Abraham Lincoln

Student candidate: Ursache Radu-Andrei

Teacher coordinator: Diana Neacsu

Contents

Introduction......................................................................................................................................2

Chapter One Early Life and Ancestry.............................................................................................3

Chapter Two Candidacy and Presidency.........................................................................................5

Chapter Three Assassination and Funeral.......................................................................................8

Conclusions....................................................................................................................................10

Motto: (I am a slow walker, but I never walk back.)

Abstract: Born in February 1809, Abraham Lincoln was the man who would become the
16th president of the United States. His journey being a very impressive one: going from steering
rafts to running one of the biggest countries in the world and also ending slavery.

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 Introduction

Abraham Lincoln was the 16th president of the United States and is regarded as one of
America's greatest heroes due to his role as savior of the Union and emancipator of the slaves.
His rise from humble beginnings to achieving the highest office in the land is a remarkable story.
The two reasons why I chose to write about Abraham Lincoln are that he was a
successful man. He started from the bottom and slowly became the most important man in the
country. And because I admire him for having freed African-Americans from slavery.
The present paper is divided into three chapters. Chapter One Early Life and Ancestry
presents Lincoln’s childhood from his low beginnings to when he witnessed slavery. Chapter
Two Candidacy and Presidency focuses on Lincoln’s presidential candidacy and a little about
his role in the civil war. And finally, Chapter Three Assassination and Funeral tells about how
and where he was killed and by whom.

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 Chapter One Early Life and Ancestry

Abraham Lincoln was born on the 12th of February 1809 as Thomas and Nancy Hanks'
second child. He saw the light in a very small cabin on a farm near Hodgeville in Kentucky . His
father was the descendant of an English immigrant, Samuel Lincoln, who settled in
Massachusetts in 1638.

In his youth, Lincoln didn't like the hard work of the frontier life . His neighbors and
family thought he was reading, scribbling, writing, ciphering and writing poetry just to avoid
manual labor. His stepmother also admitted he did not like physical work, but enjoyed reading.

Lincoln was mostly self-educated. His formal schooling from several itinerant teachers was
irregular and may effectively have amounted to less than a year; anyway, he was an eager reader
and had a constant interest in learning . Those around young Lincoln remembered that he read
again and again the King James Bible, Aesop’s Fables, Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress, and
Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe among others.

Figure 1 Young Lincoln by Charles Keck at Senn Park, Chicago

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Abe's developing ambition to attend school disagreed with his father's pretentions. He often
appeared lazy to his neighbors. His father frequently rented him out to do manual labor such as

shucking corn, hoeing, gathering, and plowing . He turned out to be a strong man with an
amazing skill at handling the axe. It’s said that he could chop more wood and split more rails
than anyone in the area.

Much larger and stronger than the other boys in the country, Abe could surpass and beat all of
them. Different from most boys of his time, Abe avoided hunting because he hated killing
animals.

Figure 2 A young Abe Lincoln chopping wood.

Despite gaining a reputation as a prankster, and for his narrative abilities, he also gained a
reputation for being honest. At the age of nineteen, he was hired to co-steer a flat raft down the
Mississippi River to unload produce to be sold at the plantations in the South and to come back
with the money acquired. They paid him eight dollars per month for these services . More
significantly, these raids into the South opened Abe's eyes to the world above the Indiana frontier
and possibly begun to shape his attitude against the horrors of slavery as he saw firsthand what
happened at auctions and how slaves were treated.

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 Chapter Two Candidacy and Presidency

On May 9–10, 1860, the Illinois Republican State Convention was held in
Decatur. Lincoln's followers organized a campaign team led by David Davis, Norman
Judd, Leonard Swett, and Jesse DuBois, and Lincoln received his first endorsement to run for the
presidency. Exploiting the embellished legend of his frontier days with his father, Lincoln’s
supporters adopted the label of “The Rail Candidate”.

Figure 3 The Rail Candidate—Lincoln's 1860 candidacy is depicted as held up by the slavery issue—
a slave on the left and party organization on the right.

On May 18, at the Republican National Convention in Chicago, Lincoln became the
Republican candidate on the third ballot, beating candidates such as Seward and Chase. Lincoln's
success depended on his campaign team, his reputation as a moderate on the slavery issue, and
his strong support for Whiggish programs of internal improvements and the protective tariff.
Lincoln had a highly effective campaign team who carefully projected his image as an
ideal candidate. His supporters also portrayed him as "Honest Abe," the country fellow who was
simply dressed and not especially polished or formal in his manner but who was as honest and
trustworthy as his legs were long.

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 As Lincoln's ideas of abolishing slavery grew, so did his supporters. People of the
Northern states knew the Southern states would vote against Lincoln because of his ideas of anti-
slavery and took action to rally supporters for Lincoln. Unlike other candidates, Lincoln gave no
speeches.
Instead, he monitored the campaign closely and relied on the enthusiasm of the
Republican Party. There were thousands of Republican speakers who focused first on the party
platform, and second on Lincoln's life story, accentuating his childhood poverty. The goal was to
demonstrate the superior power of "free labor", whereby a common farm boy could work his
way to the top by his own efforts.

Figure 4 Wood engraving of Lincoln,

taken two days following his nomination as president.

Abraham Lincoln is elected the 16th president of the United States over a deeply divided
Democratic Party, becoming the first Republican to win the presidency. Lincoln received only
40 percent of the popular vote but handily defeated the three other candidates: Southern
Democrat John C Breckinridge, Constitutional Union candidate John Bell, and Northern
Democrat Stephen Douglas, a U.S. senator for Illinois.

