Abraham Lincoln

Lincoln was born on Feb. 12, 1809, in a log cabin in Hardin (now Larue) County, KY. In 1816 the Lincolns moved to Indiana, partly on account of slavery, Abraham recalled, but mainly on account of trouble in land titles in Kentucky. Land ownership was more secure in Indiana because the Land Ordinance of 1785 provided for surveys by the federal government; moreover, the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 forbade slavery in the area. Lincoln's parents belonged to a faction of the Baptist church that disapproved of slavery, and this affiliation may account for Abraham's later statement that he was "naturally anti-slavery" and could not remember when he "did not so think, and feel."

Before the civil war and becoming President Lincoln ran unsuccessfully for the Illinois legislature in 1832. Two years later he was elected to the lower house for the first of four successive terms (until 1841) as a Whig. His membership in the Whig Party was natural. Lincoln's father was a Whig, and the party's ambitious program of national economic development was the perfect solution to the problems Lincoln had seen in his rural, hardscrabble Indiana past. Lincoln became a lawyer in 1836, and in 1837 he moved to Springfield, where he became Stuart's law partner. With a succession of partners, including Stephen T. Logan and William H. Herndon, Lincoln built a successful practice.

As Lincoln's election became more likely in 1861, secessionists made it clear that their states would leave the Union. South Carolina took the lead, followed by six other cotton-growing states in the deep South. The upper South (Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, Kentucky, Missouri, and Arkansas) listened to and rejected the secessionist appeal. Lincoln felt that everyone should be counted as an equal and opposed slavery. After the secession the Confederates and the Union went to war. The war lasted a year with the Union winning.

After the Civil War Lincoln crated the Emancipation Proclamation on Sept. 22, 1862, bore this military justification, as did all of Lincoln's racial measures, including his decision in the final proclamation of Jan. 1, 1863, to accept blacks in the army. By 1864, Democrats and Republicans differed clearly in their platforms on the race issue: Lincoln's endorsed the 13TH Amendment to the Constitution abolishing slavery,