Abraham Lincoln

On February 12, 1809, in Hardin County, Kentucky, Abraham Lincoln was born into a frontier family of limited means. He educated himself through borrowed books, flatboat work, and years of manual labor before building a legal career in Springfield, Illinois. Service in the Illinois legislature and a single term in Congress turned the prairie lawyer into a rising Whig and then Republican politician.

Lincoln won the presidency in 1860 after the Lincoln-Douglas debates and the sectional crisis over slavery's expansion. As president from 1861 to 1865, he issued the Emancipation Proclamation, defended Union authority during the Civil War, and pressed for the Thirteenth Amendment before his assassination in April 1865. The Gettysburg Address and his Second Inaugural Address made wartime policy inseparable from a larger constitutional argument about nationhood and slavery.

Lincoln's leadership shaped the Reconstruction Amendments and permanently altered the relationship between federal power and civil rights. The Thirteenth Amendment, the Civil Rights Act of 1866, and later memory of Gettysburg all grew in the shadow of decisions made during his presidency.