Abraham Lincoln Born: America's Great Emancipator

Abraham Lincoln was born on February 12, 1809, in a one-room log cabin with a dirt floor near Hodgenville, Kentucky. His mother, Nancy Hanks Lincoln, died of milk sickness when he was nine, and his formal education amounted to less than eighteen months of frontier schooling spread across several years. He taught himself to read by firelight, borrowing books from neighbors and walking miles to find new ones. He failed in a business venture, lost multiple elections, suffered what appears to have been severe clinical depression throughout his adult life, and was prone to dark moods that his law partner William Herndon described as so deep that Lincoln sometimes worried his friends by talking about death. He was elected to the Illinois state legislature, served a single term in Congress, and lost two Senate races before winning the presidency in 1860 on a platform opposing the expansion of slavery. Seven Southern states seceded before he took office. He had no military experience and took command of a war effort that had no precedent in American history. He fired five commanding generals before he found Ulysses S. Grant. The Emancipation Proclamation, issued on January 1, 1863, freed no enslaved people on the day it took effect: its reach was legally limited to Confederate states where Lincoln had no practical authority, and it explicitly exempted loyal border states and Union-occupied areas of the South. Its power was symbolic and strategic, reframing the war as a fight for human freedom and discouraging European governments from recognizing the Confederacy. He was shot by John Wilkes Booth at Ford's Theatre on Good Friday, April 14, 1865, five days after Robert E. Lee's surrender at Appomattox. He never saw the end of the war he had held together.