Lincoln, Abraham(1809–65)

16th President of the United States

Abraham Lincoln is universally regarded as one of America's greatest presidents and one of its most effective commanders in chief. He is also one of the most mythic figures in American history, a fact that helps to explain his standing as the country's quintessential war president.

Born in rural Kentucky on February 12, 1809, Lincoln grew up in Indiana and reached manhood in Illinois, the state in which he made his career. Starting out as a clerk in a small store in New Salem, near Springfield, Illinois, he soon strove to become a public figure within his community. As part of that effort, Lincoln served in the militia during the Black Hawk War of 1832. He saw no combat and later made light of this, his only military experience. He nonetheless enlisted for three successive 30-day terms of service—in his own words, he “went the whole campaign”—and was elected captain of a militia company. This achievement gave him lifelong satisfaction. Even after the war's conclusion, Lincoln volunteered for yet a fourth term of service. Something about military life clearly appealed to him.

A member of the Whig Party who served several terms in the Illinois legislature, by the 1850s Lincoln was also a prosperous lawyer of wide reputation. He was married to Mary Todd Lincoln. They had four sons, but only one, Robert Todd Lincoln, survived to adulthood.

Abraham Lincoln was elected to the U.S. Congress in 1846, and served a single term from 1847 to 1849. His time in Washington coincided with the Mexican War, a conflict whose wisdom and justice he openly questioned. Like most Whigs, Lincoln was careful to vote in favor of the military appropriations required to sustain the armies in the field. Nevertheless, he forcefully criticized their commander in chief, Democratic Pres. James K. Polk, averring in one address before Congress that Polk must feel “the blood of this war, like the blood of Abel, crying from the ground against him.” He was especially incensed by what he considered the duplicity of the case for war that Polk presented to Congress, and argued that in his conduct of the war Polk sought to escape scrutiny “by fixing the public gaze on the exceeding brightness of military glory—that attractive rainbow, that rises in showers of blood, that serpent's eye, that charms but to destroy” (Basler, 439).

As the slavery controversy intensified in the 1850s, Lincoln joined the fledgling Republican Party, which was committed to excluding slavery from the western territories. In 1858 he ran for the U.S. Senate. He lost, but his debates [Page 420]with opponent Stephen A. Douglas gave him national stature and paved the way for a presidential run in 1860. Although he received less than 40 percent of the popular vote, he won a resounding victory in the Electoral College and became president-elect. Viewing a Republican president as illegitimate and unacceptable, the state of South Carolina seceded in December 1860. By the time Lincoln took office on March 4, 1861, seven states in the lower South had left the Union and formed the Confederate States of America.

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