Abraham Lincoln

Abraham Lincoln (photo) was a president who has left his mark on the United States history not only because he was involved in the U.S. Civil War but mainly because he is one of the first to have made laws to improve the black slaves' condition at the time when the triangular trade was booming. 

I-   Path in life
1) Childhood

    Abraham Lincoln was born in a log cabin (photo) in Hardin County, Kentucky (photo), in 1809. He is the son of two uneducated farmers. His father Thomas, a descendant of weavers who emigrated from England to Massachusetts in 1637, was a pioneer (someone who ventures into unknown territory to settle). On June 12th 1806, Thomas Lincoln married Nancy Hanks. Abraham lived a difficult childhood, following his father through the Indiana wilderness. They moved to the South West of Indiana because of a trial. He had very little formal schooling and was mostly self-educated, with a taste for jokes, hard work, and books. When Lincoln was nine, his 34-year-old mother died. His father married Sarah Bush Johnston, with whom Lincoln became very close. 

2) Adulthood

    Though Lincoln attended only 18 months of schooling, he was a voracious reader. Abraham Lincoln was soon driven

by a desire for social success. He served for a time as a soldier in the Black Hawk War, against the Amerindians. He had various jobs like grocer, mailman ... He do wanted to become lawyer and though books were scarce, at first, he studied law by himself. Lincoln moved to Springfield, in the Illinois, where he became lawyer, and a Republican politician. He married Mary Todd (photo) in Springfeild in 1842. She was from a wealthy slave-holding family in Lexington, Kentucky. They had four boys, only one of them lived to maturity. He began a political career whereas he was not thirty. 

II- Politics and struggle against Black Slavery
1) His debut in politics

    From 1828, Abraham Lincoln made a journey in the Mississippi - as he was boatman -, he was interested in slavery, established in the South of the USA. He already wanted to condemn it. 
    He was elected representative republican in 1834, and he integrated the Congress in 1847.
    In 1858 he stood for election for the Senate on behalf of the Republican Party. He confronted the Democratic candidate Stephen A. Douglas (photo), and he lost, but he became famous. Then, Abraham Lincoln won his party's nomination to the U.S.   This put him against

the powerful senator Stephen A. Douglas, one of Lincoln's rivals. A series of seven debates followed between Lincoln and Douglas in towns across Illinois during seventy days, in which slavery was a main topic. (photo) This revealed the struggle he wanted to lead as President against black slavery. 

2) The Presidency 

    On November 1860, he stood for the presidential election, and he was elected representative. He expressed his opposition to slavery and his determination to limit the expansion of slavery. Abraham Lincoln was elected the sixteenth President of the United States on November 6, 1860. His election victory created a North-South divide.   The South countries decided they didn’t want to be part of the union, so they tried to start a new country. Lincoln faced the greatest internal crisis of the U.S.A., which was several states seceding from the union. 
      On February 1861, the South countries founded the Confederate States of America.   The President decided to raise an army. 
    On April 12th   1861, whereas Lincoln was trying to diffuse the situation, and to reunify the country, the South countries attacked the fort of Sumter. It's the beginning of   the US Civil War. On January

1st, 1863 the Emancipation Proclamation is made public by the President. This was Lincoln’s declaration of freedom for all slaves in areas of the Confederacy. The South didn’t like this because they would have to free all their slaves if the North won the war. Slavery was forever ended with the passage of the 13th amendment.
      He was reelected President in November 1864.

III- Lincoln's death
1) The assassination

    On April 11th 1865, Lincoln spoke to a crowd outside the White House. Among other things, he suggested he would vote for rights for Black people. On April 14th , 1865, Lincoln was assassinated while he was attending a play at Ford's Theater in Washington, D.C. An actor, John Wilkes Booth (photo), shot him in the back of the head (photo) before escaping to Maryland. Lincoln died on April 15th. His murderer was a racist and a Southern sympathizer who hated everything the President stood for. This was the first presidential assassination in United States history. 

2) Homage

    As Lincoln is considered as one of the most influential, admired person, and the greatest president in the U.S.A. history, the nation pay tribute to him in different ways. A lot of monuments, inventions,

… were named in his honor. For example, a lot of military inventions   have his name, which was also given to the capital of the State of Nebraska; Lincoln's face appears on the five-dollar bill (photo). But there's two main commemorative constructions. The first one is the Lincoln Memorial (1914-1922), in Washington, built in his honor (photo). Inside, there is a huge statue of him (photo). The second one is his portrait carved on the famous Mount Rushmore (photo). Mount Rushmore National Memorial is a sculpture carved into the granite, near Keystone, in South Dakota. The carving started in 1927, and ended in 1941. We can also see on it George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Theodore Roosevelt.   

    Lincoln had some of the most difficult problems that any president ever had to face, and he died as an hero because of his opinions, and behaviour. He was one of the most important precursor of the movement against slavery and for the emancipation of Afro-Americans in the United States. Then, a lot of prominent figures took over from him, like Martin Luther King who is a very famous influential civil rights activist.