Honest Abe - Abraham Lincoln

Abraham Lincoln was born on a cold day in February in 1809; he was born in a one-room log cabin to Thomas Lincoln and Nancy Lincoln. When he was seven years old, his family left Kentucky because of land problems and they went to Indiana…they did not stay very long before they were moving again; Lincoln’s mother died soon after that and his father remarried to a woman named Sarah Johnston. She took Lincoln under her wing and raised him as if he was her own child.

When his father decided to move again, Lincoln made the decision to strike out on his own, he was twenty one years old; he found a job later that year working for a business man, taking goods down the Illinois and the Mississippi rivers from New Salem to New Orleans.

Because Lincoln was nothing more then a farm boy, he had little if any real education, he basically taught himself how to read and write, he read Shakespeare, the Bible and a book about George Washington…it is said that he walked twenty miles one time just to borrow a book.

Lincoln started his career in politics at the age of 23, he was not very successful but at least he had started. Later on, he was elected the captain of the Illinois militia and he helped to bury some bodies but that was about the extent of his fighting; he also worked in a store selling goods and then he became a postmaster and surveyor, it was in 1834 that he finally had some success in his political career, he won the state legislator and he began to teach himself law.

He was admitted in the Bar and he moved to Springfield Illinois and started to practice law with a friend, he became known as a formidable advisory and soon had the respect of the people in the area. Lincoln became more prosperous and served in the House of Representatives for four terms; it was at this time that Lincoln began to express his views on slavery, stating that is was bad politics.

In 1844 Lincoln and a friend joined the republican party which at the time was newly formed; Lincoln continued his law practice, he had a case about every day and in was not uncommon for Lincoln to use strategies that were basically unheard of during that time.

He married the daughter of a well-known slave owner and out of the four children that they had together only one reached adulthood, the child received the best of educations and he was sent to Harvard for his college years.

When Abraham Lincoln entered the presidential race he was not the most popular candidate and many did not think that he had that big of a chance to win, the people who ran his campaign used the fact that he was one of the small people that worked himself to the top and they used the nicknames Honest Abe and Rail Slitter to the max; there were thousands of people campaigning for him, but only in the North, in the South he did not do any campaigning and because of that he was basically unheard of down there.

On November 6, 1860, Abraham Lincoln became the 16th president of the United States of America, he won by a landslide and that with only the support of the states in the North, if you would combine the votes of the other candidates he would still have had more and he would still have won the presidency. God had put his man in place.

Although it was obvious that war was inevitable once the southern states declared themselves the Confederate union, Lincoln did everything that he could to preserve the peace and he refused to attack unless the he was attacked, it did not take long for this to happen, in 1861, Fort Sumter was attacked by the South and the war had begun.

Lincoln was a brilliant strategist and he personally chose his war generals, at the end of the war Lincoln attempted to bring peace and unity to the states as soon as possible, and his assassination made him a martyr for the idea of unity among the states