Abraham Lincoln

The Kentucky farm his father bought near Hodgenville had a bad title, and the Lincolns lost it and moved to Indiana when Abraham was seven. His mother died of milk sickness on October 5, 1818. All the formal schooling he ever had, added together, came to under 12 months. At 22 he took a flatboat down to New Orleans, then settled at New Salem, Illinois, where he clerked, surveyed, ran the post office, and bought a general store with William Berry. It failed. Berry died in 1835 and left him holding the notes. Lincoln called the balance his national debt and was still paying it off more than a decade later. Ann Rutledge died of typhoid that August. He fell into a melancholy that frightened his friends.

Four years and 42 days, every one of them at war. He put down a rebellion of eleven states, freed the enslaved population of the Confederacy by proclamation, drove the 13th Amendment through a lame-duck House by two votes to spare, and was dead six weeks into the second term. Nobody has written a better American sentence than the one at Gettysburg. BriefHistory tells that presidency and the war it was made of. This page takes the 52 years in front of it and the century behind.

On January 1, 1841, he broke off his engagement to Mary Todd and came apart. Three weeks later he wrote to his law partner John T. Stuart that he was now the most miserable man living, and that if what he felt were spread evenly across the human family there would not be one cheerful face on earth. They married anyway, on November 4, 1842, and buried two of their four sons: Eddie in 1850, and Willie in the White House on February 20, 1862, at 11. Mary held séances in the mansion trying to reach him. The war Lincoln ran required things he never pretended were ordinary. He suspended habeas corpus, and some 15,000 civilians were held without trial, among them newspaper editors and the Ohio Democrat Clement Vallandigham, convicted by a military commission and banished to the Confederacy.

The funeral train carried him back to Springfield through a fortnight of cities and vast crowds, and the martyrdom was set before the burial was. In 1876 a Chicago counterfeiting ring tried to lift the body out of the tomb and ransom it for an imprisoned engraver. Robert Lincoln had the coffin sunk in a steel cage under 10 feet of concrete in 1901. The Lincoln Memorial opened on May 30, 1922, Black guests herded into a segregated section under Marine guard and the one Black speaker's address censored before delivery. Marian Anderson sang on those steps in 1939 and King spoke from them in 1963. Historians have ranked him first, or near it, in nearly every survey since 1948.

Abraham Lincoln's life against the full span of the corpus.

• Patent No. 6469, a device for buoying vessels over shoals invention
  The only patent ever issued to a president 1849
• The Lincoln-Douglas debates speech
  Seven debates across Illinois, printed as a book in 1860 and the reason anyone outside the state knew his name 1858
• Cooper Union address speech
  Delivered February 27, 1860 in New York and made him nationally plausible 1860
• Homestead Act law
  160 acres to anyone who would work it for five years 1862
• Morrill Land-Grant College Act law
  Federal land sold to endow a public university in every state 1862
• The Gettysburg Address speech
  272 words, delivered November 19, 1863 1863

• February 12, 1809 aged 0 Born in a one-room cabin on Sinking Spring Farm in Kentucky
• October 5, 1818 aged 9 His mother dies of milk sickness in Indiana He was nine. Thomas Lincoln married Sarah Bush Johnston the following December.
• 1832 aged ~23 Elected captain by his own volunteer company in the Black Hawk War He said later that no honor had ever pleased him more. The company saw no combat.
• August 25, 1835 aged 26 Ann Rutledge dies of typhoid at New Salem How far the friendship had gone cannot be reconstructed from the record.
• January 23, 1841 aged 31 Writes to John T. Stuart that he is the most miserable man living
• November 4, 1842 aged 33 Marries Mary Todd in Springfield
• June 16, 1858 aged 49 Gives the house divided speech on taking the Senate nomination He lost the seat and gained the country.
• February 20, 1862 aged 53 Willie Lincoln dies in the White House at 11 The second of their four sons to die.
• April 15, 1865 aged 56 Dies at 7:22 in the morning in a boarding house across from Ford's Theatre

• Frederick Douglass 1818–1895
  Former slave who became a leading abolitionist, orator, and advocate for equal rights. received at the White House
• Stephen A. Douglas 1813–1861
  Illinois senator whose popular-sovereignty doctrine and debates with Lincoln framed the crisis over slavery. defeated by
• John Wilkes Booth 1838–1865
  Actor who assassinated President Lincoln in 1865 — altering the course of Reconstruction. killed by
• Roger B. Taney 1777–1864
  Chief justice whose Court shaped federalism but is principally remembered for the disastrous Dred Scott decision. defied
• Robert E. Lee 1807–1870
  Confederate commander whose military reputation and later commemoration became central to Civil War memory and the Lost Cause. offered command to
• Harriet Beecher Stowe 1811–1896
  Author of Uncle Tom's Cabin whose novel galvanized the abolitionist movement. received at the White House
• Mary Todd Lincoln 1818–1882
  First Lady who buried three sons and was committed by the fourth in a public insanity trial. married to
• Edwin M. Stanton 1814–1869
  Lincoln's war secretary whose refusal to be fired triggered the impeachment of Andrew Johnson. appointed
• John Hay 1838–1905
  Lincoln's young secretary who lived to run American foreign policy and write the Open Door notes. secretary