Abraham Lincoln became the United States’ 16th President in 1861, issuing the Emancipation Proclamation that declared forever free those slaves within the Confederacy in 1863.
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. ined within the Union.Four more slave states joined the Confederacy but four rema 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:
American politicians like to cast themselves as “of-the-people,” but few have come from beginnings as humble as Lincoln’s. He was born on the Kentucky frontier in 1809 in a dirt-floor log cabin with one window, one door hung on leather hinges, and a primitive stick and mud chimney. He was tall, very tall. One of his good friends remembered him as “a long tall raw boned boy—odd and gawky.” His clothes rarely fit. One country observer wrote, “Between the shoe and Sock & his britches—made of buckskin there was bare & naked 6 or more inches of Abe Lincoln shin bone.”[i] But the ragged appearance clothed an intellectually ravenous mind, and discovering books changed Lincoln’s life. He read everything he could get his hands on, and in his mid-twenties, he taught himself law, receiving his license to practice in 1836.
It was an auspicious moment to begin a career as a lawyer, for political freedom was rapidly expanding. Although the privilege of voting was restricted to a very few wealthy, white, landowning men in the years immediately following the Revolution, by the