Who Was Abraham Lincoln?

1. The log cabin and the self-made man

Abraham Lincoln was born on 12 February 1809 in a one-room log cabin on Sinking Spring Farm near Hodgenville, Kentucky, the son of Thomas Lincoln, a farmer and carpenter, and Nancy Hanks Lincoln. The family moved to Indiana in 1816 and to Illinois in 1830, and Lincoln had less than a year of formal schooling in total. He was largely self-educated, reading borrowed books by firelight, and he later said that his entire schooling amounted to no more than a year's attendance. The books he absorbed thoroughly were few: the Bible, Shakespeare, Aesop's Fables, Robinson Crusoe and the life of George Washington. He read them again and again until their language became his own.

The log cabin has become the central image of Lincoln's life, and it is worth asking how much of it is true and how much is myth. The poverty was real: his family were poor frontier farmers, his mother died when he was nine, and he worked as a labourer, storekeeper, postmaster and surveyor before he became a lawyer. But the image was also useful, and Lincoln and his supporters used it deliberately in his campaigns, presenting him as the rail-splitter who rose by his own effort. His opponents mocked the image, and his supporters embraced it, and the argument over whether Lincoln was a man of the people or a man who performed being a man of the people has never quite ended.

What is not in doubt is that his self-education shaped his mind. Because he had read few books deeply rather than many books shallowly, he developed a style of thinking that was logical, patient and grounded in first principles. His speeches work by definition and deduction: he defines a term, follows it to its conclusion, and invites the listener to follow. That style, learned from Euclid's geometry and from the Bible, is what makes his writing so different from the ornate political rhetoric of his time, and it is why his words are still quoted when other politicians of his era are forgotten.

2. Lawyer, debater and the road to the White House

Lincoln was elected to the Illinois legislature in 1834 and served four terms. He married Mary Todd on 4 November 1842 and built a successful law practice in Springfield, becoming one of the most respected lawyers in Illinois. He served one term in the US House of Representatives from 1847 to 1849, where he opposed the Mexican-American War, and then returned to law. He might have stayed there, a successful provincial lawyer, if the slavery question had not drawn him back into politics. The Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, which allowed new territories to decide for themselves whether to permit slavery, revived the national debate, and Lincoln returned to public life as an opponent of slavery's expansion.

His 1858 debates with Stephen A. Douglas for the US Senate made him nationally known. Lincoln lost the election, the Illinois legislature chose Douglas, but the debates were published across the country, and Lincoln's argument, that slavery was a moral wrong that should be placed on a course to extinction, reached a national audience. He did not, at that point, call for the immediate abolition of slavery where it already existed, and he said plainly that he did not favour social and political equality between the races. Those statements are quoted today by critics who argue that Lincoln was no egalitarian, and they are quoted by defenders who argue that he was moving public opinion as fast as it could be moved. Both readings have evidence behind them.

In 1860 Lincoln was nominated as the Republican candidate for president, and he won the election in November, carrying the North and West while receiving almost no votes in the South. His election was the trigger for secession: South Carolina left the Union in December 1860, and by February 1861 seven Southern states had formed the Confederacy. Lincoln took office on 4 March 1861 insisting that the Union was perpetual and that secession was illegal, and a month later Confederate forces fired on Fort Sumter, beginning the Civil War. He had won the presidency on a platform of stopping slavery's expansion; he would be forced, within two years, to decide whether the war was about the Union alone, or about slavery as well.

3. The Civil War: saving the Union first

Lincoln's chief goal at the start of the war was to preserve the Union, and he said so plainly. In a famous letter to Horace Greeley in 1862 he wrote that his paramount object was to save the Union, and that if he could save it without freeing any slave he would do it, and if he could save it by freeing all the slaves he would do that too. This is often quoted as proof that Lincoln did not care about slavery, but that reading misses the context: he was speaking as a president with a constitutional duty, in a country where four slave states had remained loyal to the Union, and where freeing their slaves might have driven them into the Confederacy. His private hatred of slavery was clear; his public policy was constrained by the need to keep the Union together.

The war went badly for the North in its first years, and Lincoln cycled through generals, searching for one who would fight. He endured defeats, criticism from his own party, and the deaths of his soldiers in numbers that are still hard to comprehend: more than 600,000 Americans died in the war, a scale of loss no other American war has matched. He also suspended the writ of habeas corpus, shut down newspapers, and arrested critics, actions that his defenders describe as wartime necessity and his critics describe as violations of civil liberty. The debate over Lincoln's wartime powers is still live, and it is one of the reasons historians argue about him: the same man who wrote the most eloquent defence of democracy in American history also used powers that no peacetime president would dare to claim.

In 1863 the tide turned. The Union victories at Gettysburg and Vicksburg in July 1863, and Lincoln's appointment of Ulysses S. Grant as commander of all Union armies in 1864, put the North on the road to victory. Lincoln was re-elected in 1864, defeating George McClellan, and in April 1865 the Confederate general Robert E. Lee surrendered at Appomattox. The Union was saved. But the war had cost more American lives than any other conflict, and the country Lincoln had saved was a different country from the one he had inherited, with slavery destroyed and the question of what freedom would mean for four million freed people still unanswered.

