparently did, that he had a mandate from the people for the Thirteenth Amendment. The newly chosen Congress, with its overwhelming Republican majority, was not to meet until after the lame duck session of the old Congress during the winter of 1864–65. Lincoln did not wait. Using his resources of patronage and persuasion upon certain of the Democrats, he managed to get the necessary two-thirds vote before the session’s end. He rejoiced as the amendment went out to the states for ratification, and he rejoiced again and again as his own Illinois led off and other states followed one by one in acting favourably upon it. (He did not live to rejoice in its ultimate adoption.)

Lincoln deserves his reputation as the Great Emancipator. His claim to that honour, if it rests uncertainly upon his famous proclamation, has a sound basis in the support he gave to the antislavery amendment. It is well founded also in his greatness as the war leader who carried the nation safely through the four-year struggle that brought freedom in its train. And, finally, it is strengthened by the practical demonstrations he gave of respect for human worth and dignity, regardless of colour. During the last two years of his life he welcomed African Americans as visitors and friends in a way no president had done before.

To win the war, President Lincoln had to have popular support. The reunion of North and South required, first of all, a certain degree of unity in the North. But the North contained various groups with special interests of their own. Lincoln faced the task of attracting to his administration the support of as many divergent groups and individuals as possible. Accordingly, he gave much of his time and attention to politics, which in one of its aspects is the art of attracting such support. Fortunately for the Union cause, he was a president with rare political skill. He had the knack of appealing to fellow politicians and talking to them in their own language. He had a talent for smoothing over personal differences and holding the loyalty of men antagonistic to one another. Inheriting the spoils system, he made good use of it, disposing of government jobs in such a way as to strengthen his administration and further its official aim.

The opposition party remained alive and strong. Its membership included war Democrats and peace Democrats, often called “Copperheads,” a few of whom collaborated with the enemy. Lincoln did what he could to cultivate the assistance of the war Democrats, as in securing from Congress the timely approval of the Thirteenth Amendment. So far as feasible, he conciliated the peace Democrats. He heeded the complaints of one of them, Governor Horatio Seymour of New York, in regard to the draft quota for that state. He commuted the prison sentence of another, Congressman Clement L. Vallandigham of Ohio, to banishment within the Confederate lines. In dealing with persons suspected of treasonable intent, Lincoln at times authorized his generals to make arbitrary arrests. He justified this action on the ground that he had to allow some temporary sacrifice of parts of the Constitution in order to maintain the Union and thus preserve the Constitution as a whole. He let his generals suspend several newspapers, but only for short periods, and he promptly revoked a military order suppressing the hostile Chicago Times. In a letter to one of his generals he expressed his policy thus:

“You will only arrest individuals and suppress assemblies or newspapers when they may be working palpable injury to the military in your charge, and in no other case will you interfere with the expression of opinion in any form or allow it to be interfered with violently by others. In this you have a discretion to exercise with great caution, calmness, and forbearance.”

Considering the dangers and provocations of the time, Lincoln was quite liberal in his treatment of political opponents and the opposition press. He was by no means the dictator critics often accused him of being. Nevertheless, his abrogating of civil liberties, especially his suspension of the privilege of the writ of habeas corpus, disturbed Democrats, Republicans, and even members of his own cabinet. In the opinion of a soldier from Massachusetts, the president, “without the people having any legal means to prevent it, is only prevented from exercising a Russian despotism by the fear he may have of shocking too much the sense of decency of the whole world.” Even Lincoln’s friend Orville Hickman Browning believed the arrests ordered by the president were “illegal and arbitrary, and did more harm than good, weakening instead of strengthening the government.” Yet Lincoln defended his actions, arguing that the Constitution provided for the suspension of such liberties “in cases of Rebellion or Invasion, [when] the public Safety may require it.” Moreover, posed Lincoln with rhetorical flare, “Must I shoot a simpleminded soldier boy who deserts” and “not touch a hair of a wilely agitator who induces him to desert?”

Within his own party, Lincoln confronted factional divisions and personal rivalries that caused him as much trouble as did the activities of the Democrats. True, he and most of his fellow partisans agreed fairly well upon their principal economic aims. With his approval, the Republicans enacted into law the essentials of the program he had advocated from his early Whig days—a protective tariff; a national banking system; and federal aid for internal improvements, in particular for the construction of a railroad to the Pacific Coast. The Republicans disagreed among themselves, however, on many matters regarding the conduct and purposes of the war. Two main factions arose: the “Radicals” and the “Conservatives.” Lincoln himself inclined in spirit toward the Conservatives, but he had friends among the Radicals as well, and he strove to maintain his leadership over both. In appointing his cabinet, he chose his several rivals for the 1860 nomination and, all together, gave representation to every important party group. Wisely he included the outstanding Conservative, Seward, and the outstanding Radical, Salmon P. Chase. Cleverly he overcame cabinet crises and kept these two opposites among his official advisers until Chase’s resignation in 1864.

