Profiles on American Presidents Life and Presidency

American President

Biography

Generally considered to be the greatest president of the United States, who freed four million slaves and saved the nation after leading the Union to victory in the Civil War of 1861-65, Abraham Lincoln was born in Kentucky in 1809 to a pioneer family on what was then the western frontier of the United States. His family then moved to southern Indiana in 1816 and southern Illinois three years later, although Lincoln by all accounts never intended to follow the same social and economic path as these poor white farmers. Even as a young man, though, he picked up their strongly antislavery views and the common belief that poor whites had little opportunity to better their social and economic circumstances in the slave states. Given the lack of schools and universities on the frontier, almost all of Lincoln's education was really self-education, and he learned his writing and rhetorical skills from reading Shakespeare's plays and the King James Version of the Bible (McPherson 3). His literary genius enabled him to use the language from these sources to produce true masterpieces like the Gettysburg Address of 1863 and Second Inaugural Address on 1865 that stood the test of time. His early ventures such as founding a general store were not successful, although he did find his true vocation in law and politics. From the start, he was a member of the Whig Party, which favored the urban commercial and industrial regions over those of the agrarian and Southern-oriented Democratic Party. With his marriage to Mary Todd, a member of a prominent Whig family, Lincoln was also able to move in the highest social circles in Springfield, Illinois (McPherson 9).

When he was in the Illinois legislature, Lincoln supported a state bank and government funding for the Illinois Central Railroad, while in his private practice as an attorney he also represented railroads. Prior to being elected president in 1860, he had served only one term in Congress in 1846-48, where he came to public notice by opposing the Mexican War. Indeed, like many Northern Whigs he regarded this as a war of aggression in order to expand the territory open to slavery, and he voted repeatedly for the Wilmot Proviso that would have excluded this from these regions annexed from Mexico (Thomas 111). Lincoln never changed any of these views in his later political life, and when he was one of the early members of the new Republican Party, which formed to resist the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 (McPherson 24). He also ran (unsuccessfully) as a Free Soiler against Senator Stephen Douglass in 1858, although his debates with this great rival made him the leading contender for the Republican presidential nomination in 1860 (Thomas 171).

Domestic Issues

For Lincoln, no domestic issue was more important than the defeat of the Southern Confederacy and the destruction of slavery, although he was not an open abolitionist when he first assumed the presidency in 1861. He had not run for office with the promise of eliminating slavery where it already existed, but only to prevent its expansion to the western territories, although this was sufficient to push the Deep South out of the Union. Only when he requested troops to suppress the rebellion did the Upper South follow, and in the early years of the war Lincoln was particularly concerned that Border States like Maryland, Missouri and Maryland would also secede. This caused him to play down the issue of slavery in favor of simply fighting the war for reunification of the country, but by 1862 he concluded that the Confederacy could not be defeated without striking at slavery as well. After the Union victory at Antietam in 1862, Lincoln issued an Emancipation Proclamation that would free all slaves in those regions of the country that were still under Confederate control in January 1863 (McPherson 51).