Jdhee biography of abraham lincoln
When Abraham Lincoln was elected President in , seven slave states left the Union to form the Confederate States of America, and four more joined when hostilities began between the North and South. A bloody civil war then engulfed the nation as Lincoln vowed to preserve the Union, enforce the laws of the United States, and end the secession.
Jdhee biography of abraham lincoln: ^ Reservations have been
The war lasted for more than four years with a staggering loss of more than , Americans dead. Midway through the war, Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, which freed all slaves within the Confederacy and changed the war from a battle to preserve the Union into a battle for freedom. He was the first Republican President, and Union victory ended forever the claim that state sovereignty superseded federal authority.
Killed by an assassin's bullet less than a week after the surrender of Confederate forces, Lincoln left the nation a more perfect Union and thereby earned the admiration of most Americans as the country's greatest President. Born dirt-poor in a log cabin in Kentucky in , Lincoln grew up in frontier Kentucky and Indiana, where he was largely self-educated, with a taste for jokes, hard work, and books.
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 s and s. From state politics, he moved to the U. House of Representatives in , where he voiced his opposition to the U. In , he went up against one of the most popular politicians in the nation, Senator Stephen Douglas, in a contest for the U.