Lincoln had to deal with even more serious factional uprisings in Congress. The big issue was the “reconstruction” of the South. The seceded states of Louisiana, Arkansas, and Tennessee having been largely recovered by the federal armies, Lincoln late in 1863 proposed his “ten percent plan,” according to which new state governments might be formed when 10 percent of the qualified voters had taken an oath of future loyalty to the United States. The Radicals rejected Lincoln’s proposal as too lenient, and they carried through Congress the Wade-Davis Bill, which would have permitted the remaking and readmission of states only after a majority had taken the loyalty oath. When Lincoln pocket-vetoed that bill, its authors published a “manifesto” denouncing him.

Lincoln was already the candidate of the “Union” (that is, the Republican) party for reelection to the presidency, and the Wade-Davis manifesto signalized a movement within the party to displace him as the party’s nominee. He waited quietly and patiently for the movement to collapse, but even after it had done so, the party remained badly divided. A rival Republican candidate, John C. Frémont, nominated much earlier by a splinter group, was still in the field. Leading Radicals promised to procure Frémont’s withdrawal if Lincoln would obtain the resignation of his conservative postmaster general, Montgomery Blair. Eventually Frémont withdrew and Blair resigned. The party was reunited in time for the election of 1864.

In 1864, as in 1860, Lincoln was the chief strategist of his own electoral campaign. He took a hand in the management of the Republican Speakers’ Bureau, advised state committees on campaign tactics, hired and fired government employees to strengthen party support, and did his best to enable as many soldiers and sailors as possible to vote. Most of the citizens in uniform voted Republican. He was reelected with a large popular majority (55 percent) over his Democratic opponent, General George B. McClellan.

In 1864 the Democratic platform called for an armistice and a peace conference, and prominent Republicans as well as Democrats demanded that Lincoln heed Confederate peace offers, irregular and illusory though they were. In a public letter, he stated his own conditions:

“Any proposition which embraces the restoration of peace, the integrity of the whole Union, and the abandonment of slavery, and which comes by and with an authority that can control the armies now at war against the United states will be received and considered by the Executive government of the United States, and will be met by liberal terms on other substantial and collateral points”.

When Conservatives protested to him against the implication that the war must go on to free the enslaved, even after reunion had been won, he explained, “To me it seems plain that saying reunion and abandonment of slavery would be considered, if offered, is not saying that nothing else or less would be considered, if offered.” After his reelection, in his annual message to Congress, he said, “In stating a single condition of peace, I mean simply to say that the war will cease on the part of the government, whenever it shall have ceased on the part of those who began it.” On February 3, 1865, he met personally with Confederate commissioners on a steamship in Hampton Roads, Virginia. He promised to be liberal with pardons if the South would quit the war, but he insisted on reunion as a precondition for any peace arrangement. In his Second Inaugural Address he embodied the spirit of his policy in the famous words “with malice toward none; with charity for all.” His terms satisfied neither the Confederate leaders nor the Radical Republicans, and so no peace was possible until the final defeat of the Confederacy.

At the end of the war, Lincoln’s policy for the defeated South was not clear in all its details, though he continued to believe that the main object should be to restore the “seceded States, so-called,” to their “proper practical relation” with the Union as soon as possible. He possessed no fixed and uniform program for the region as a whole. As he said in the last public speech of his life (April 11, 1865), “so great peculiarities” pertained to each of the states, and “such important and sudden changes” occurred from time to time, and “so new and unprecedented” was the whole problem that “no exclusive and inflexible plan” could “safely be prescribed.” With respect to states like Louisiana and Tennessee, he continued to urge acceptance of new governments set up under his 10 percent plan during the war. With respect to states like Virginia and North Carolina, he seemed willing to use the old rebel governments temporarily as a means of transition from war to peace. He was on record as opposing the appointment of “strangers” (carpetbaggers) to govern the South. He hoped that the Southerners themselves, in forming new state governments, would find some way by which whites and Blacks “could gradually live themselves out of their old relation to each other, and both come out better prepared for the new.” A program of education for the freedmen, he thought, was essential to preparing them for their new status. He also suggested that the vote be given immediately to some African Americans—“as, for instance, the very intelligent, and especially those who have fought gallantly in our ranks.”

On the question of reconstruction, however, Lincoln and the extremists of his own party stood even farther apart in early 1865 than a year before. Some of the Radicals were beginning to demand a period of military occupation for the South, the confiscation of planter estates and their division among the freedmen, and the transfer of political power from the planters to the formerly enslaved. In April 1865 Lincoln began to modify his own stand in some respects and thus to narrow the gap between himself and the Radicals. He recalled the permission he had given for the assembling of the rebel legislature of Virginia, and he approved in principle—or at least did not disapprove—Stanton’s scheme for the military occupation of Southern states. After the cabinet meeting of April 14, Attorney General James Speed inferred that Lincoln was moving toward the radical position. “He never seemed so near our views,” Speed believed. What Lincoln’s reconstruction policy would have been, if he had lived to complete his second term, can only be guessed at.

On the evening of April 14, 1865, 26-year-old John Wilkes Booth—a rabid advocate of slavery with ties to the South and the flamboyant son of one of the most distinguished theatrical families of the 19th century—shot Lincoln as he sat in Ford’s Theatre in Washington. Early the next morning Lincoln died.