Abraham Lincoln

Abraham Lincoln was the 16th president of the United States. He was a Republican from Illinois and served from 1861 to 1865. People called him Honest Abe because he told the truth. He grew up poor on the frontier, split rails, worked hard, and taught himself by reading. He was born in Kentucky and grew up in Indiana, but Illinois was his home as a lawyer and politician. He was the first Republican elected president.

When Southern states left the Union, Lincoln said his first duty was to keep the United States one country. A country, he said, cannot be split in two. The Civil War followed. Besides saving the Union, he is remembered for ending slavery. In 1863 the Emancipation Proclamation freed slaves in the rebel states still at war. In 1865 he pushed the 13th Amendment, which banned slavery in the whole United States. He also signed the Homestead Act, so settlers could claim western land if they lived on it and farmed it, and a law to build a transcontinental railroad.

Lincoln spoke the Gettysburg Address in only a few minutes — about 270 words that Americans still know. In 1864 the country held a regular election during the Civil War, and he won a second term. That showed the Union still ran as a republic. In his second inaugural address he asked Americans to act with malice toward none and charity for all. Days after the war’s end, John Wilkes Booth shot him at Ford’s Theatre. Lincoln died the next morning.