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 By the time of Lincoln’s inauguration on March 4, 1861, seven states had seceded, and
the Confederate States of America had been formally established, with Jefferson Davis as its
elected president. One month later, the American Civil War began when Confederate forces
opened fire on Union-held Fort Sumter in South Carolina. Lincoln called for 75,000 troops to
suppress the Southern rebellion. Virginia, Arkansas and Tennessee then seceded, refusing to
fight their fellow Southerners. The president knew little of military affairs, but just as he had
educated himself as a youth, he began a self-education in the art of war, checking books of
military history out of the Library of Congress. From this reading, he sometimes understood
better than some of his generals that destroying the enemy’s armies was more important than
capturing the Confederate capital.
In the autumn of 1862, following the Battle of Antietam, he announced his Emancipation
Proclamation. It granted freedom to slaves—but only to those in the areas still in rebellion, it was
a war measure to both preserve the Union and end slavery.
Major battles had each produced over 10,000 casualties, Grant’s campaign in Virginia
already suffered nearly 50,000 losses. The war ended on April 9, 1865, when General Robert Lee
surrendered the Confederate army to Grant.

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 Abraham Lincoln and the Soldiers Rally Round the Flag

Chapter Three Assassination and Funeral

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 On April 14, 1865, in full view of a theatre audience, the President of the United States
was assassinated. Despite everyone seeing the murderer, he still got away. The assassination
happened five days after the surrender of Robert Lee and the Confederate Army.

Figure 5 Lincoln being killed in the presidential booth of Ford's Theatre.

John Wilkes Booth was a famous actor and a Confederate spy from Maryland. In 1864,
he planned to kidnap Lincoln in exchange for the release of Confederate prisoners. After
attending one of Lincoln’s speeches in which he was promoting voting rights for blacks, Booth
changed his plans into assassinating the president. Knowing that Lincoln and Grant would be at
Ford’s Theatre, Booth planned to assassinate Lincoln and Grant there. With his bodyguard
missing, Lincoln left to attend the play Our American Cousin on April 14. Lincoln’s bodyguard,
John Parker, left the theater to drink at the saloon next door. Lincoln now unguarded was sitting
in his state box in the balcony. Seizing the opportunity, Booth sneaked up on Lincoln and aimed
at the back of his head firing at point-blank range, killing the President. Henry Rathbone faced
Booth, but he stabbed him and escaped.
Doctor Charles Leale, found the President impassive, barely breathing and with no
detectable pulse. The doctor tried to clear the blood clot, after which the President began
breathing more naturally. Lincoln died on April 15 after being in a coma for nine hours.
Secretary of War Stanton saluted and said, “Now he belongs to the ages”.
Lincoln's flag-enfolded body was then escorted in the rain to the White House by
bareheaded Union officers, while the city's church bells rang. Six hundred invited guests
attended the funeral of President Lincoln. The East Room flooded with mourners out into the
Green Room. Devastated, Mary Todd Lincoln would not attend the funeral services. General
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Grant was seated alone at the head of the catafalque in full uniform, the hero on a pedestal, his
face gleaming with tears. Rev. Dr. Phineas D. Gurley compared Lincoln with Moses in his long
and sentimental sermon. When the service ended the grievers filed out in arranged lines, emerged
through the north door, and stood on the driveway awaiting the parade to the Capitol. Thousands
of mourners spread beyond the fence. At two o'clock the coffin was carried by an honor guard
from the White House and placed on a black-draped funeral car drawn by six white horses.
Church bells tolled through the city as the car drove down the driveway, through the iron gates,
and away to the Capitol rotunda where Lincoln's body first lay in state and then was taken onto
cities across the nation.

Figure 5 The death of Abraham Lincoln. This is the only photo of the 16th US President in death.

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 Conclusions

Summary: This essay is a short summary of Abraham Lincoln’s life. Starting with his
childhood and how he grew up in poverty, going to the time he saw the horrors of slavery. Later
on, after going through debates against slavery, Lincoln ran for presidency with the purpose of
abolishing slavery and thanks to his supporters and campaign team he won and managed to end
slavery in some of the states and in the end he was shot in a theater and later died.

Opinion: In my opinion Abraham Lincoln was a great man, his story being a remarkable
one. He started from the bottom and slowly he rose up to become the most important man in the
country. He was also known as the liberator of slaves, the savior of the Union and a martyr for
the cause of freedom. But the most admirable thing about him was that despise everyone
accepting that black men are inferior and should be slaves, he wanted to change that and return
their freedom.

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 References

1.“Abraham Lincoln.” Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation, 17 May 2017. Web. 21 May 2017.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abraham_Lincoln.

2.“Abraham Lincoln – Early Years.” MrNussbaumcom Abraham Lincoln Early Years

Comments. N.p., n.d. Web. 21 May 2017. http://mrnussbaum.com/childhood/.

3.“Abraham Lincoln.” Civil War Trust, www.civilwar.org/learn/biographies/abraham-lincoln.

4. “Abraham Lincoln.” HistoryNet, www.historynet.com/abraham-lincoln.

5. “Abraham Lincoln Funeral.” WHHA, www.whitehousehistory.org/abraham-lincoln-funeral.

6.Abraham Lincoln and the Soldiers Rally Round the Flag

http://www.mrlincolnandfriends.org/abraham-lincoln-soldiers

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