4. Emancipation: the war becomes a war against slavery

On 1 January 1863 Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, declaring enslaved people in the rebelling states free and authorising Black men to serve in the Union army. The Proclamation did not free slaves in the loyal border states, and it did not free slaves in areas already under Union control, which is why it is sometimes described as a military measure rather than a moral one. That description is accurate as far as it goes, but it understates what the Proclamation did: it transformed the war from a struggle to restore the Union into a struggle against slavery, it made foreign intervention on behalf of the Confederacy politically impossible for Britain and France, and it opened the Union army to nearly 180,000 Black soldiers, whose service changed the moral character of the war.

Lincoln then pushed for the Thirteenth Amendment, which abolished slavery throughout the United States. Congress passed it in January 1865, and it was ratified in December 1865, eight months after his death. The amendment was the legal end of American slavery, and Lincoln's role in it was decisive: he lobbied members of Congress personally, used patronage to win votes, and treated the amendment as the condition on which the war's meaning depended. His critics note that he had once been willing to accept slavery's continued existence where it already was; his defenders note that he moved, under the pressure of war and of Black Americans' own demands, from containing slavery to destroying it, and that the movement mattered more than the starting point.

The question of Lincoln's views on race remains the most contested part of his legacy. Early in his presidency he supported the colonisation of freed Black Americans to Africa or Central America, a policy that seems shocking today and was controversial even then. By 1864 he had abandoned it, and in his last public speech, on 11 April 1865, he publicly supported limited Black suffrage, for Black soldiers and educated Black men. John Wilkes Booth was in the audience for that speech, and he later said it was the final provocation that drove him to murder. Whether Lincoln would have gone further towards full equality, had he lived, is one of the great unanswerable questions of American history, and historians divide sharply on it.

5. The Gettysburg Address and the second inaugural

Lincoln delivered the Gettysburg Address on 19 November 1863, at the dedication of the cemetery at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, where thousands of soldiers had died four months earlier. In 272 words he redefined the war: it was not only about preserving the Union, but about whether a nation conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal could long endure. The speech was brief, almost shockingly so by the standards of the day, when the main orator spoke for two hours, and some listeners at the time thought it too short to matter. Within years it was recognised as one of the greatest speeches in the English language, and it remains the most quoted American political text after the Declaration of Independence.

His second inaugural address, delivered on 4 March 1865, a month before his death, is even more remarkable. In it Lincoln refused to claim that God was on the Union's side, and instead suggested that the war might be God's punishment on the whole nation, North and South, for the sin of slavery. He closed with the words that have become his epitaph: with malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds. It is a speech of extraordinary humility from a man on the verge of victory, and it is the best evidence for those who argue that Lincoln's greatness lay in his moral imagination as much as in his politics.

These two speeches are why Lincoln is remembered as a writer as well as a president. Winston Churchill, another leader who wrote his way into history, admired Lincoln's prose, and modern speechwriters still study the Gettysburg Address as a model of compression. But the speeches also raise a question: how much of Lincoln's reputation rests on his words, and how much on his deeds? His defenders say the words and the deeds were the same, that the speeches stated the principles he acted on. His critics say the words were more generous than the policies, and that the gap between Lincoln's language and his actions on race is the real story. The argument will not be settled, because it is really an argument about what America owes its promises.

6. Assassination and the martyr president

On the evening of 14 April 1865, five days after Lee's surrender at Appomattox, John Wilkes Booth, a Confederate sympathiser and actor, shot Lincoln at Ford's Theatre in Washington, D.C. Lincoln died the next morning, 15 April 1865. He was the first American president to be assassinated, and his death, on Good Friday, immediately took on religious overtones: he was mourned as a martyr who had died for the nation's sins, and his funeral train carried his body through the North for two weeks, past crowds who had never seen him alive. The assassination also changed the course of Reconstruction, because his successor, Andrew Johnson, lacked Lincoln's political skill and his commitment to protecting the freed people, and the settlement that followed was harsher and more confused than the one Lincoln had begun to design.

Booth's conspiracy was broader than one man: his associates attacked the Secretary of State and planned to kill the Vice President, in an attempt to decapitate the Union government. The conspirators were tried by a military commission and four were hanged. The assassination has been studied ever since, not only as a crime but as a turning point: had Lincoln lived, would Reconstruction have been gentler, and would the freed people have been better protected? Most historians think Lincoln would have faced the same resistance from Southern whites and from his own party, but that his political skill and his authority as the man who won the war would have given Reconstruction a better chance. It is a counterfactual, and like all counterfactuals it cannot be proved, but it is the reason his death feels, to many Americans, like a second tragedy on top of the war itself.

The martyrdom also shaped Lincoln's reputation in ways that have complicated honest assessment. For a century after his death, criticism of Lincoln was almost taboo in the North, and his image, the log cabin, the stovepipe hat, the beard, the sad face, became an American icon, carved into a mountain and a memorial in Washington. Only in recent decades have historians felt free to examine his record on race, his wartime powers and his political calculations without being accused of disloyalty. That examination has not diminished him; if anything, it has made him more interesting, because a Lincoln who struggled, changed his mind and made compromises is a more useful model than a Lincoln who was always right.

