Abraham Lincoln

I was born in a Kentucky cabin in 1809 and raised on the rough edge of Indiana. My schooling was brief; my teachers were borrowed books—the Bible, Shakespeare, and Euclid. I swung an ax, split rails, kept a store at New Salem, and once poled a flatboat to New Orleans, where the sight of slavery came close enough to trouble a young man’s sleep.

I taught myself the law, rode the Eighth Judicial Circuit with carpetbag and casebook, and made my way by plain speech and patient listening. In our Illinois House I served as a Whig; in Congress I questioned a war begun on doubtful grounds. The Kansas-Nebraska Act called me back to the field, and in debating Judge Douglas I said what I believed: a house divided against itself cannot stand.

Chosen president in 1860, I took the oath to preserve the Union. With rebellion pressing, I stretched powers I would gladly have left unused. I called up men, kept Maryland and Kentucky from slipping away, and, as a war measure, proclaimed freedom in the states in arms against us. Black men shouldered muskets for the Union; their service helped seal the argument for liberty.

War is a hard master. I read dispatches past midnight, visited hospitals, signed pardons where duty allowed, and sought to bind the nation’s wounds with malice toward none. I urged the Thirteenth Amendment forward. Not long after Richmond fell and General Lee yielded, an assassin’s shot ended my part. I hoped the better angels of our nature would finish the work.