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U.S Presidents — Abraham Lincoln

OVERVIEW Name: Abraham Lincoln President: # 16 Term Number(s): 19, 20 Term Length: 4.1 Took Office: March 4, 1861 Left Office: April 15, 1865 Age when Elected: 52 Party: Republican National Union Also Known As: "Honest Abe, Illinois Rail-Splitter" BIOGRAPHIC INFORMATION Education: no formal education Occupation: Lawyer Other Governmental Position: Member of the U.S. House of Representatives from Illinois's 7th District. Military Service: Illinois Militia Religion: unknown Spouse(s): Mary Todd Lincoln (November 4, 1842) Children: Robert Todd Lincoln, Edward Lincoln, Willie Lincoln, Tad Lincoln Birthdate: February 12, 1809 Birthplace: Hardin County, Kentucky Deathdate: April 15, 1865 Deathplace: Washington, D.C. Age at Death: 56 Cause of Death: assassinated Place of Internment: Oak Ridge Cemetery in Springfield, Illinois Signature FIRST ELECTION Election Year: 1860 Main Opponent: John C. Breckinridge Voter Participation: 81.20%   Electoral Popular States Click for larger image Winner 180 (59.00%) 1,865,908 (39.80%) 18 Main Opponent 72 (23.76%) 848,019 (18.10%) 11 total 303 4,685,561 33 SECOND ELECTION Election Year: 1864 Main Opponent: George B. McClellan Voter Participation: 73.80%   Electoral Popular States Click for larger image Winner 212 (91.00%) 2,218,388 (55.00%) 22 Main Opponent 21 (9.01%) 1,812,807 (45.00%) 3 total 233 4,031,887 25 CABINET AND COURT APPOINTMENTS Vice President: Hannibal Hamlin, Andrew Johnson Secretary of State: William H. Seward (1861–1865) Secretary of the Treasury: Simon Cameron (1861–1862), Edwin M. Stanton (1862–1865) Secretary of War: Simon Cameron (1861–1862), Edwin M. Stanton (1862–1865) Secretary of the Navy: Gideon Welles (1861–1865) Secretary of the Interior: Caleb B. Smith (1861–1862), John P. Usher (1863–1865) Attorney General: Edward Bates (1861–1864), James Speed (1864–1865) Postmaster General: Montgomery Blair (1861–1864), William Dennison Jr. (1864–1865) Supreme Court Assignments: Noah Haynes Swayne (1862), Samuel Freeman Miller (1862), David Davis (1862), Stephen Johnson Field (1863), Salmon Portland Chase (1864) PRESIDENT'S BIOGRAPHY 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 February 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, Lincoln 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 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. FIRST LADY'S BIOGRAPHY Mary Todd Lincoln As a girlhood companion remembered her, Mary Todd was vivacious and impulsive, with an interesting personality—but "she now and then could not restrain a witty, sarcastic speech that cut deeper than she intended..." A young lawyer summed her up in 1840: "the very creature of excitement." All of these attributes marked her life, bringing her both happiness and tragedy. Daughter of Eliza Parker and Robert Smith Todd, pioneer settlers of Kentucky, Mary lost her mother before the age of seven. Her father remarried, and Mary remembered her childhood as "desolate" although she belonged to the aristocracy of Lexington, with high-spirited social life and a sound private education. Just 5 feet 2 inches (157.5 cm) at maturity, Mary had clear blue eyes, long lashes, and light-brown hair with glints of bronze. She danced gracefully, she loved finery, and her crisp intelligence polished the wiles of a Southern coquette. Nearly 21, Mary went to Springfield, Illinois, to live with her sister Mrs. Ninian Edwards. Here she met Abraham Lincoln—in his own words, "a poor nobody then." Three years later, after a stormy courtship and broken engagement, they were married. Though opposites in background and temperament, they were united by an enduring love—by Mary's confidence in her husband's ability and his gentle consideration of her excitable ways. Their years in Springfield brought hard work, a family of boys, and reduced circumstances to the pleasure-loving girl who had never felt responsibility before. Lincoln's single term in Congress, for 1847–1849, gave Mrs. Lincoln and the boys a winter in Washington, but scant opportunity for social life. Finally her unwavering faith in her husband won ample justification with his election as President in 1860. Though her position fulfilled her high social ambitions, Mrs. Lincoln's years in the White House mingled misery with triumph. An orgy of spending stirred resentful comment. While the Civil War dragged on, Southerners scorned her as a traitor to her birth, and citizens loyal to the Union suspected her of treason. When she entertained, critics accused her of unpatriotic extravagance. When, utterly distraught, she curtailed her entertaining after her son Willie's death in 1862, they accused her of shirking her social duties. Yet Lincoln, watching her put her guests at ease during a White House reception, could say happily, "My wife is as handsome as when she was a girl, and I...fell in love with her; and what is more, I have never fallen out." Her husband's assassination in 1865 shattered Mary Todd Lincoln. The next 17 years held nothing but sorrow. With her son Tad she traveled abroad in search of health, tortured by distorted ideas of her financial situation. After Tad died in 1871, she slipped into a world of illusion where poverty and murder pursued her. A misunderstood and tragic figure, Mrs. Lincoln passed away in 1882 at her sister's home in Springfield—the same house from which she had walked as the bride of Abraham Lincoln, 40 years before. MAJOR EVENTS 1861: Lincoln's election is viewed as the tipping point for the sectional conflict and seven Southern states secede from the Union. 1861: Jefferson Davis is elected president of the Confederate States of America, which consisted of all Southern states stretching from South Carolina to Texas. 1861: An attack on Fort Sumter, a federal station in the South Carolina, marks the start of the Civil War. 1863: The Emancipation Proclamation frees all slaves in the seceded states that are not yet under Northern control. 1863: West Virginia joins the Union. 1863: The Battle of Gettysburg. In the war's greatest battle, the confederate's General Lee fails to take Washington D.C. and never returns to the North. 1864: Nevada joins the Union. 1865: The Thirteenth Amendment allows for the emancipation of all slaves with no compensation to their owners. 1865: Confederate General Robert E. Lee surrenders to General Grant, designating the end of the Civil War. 1865: Lincoln is assassinated by John Wilkes Booth at Ford's Theater in Washington D.C. TRIVIA 1. Abraham Lincoln was the tallest of all the presidents at 6 feet, 4 inches (193 cm) tall. 2. Lincoln has no living descendants. 3. Lincoln was very poor when he married Mary Todd. Her family did not approve of the engagement.