On February 12th in the year 1809, Abraham Lincoln was born. He grew up in a one-room log cabin in Kentucky and later moved to Indiana when he was seven. He was very tall and very skinny with a lot of energy. When he was nine years old, his mother died. His father remarried soon after. Though Abraham Lincoln had only a few months of solid education, his stepmother taught him how to read and write. His dad taught him how to make fences and chop wood. He was known for splitting logs to make rail fences, so his nickname was “the Rail-splitter.” In Lincoln’s free time, he read books and wrestled. That made him very smart, clever and strong. He was also very popular and well liked throughout his community.
When Abraham Lincoln was twenty-two years old, he left home. His first job was working as a store clerk. The nickname “Honest Abe” came from when he accidentally overcharged a customer and ran two miles to charge them the right amount. When the store failed, the community liked him so much that they helped him find jobs as a Postmaster and a Surveyor. Later, he was a soldier in the Black Hawk War, but he wasn’t very good and told jokes about that.
In his 20s, Lincoln started to really enjoy law and politics. Instead of going to law school, Lincoln read any book about law that he could get his hands on. At the same time, he was running for Illinois State Legislature. He lost his first election, but in 1836, he ran again and won. In the same year he earned his license to practice law. The next year he moved to Springfield, Illinois to join a law firm. While he was serving four terms in the Illinois State Legislature, he supported himself by becoming a circuit-riding lawyer. He traveled by horse with two other lawyers and a judge to help people in other cities. Lincoln put notes in his hat because he had trouble remembering where they were. He always wore a stovepipe hat, so we could put a lot of notes in it.
In 1842 Lincoln married Mary Todd. She was the cousin of his first law partner. They had four children, but only one of them lived to adulthood. That was very hard for them. One of their children died when he was four from tuberculosis, another died at the age of 11 during Lincoln’s second term as President, and the last son died at the age of 18.
In 1858, the Republican Party nominated Lincoln for the US Senate. He ran against a popular politician name Stephen A. Douglas. Stephen A. Douglas was a supporter of slavery. Lincoln challenged him to a series of debates, called the Lincoln-Douglas debates. Douglas argued that new states should be able to decide for themselves if slavery is allowed in their state. Lincoln argued that slavery was wrong and it should not spread to new territories. Lincoln lost the election, but he got more popular because of the debates and his views.
In 1860 Lincoln was chosen by the Republican Party to run for president. When Lincoln won the election some Southern states started to secede from the union. Lincoln tried hard to keep the union together, but on April 12 the Confederates attacked Fort Sumter. That was the beginning of the Civil War. The first battle was the battle of Bull Run in Virginia. People were sitting at their picnic baskets expecting to see some sort of sports event, but that did not happen. Stonewall Jackson’s Confederate troops beat the Northerners back into retreat. This showed Lincoln it was going to be a long brutal war.
Lincoln realized the war was not about keeping the union together, it was about stopping slavery. So on January 1, 1863 he wrote the Emancipation Proclamation, which freed the slaves in the southern states. The Southerners were not happy. The northerners gained more people to fight for the union. On November 19, 1863, four months after the battle of Gettysburg, Lincoln gave his famous Gettysburg Address to commemorate all the dead soldiers. In 1864, he was reelected for a second term in office. The Civil War ended on April 9, 1865 when General E. Lee surrendered at Appomattox Courthouse to Ulysses S. Grant.
On Friday, April 14, 1865, five days after the war ended, President Lincoln was assassinated. Abraham Lincoln and his wife were going to a play called Our American Cousin, but sadly, the guard either left his post or fell asleep during the play and John Wilkes Booth, an angry southern actor, shot Lincoln in the back of the head. John Wilkes Booth jumped over the rail on to the stage and broke his leg, but still escaped. He was shot and killed 12 days later. They tried to save Lincoln, but he died the next day. They put his coffin on a train with his son’s to take them to be buried together in Springfield, Illinois. The train stopped in 11 cities so people could say their goodbyes.
Shuffle Your Feet
