Abhorring
war, Abraham Lincoln accepted it as the only means to save the
Union.
Abraham
Lincoln warned the South in his Inaugural Address: "In your
hands, my dissatisfied fellow countrymen, and not in mine,
is the momentous issue of civil war. The government will not
assail you.... You have no oath registered in
Heaven to destroy the government, while I shall have
the most solemn one to preserve, protect and defend it."
Lincoln
thought secession illegal, and was willing to use force to
defend Federal law and the Union. When Confederate batteries
fired on Fort Sumter and forced its surrender, he called on
the states for 75,000 volunteers. Four more slave states
joined the Confederacy but four remained within the Union. The
Civil War had begun.
The son
of a Kentucky frontiersman, Lincoln had to struggle for a
living and for learning. Five months before receiving his
party's nomination for President, he sketched his life:
"I
was born Feb. 12, 1809, in Hardin County, Kentucky. My parents
were both born in Virginia, of undistinguished
families--second 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
made extraordinary efforts to attain knowledge while working
on a farm, splitting rails for fences, and keeping store at
New Salem, Illinois. He was a captain in the Black Hawk War,
spent eight years in the Illinois legislature, and rode the
circuit of courts for many years. His law partner said of him,
"His ambition was a little engine that knew no
rest."
He
married Mary Todd, and they had four boys, only one of whom
lived to maturity.
In 1858
Lincoln ran against Stephen A. Douglas for Senator. He lost
the election, but in debating with Douglas he gained a
national reputation that won him the Republican nomination for
President in 1860.
As
President, he built the Republican Party into a strong
national organization. Further, he rallied most of the
northern Democrats to the Union cause.
On
January 1, 1863, he issued the Emancipation Proclamation that
declared forever free those slaves within the Confederacy.
Lincoln
never let the world forget that the Civil War involved an even
larger issue. This he stated most movingly in dedicating the
military cemetery at Gettysburg: "that we here highly
resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain--that this
nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom--and that
government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall
not perish from the earth."
Lincoln
won re-election in 1864, as Union military triumphs heralded
an end to the war. In his planning for peace, the President
was flexible and generous, encouraging Southerners to lay down
their arms and join speedily in reunion.
The
spirit that guided him was clearly that of his Second
Inaugural Address, now inscribed on one wall of the Lincoln
Memorial in Washington, D. C.:
"With
malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the
right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to
finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation's wounds....
"
On Good
Friday, April 14, 1865, Lincoln was assassinated at Ford's
Theatre in Washington by John Wilkes Booth, an actor, who
somehow thought he was helping the South. The opposite was the
result, for with Lincoln's death, the possibility of peace
with magnanimity died.
-
Abraham
Lincoln