Abraham Lincoln example essay topic
435 words
Abraham Lincoln was born on February 12, 1809, in Hardin County, Kentucky. Both his parents were born in Virginia. His mother, who died when he was ten years old, was of a family of the name Hanks. His father moved from Kentucky to Indiana, in his eighth year. Indiana was a region, with many bears and other wild animals still in the woods. When Lincoln became of age he did not know much. Still somehow, he could read, write, and cipher. Lincoln made great efforts to attain knowledge while working on a farm, splitting rails for fences, and keeping store a New Salem, Illinois. He was a captain in the Black Hawk War, spent eight years in the Illinois legislature, and role the circuit of courts for many years. His law partner said of him, "His ambition was a little engine that know no rest".
He married Mary Todd, and they had four boys, only one of who lived to become an adult. 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. In addition, 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 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". Abraham Lincoln was elected the sixteenth President of the United States in 1861. His term ended in 1865.
In Lincoln's planning for peace, he was flexible and generous, encouraging Southerners to lay down their arms and join speedily in reunion. The spirit that guided him was that of his Second Inaugural Address, now inscribed on one wall of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. On Good Friday, April 14, 1865, John Wilkes Booth, an actor, who somehow thought he was helping the South, assassinated Lincoln at Ford's Theatre in Washington. The opposite was the result, for with Lincoln's death, the possibility of peace with fairness died.
