Titans of History

LINCOLN

1809–1865

We here highly resolve that the 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, and for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

From Lincoln’s address at the dedication of the National Cemetery at Gettysburg (November 19, 1863)

“Honest Abe,” the president who saved the Union and freed the slaves, is a legend of American history. Truly good as well as truly great, this gaunt, austere figure, who rose from the Kentucky backwoods to lead his nation, evinced a humble charm that has made him loved as much as he is admired.

Though he received almost no formal education—off-and-on schooling “by littles,” as he put it—he educated himself and could quote swathes of the Bible and Shakespeare, becoming a master of the English language. Abraham Lincoln’s journey from the one-room Kentucky log cabin of his birth to the White House is the blueprint for the American Dream. His father and much-loved stepmother were almost illiterate. The lowly one-time rail-splitter taught himself law, established a flourishing Illinois practice, and—defending his well-known nonattendance at church—entered politics. First a Whig, then a founding member of the Republican Party, in 1860 Lincoln became the 16th president of the United States.

Lincoln’s leadership may in the end have kept the states united, but his election was the catalyst for their split. In 1858 Lincoln famously declared: “A house divided against itself cannot stand. I believe the government cannot endure permanently half-slave and half-free.” Lincoln’s preference for freedom was well known, and even before he took office in 1861, seven Southern states declared themselves a new nation—the Confederate States of America. Respecting the Constitution, Lincoln would not open hostilities—it was the Confederates who initiated civil war when they fired on Fort Sumter—but refusing to countenance permanent secession, he was firm in his resolve: the Union would not be broken.

Lincoln wanted to save the Union both for its own sake and to preserve an ideal of democratic self-government that he saw as an exemplar for the world. In his 1863 Gettysburg Address, Lincoln bound the nation “conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal” to the principles of democracy and equality on which it had been founded in 1776: “this nation,” he proclaimed, “shall have a new birth of freedom; and … government of the people, by the people, and for the people, shall not perish from the earth.” Lincoln reaffirmed a vision of the nation and its identity that endures to this day.

Lincoln’s wartime leadership ensured the Union’s victory. The struggle demanded extreme measures. Using emergency wartime powers, Lincoln suspended habeas corpus, blockaded southern ports and imprisoned without trial thousands of suspected Confederate sympathizers. His opponents, including the Copperheads lobbying for peace within the Union, criticized him violently, but, given the time and the circumstances, his methods were relatively humane. His innate magnanimity is clear in his treatment of the defeated Confederates: “Let ’em up easy,” he told his generals.

As the Union army’s commander-in-chief, the former lawyer displayed an instinct for strategy that belied his lack of military training. After several false starts, in Ulysses S. Grant he found a commander who instinctively understood his vision of how the war should be pursued: “I cannot spare this man,” was Lincoln’s reported response to criticism of Grant. “He fights.”

While Grant pursued the conflict with aggressive and highly successful campaigns, Lincoln traveled around the country inspiring fighters and followers alike. The eloquence and integrity of his addresses reached a climax at Gettysburg, where he dedicated the nation’s future to those who had died in its name.

Lincoln had been “naturally anti-slavery” since his youth, and it had been the issue that made him leave the law and re-enter politics in 1854. It was the Civil War that turned Lincoln into an outright abolitionist. His 1862 Emancipation Proclamation used his wartime powers to free all slaves in the rebel states. Bringing black support and enlisting soldiers for the Union cause, it was a decision as politically justifiable as it was morally sound. For Lincoln it was a triumph: “I never, in my life,” he said, “felt more certain that I was doing right, than I do in signing this paper.” Anxious to prevent a peacetime revocation of his emergency decree, Lincoln secured in 1865 the Thirteenth Amendment that enshrined in America’s Constitution the freedom of all its people.

Shot in the back of the head by the southern radical John Wilkes Booth as he attended the theater with his wife Mary on April 14, 1865, Lincoln became America’s first president to be assassinated in office. Some confusion surrounds the words spoken by John Stanton, the secretary of war, as Lincoln breathed his last. But truly Lincoln belongs both “to the angels” and “to the ages.”