Ludovic ondiviela biography of abraham lincoln
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Lincoln lost that election, but his spectacular performance against Douglas in a series of nationally covered debates made him a contender for the 1860 Republican presidential nomination.
Fighting for Unity and Freedom
In the 1860 campaign for President, Lincoln firmly expressed his opposition to slavery and his determination to limit the expansion of slavery westward into the new territories acquired from Mexico in 1850.
When Confederate batteries fired on Fort Sumter and forced its surrender, he called on the states for 75,000 volunteers. After weighing several options, including abandoning the fort, Lincoln informed the governor of South Carolina of his intentions to resupply the fort.
Rather than face a future in which black people might become free citizens, much of the white South supported secession. With the electoral support of Union soldiers, many of whom were given short leaves to return home to vote, and thanks to the spectacular victory of Union troops in General Sherman's capture of Atlanta, Lincoln was decisively reelected.
What started as a war to preserve the Union and vindicate democracy became a battle for freedom and a war to end slavery when Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation in January of 1863.
Early in Lincoln’s life, his family enjoyed considerable prosperity, but legal problems involving land ownership prompted his family to move to Indiana in December 1816. Further, he rallied most of the northern Democrats to the Union cause. The Civil War had begun. If the end brings me out wrong, ten angels swearing I was right would make no difference.
Five months before receiving his party's nomination for President, he sketched his life:
"I was born Feb. 12, 1809, in Hardin County, Kentucky. In 1858, he went up against one of the most popular politicians in the nation, Senator Stephen Douglas, in a contest for the U.S. Senate. Lincoln led the UnitedStatesthrough its greatest constitutional, military, and moral crisis—the AmericanCivil War—preserving the Union, abolishing slavery, strengthening the nationalgovernment and modernizing the economy.
Although the Proclamation did not free all slaves in the nation—indeed, no slaves outside of the Confederacy were affected by the Proclamation—it was an important symbolic gesture that identified the Union with freedom and the death of slavery.
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.... Despite having far more men and materials at their disposal, Union armies had little success during the early part of the war.
Lincoln received little formal education during his youth, but his stepmother taught him how to read and encouraged him to learn on his own. He served for a time as a soldier in the Black Hawk War, taught himself law, and held a seat in the Illinois state legislature as a Whig politician in the 1830s and 1840s. Lincoln was convinced that within the branches of government, the presidency alone was empowered not only to uphold the Constitution, but also to preserve, protect, and defend it.
Lincoln was assassinated in 1865, just as the Civil War was coming to an end and the country was beginning to heal from the wounds of war. He lost the election, but in debating with Douglas he gained a national reputation that won him the Republican nomination for President in 1860. Still active in politics, voters elected Lincoln to serve in the Illinois General Assembly in 1834, and they re-elected him in 1836.