Abraham Lincoln

Abraham Lincoln's Life Story

From a one-room log cabin in the Kentucky woods to the highest office in a nation tearing itself apart, Abraham Lincoln's life remains one of America's most powerful stories of self-made character, moral courage, and tragic greatness.

Born February 12, 1809, to poor frontier parents, Lincoln received almost no formal schooling. He taught himself by firelight, split rails, clerked in a store, served briefly in the Black Hawk War, and became a respected Springfield lawyer known for honesty and a gift with words. After years in the Illinois legislature and a single term in Congress, his 1858 debates with Stephen Douglas against the spread of slavery made him a national figure. In 1860 he was elected the 16th President.

The country immediately split. Seven Southern states seceded before he even took office. For four brutal years Lincoln held the Union together through military setbacks, political attacks, and personal grief—the deaths of two young sons and a wife's deepening despair. He issued the Emancipation Proclamation, delivered the Gettysburg Address, and framed the war as a test of whether government "of the people, by the people, for the people" could endure. Re-elected in 1864, he lived just long enough to see Robert E. Lee surrender at Appomattox.

Five days later, on April 14, 1865, John Wilkes Booth shot him at Ford's Theatre. Lincoln died the next morning.

This is the story of the rail-splitter who became the Great Emancipator—a man of melancholy, humor, and unshakable purpose who saved the Union and ended slavery at the cost of his own life. His words and example still define what America aspires to be.