Abraham Lincoln

Abraham Lincoln (February 12, 1809 – April 15, 1865) was the 16^th President of the United States from 1861 until 1865, his assassination.

He grew up in a poor family on the western frontier, so Lincoln was self- educated but however he became a country lawyer, Illinois state legislator in the 1830s, a one-term member of the United States House of Representatives in the 1840s, but he failed twice to be elected to the United States Senate in the 1850s. He was a person who opposed slavery in the United States, and after this, he won the Republican Party nomination and was elected President of the US in 1860.

Lincoln exercised war powers, which included the arrest and detention without judgment of thousands of secessionists. Moreover, his efforts to the slavery abolition included issuing his Emancipation Proclamation in 1863, encouraging frontier states to ban slavery and helping get though Congress the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution and he did the job in 1865. 

Under his leadership, the Union established a naval blockage that close down the South’s normal trade, took control of the frontier slave states at the beginning of the war and tried to catch the Confederate capital at Richmond, Virginia. Many generals failed and each time that these generals failed, Lincoln replaced another until Grant succeeded in 1865.

He approached to War Democrats and managed his own re-election in the 1864 presidential election. Politically, he fended with patronage; he pitted his opponents and appealed to the American people with the power of oratory.

Lincoln delivered a speech in 1863; it was a symbol of nationalism, republicanism, equal rights, liberty and democracy.  But six days after the delivery of Confederate commanding general Robert E. Lee, Lincoln was killed by John Wilkes Booth. His death was the first murder of  a U.S. president.

Lincoln has been classified by people as one of the three greatest U.S. presidents.

Marta Alcover Ibáñez