Abraham Lincoln

16th President of the United States

Born: February 12, 1809, in Hardin County, Kentucky
Died: April 15, 1865, at Petersen's Boarding House in Washington, D.C.
16th President of the United States: March 4, 1861 to April 15, 1865

Born in Hardin County, Kentucky

"I was born February 12, 1809, in Hardin County, Kentucky. My parents were both born in Virginia, of undistinguished 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

David Herbert Donald shows that Abraham Lincoln was a master of ambiguity and expediency - but he also stresses that Abraham Lincoln was a great moral leader, inflexibly opposed to slavery and absolutely committed to preserving the Union.

Abraham Lincoln Biography

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Lincoln Transformed the Meaning of the Suffering

In the tradition of Garry Wills's modern classic Lincoln at Gettysburg, Ronald C. White Jr. offers a close reading of the speech Abraham Lincoln gave in 1865 at his second inauguration and declares it the man's finest and most important effort.

Greatest Speech

Political Genius

Through the 1850s, Lincoln, Seward, Chase and Bates had intertwined with the creation of a sectional Republican party. That Abraham Lincoln emerges to win the race is the result of character traits forged by life experiences that separated him from his rivals and provided him with advantages that were unrecognized at the time and would prove his political adroitness and eventual greatness.

Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln

Assassinated at Ford's Theatre in Washington

On Good Friday, April 14, 1865, Abraham Lincoln was assassinated at Ford's Theatre in Washington by the actor John Wilkes Booth. Booth thought he was helping the South, but the opposite was the result. After Abraham Lincoln's death, the possibility of peace with magnanimity died.

Assassination

John Wilkes Booth