Who was Abraham Lincoln? The president who ended slavery

Abraham Lincoln was the 16th president of the United States, who served from March 1861 until he was assassinated in April 1865. A self-taught lawyer from the frontier, he was elected as slavery split the country, led the Union through the Civil War, declared enslaved people in the rebelling states free in 1863, and pressed Congress to pass the 13th Amendment, which abolished slavery nationwide.

In short

• Lincoln rose from poverty in Kentucky and Indiana to become an Illinois lawyer and politician who opposed the spread of slavery.
• His election in 1860 set off the secession of Southern states, eleven in all; he fought the war to restore the Union and came to make ending slavery one of its aims.
• The Emancipation Proclamation freed people only in rebel-held areas; the 13th Amendment, which he championed, ended slavery everywhere in the country.

Where did Lincoln come from?

Lincoln was born on 12 February 1809 in a one-room log cabin on a farm near Hodgenville, Kentucky. His family moved to Indiana when he was seven, and his mother died there two years later. He had less than a year of school in total and educated himself by reading borrowed books. In 1830 the family moved to Illinois, and the next year he settled in the village of New Salem, where he worked as a shopkeeper, postmaster and surveyor.

He entered politics early. He served four terms in the Illinois legislature from 1834, taught himself law and was licensed in 1836, and moved to Springfield, where he became one of the state's busiest lawyers. In 1842 he married Mary Todd; of their four sons, only Robert lived to adulthood. He served one term in the US House of Representatives, from 1847 to 1849, where he opposed the war with Mexico, and then went back to his law practice.

How did he become president?

The Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, which let new territories choose whether to allow slavery, brought Lincoln back into politics. He argued that slavery must not spread west, and in a speech at Peoria that year said he hated the professed indifference to its spread "because of the monstrous injustice of slavery itself." He joined the new Republican Party, and in 1858 ran for the Senate against Stephen Douglas. Their seven debates made Lincoln nationally known, though the Illinois legislature, which then chose senators, returned Douglas.

In 1860 the Republicans nominated Lincoln for president. On 6 November he won with just under 40% of the popular vote in a four-way race, carrying nearly all the free states and no slave state. Within weeks Southern states began to leave the Union, convinced his election threatened slavery. The causes of that crisis are set out in what caused the American Civil War.

What did Lincoln do as president?

Lincoln's central decision was that secession was illegal and the Union would be restored by force if necessary. He also used the powers of the office more broadly than any president before him: he called up troops, blockaded Southern ports and, in 1861, suspended the writ of habeas corpus in some areas, allowing arrests without trial, before Congress authorized it in 1863. Chief Justice Roger Taney ruled in 1861 that only Congress could do so, and Lincoln did not comply, which is why those actions are still studied in debates over presidential power.

Date	Event
6 November 1860	Elected president
20 December 1860	South Carolina secedes; six more states follow by February
4 March 1861	Inaugurated as the 16th president
12 April 1861	Confederate forces fire on Fort Sumter; the war begins
22 September 1862	Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, five days after the Battle of Antietam
1 January 1863	Emancipation Proclamation takes effect
19 November 1863	Gettysburg Address, at the dedication of a military cemetery
8 April 1864	The Senate passes the 13th Amendment
8 November 1864	Re-elected
31 January 1865	The House passes the 13th Amendment
4 March 1865	Second inaugural address
9 April 1865	Robert E. Lee surrenders at Appomattox Court House
14–15 April 1865	Shot at Ford's Theatre; dies the next morning
6 December 1865	The 13th Amendment is ratified

Lincoln said plainly that saving the Union came first. In August 1862 he wrote to the newspaper editor Horace Greeley: "My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery." He had in fact already drafted an emancipation order and was waiting for a military victory to announce it, so the letter also prepared the public for it.

What did the Emancipation Proclamation do, and not do?

The Emancipation Proclamation declared that enslaved people in the states then in rebellion "are, and henceforward shall be free." It was issued as a war measure, under the president's authority as commander in chief. That legal basis explains both its power and its limits, as the National Archives sets out.

It did	It did not
Declare enslaved people in rebel-held areas free	Apply to the loyal slave states of Delaware, Kentucky, Maryland and Missouri
Make ending slavery a Union war aim, so each Union advance brought freedom with it	Apply to parts of the Confederacy already under Union control
Open the Union army and navy to Black men; nearly 200,000 served	Free anyone at once where the Confederacy still ruled; freedom depended on Union victory
Make it hard for Britain and France, which had abolished slavery, to back the Confederacy	Have the permanence of a law or the Constitution; a war measure could be challenged once the war ended

That last limit is why Lincoln pushed for a constitutional amendment. The 13th Amendment passed the Senate in April 1864 but failed in the House. After his re-election, Lincoln pressed wavering members hard, and the House passed it on 31 January 1865. It was ratified in December 1865, eight months after his death. News of freedom reached the last large group of enslaved people in the former Confederacy, in Galveston, Texas, on 19 June 1865, the origin of Juneteenth.

How did Lincoln die?

On the evening of 14 April 1865, five days after Lee's surrender, Lincoln was watching a play at Ford's Theatre in Washington when the actor John Wilkes Booth, a Confederate sympathizer, shot him in the back of the head. He died the next morning, 15 April, the first American president to be assassinated. Booth was part of a group that also attacked the secretary of state, William Seward, who survived. Booth had been in the crowd on 11 April when Lincoln, in his last public speech, said he would prefer that the vote be "conferred on the very intelligent, and on those who serve our cause as soldiers" among Black men, the first time a president had publicly backed Black voting rights.

Vice President Andrew Johnson became president and clashed with Congress over how to rebuild the South. The 14th Amendment of 1868 and the 15th of 1870 went on to promise citizenship and voting rights that Lincoln's war had made possible.

What did Lincoln believe about race?

Still argued

Historians agree that Lincoln hated slavery and opposed its spread throughout his career. They disagree about how to read his views on race and how much they changed. In a debate at Charleston, Illinois, in 1858 he said he was "not, nor ever have been, in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races", and as late as 1862 he supported encouraging freed Black Americans to settle abroad. Critics such as the journalist Lerone Bennett Jr., in Forced into Glory (2000), argue that he was a reluctant emancipator pushed by events and by abolitionists. Others, such as the historian Eric Foner in The Fiery Trial (2010), argue that his views moved a long way during the war, as his last speech shows. Frederick Douglass, who knew him, said both things in 1876: that Lincoln was "preëminently the white man's President", and that judged by the opinion of the country he had to lead, he was "swift, zealous, radical, and determined."

Many quotations attributed to Lincoln online were never said by him. A good rule is to trust only words that can be traced to a speech, letter or published debate with a date, and the collected works make that easy to check. How his reputation has been built and argued over since 1865 is itself a lesson in how history is written.

Check yourself

• Without looking back, explain why the Emancipation Proclamation did not free enslaved people in Kentucky or Maryland.
• Why did Lincoln think a constitutional amendment was needed when the proclamation already existed?
• What did the letter to Horace Greeley say, and why did Lincoln write it when he did?

Sources

• The Emancipation Proclamation — U.S. National Archives
• 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution: Abolition of Slavery (1865) — U.S. National Archives
• Abraham Lincoln — Miller Center, University of Virginia
• Letter to Horace Greeley, 22 August 1862 — Abraham Lincoln Online
• Fourth Debate: Charleston, Illinois, 18 September 1858 — National Park Service, Lincoln Home
• Oration in Memory of Abraham Lincoln — Frederick Douglass, 1876, Teaching American History