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.