7. Legacy: the greatest president, and the argument that never ends

Historians consistently rank Lincoln among the greatest American presidents, usually first, alongside George Washington and Franklin Roosevelt. The case for that ranking is straightforward: he preserved the Union, he ended slavery, and he did both while maintaining democratic government through a civil war that could have destroyed it. No other president faced a crisis of that scale, and no other president's decisions mattered so much to so many people. His words, above all the Gettysburg Address and the second inaugural, gave the American experiment a moral language that it still uses, and his life, from log cabin to White House, became the central American story of self-improvement.

The argument against the legend is also serious, and it deserves to be heard. Lincoln was, for most of his career, a moderate on race by the standards of his time and a conservative by the standards of ours. He suspended civil liberties, he was willing to accept slavery's survival in 1861, and his plans for Reconstruction were vague when he died. Nelson Mandela, who also led a country out of racial oppression, faced a similar question about how far a leader should go and how fast, and his answer was different from Lincoln's in important ways. Mahatma Gandhi, who admired Lincoln's moral language, would have rejected his willingness to wage war. These comparisons do not diminish Lincoln; they place him in history, as a man of his time who pushed his time further than most of his contemporaries were willing to go.

The deepest question Lincoln leaves behind is the one he posed at Gettysburg: whether a nation dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal can long endure. America is still answering it, and the answer is still uncertain. Lincoln's life suggests that the answer depends on leaders who are willing to change their minds, to accept the costs of their principles, and to speak plainly about what the country claims to be. For readers who want to go further, the best next steps are his own words, the collected speeches and letters, which are short, clear and more revealing than any biography, and the National Park Service's account of the Gettysburg Address. The biography on this site gives the verified facts of his life; his speeches give the man himself, and they are the reason he is still argued about, and still read, more than a century and a half after his death.

Frequently asked questions

Sources and further reading

• Encyclopaedia Britannica — Abraham Lincoln
• Wikipedia — Abraham Lincoln
• National Park Service — The Gettysburg Address
• National Archives — The Emancipation Proclamation

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• Who Was Adolf Hitler? — Adolf Hitler led the Nazi Party and ruled Germany as dictator from 1933 to 1945, started the Second World War in Europe and was central to the Holocaust.
• Who Was Alan Turing? — Alan Turing defined modern computing, broke German naval Enigma and proposed the Turing test. This explains his science, his war work and his tragic end.
• Who Was Albert Einstein? — Albert Einstein rewrote physics with relativity and won the Nobel Prize for the photoelectric effect. This explains his ideas, his life and his legacy.
• Who Was Alexander Graham Bell? — Alexander Graham Bell patented the first practical telephone in 1876. This explains his work with the deaf, the patent fight and his wider inventions.
• Who Was Alexander the Great? — Alexander the Great built one of history's largest empires before dying at 32. This explains his conquests, his cities and the debate over his legacy.
• Who Was Alfred Nobel? — Alfred Nobel invented dynamite, held 355 patents and founded the Nobel Prizes. This explains his explosives empire, his will and the prizes' legacy.
• Who Was Allama Iqbal? — Allama Iqbal was Pakistan's national poet, whose ideas shaped the case for Pakistan. This explains his poetry, his philosophy and his legacy.
• Who Was Benazir Bhutto? — Benazir Bhutto was the first woman to lead a Muslim-majority country, serving as prime minister of Pakistan in 1988-90 and 1993-96.
• Who Was Bob Marley? — Bob Marley took reggae from Jamaica to the world and became a symbol of peace, resistance and unity. This explains his life, his music and his legacy.
• Who Was Bruce Lee? — Bruce Lee was the martial artist and actor who carried Hong Kong action cinema to the world and founded Jeet Kune Do, leaving a lasting influence.
• Who Was Charles Darwin? — Charles Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection, published in On the Origin of Species in 1859, became the foundation of modern biology.
• Who Was Charles Dickens? — Charles Dickens was the greatest novelist of the Victorian era, whose serialised novels mixed comedy, social criticism and unforgettable characters.
• Who Was Charlie Chaplin? — Charlie Chaplin created the Little Tramp, the most famous screen character of the silent era, and directed classics City Lights and The Great Dictator.
• Who Was Cleopatra? — Cleopatra VII was the last ruler of Ptolemaic Egypt, a multilingual stateswoman who kept her kingdom independent for 21 years before Rome annexed it.
• Who Was Diego Maradona? — Diego Maradona was an Argentine footballer who captained Argentina to the 1986 World Cup and is widely regarded as one of the greatest players in history.
• Who Was Don Bradman? — Don Bradman was an Australian cricketer who averaged 99.94 in Test cricket, a record so far ahead of any other batsman that it remains famous in sport.
• Who Was Elvis Presley? — Elvis Presley took gospel, country and rhythm and blues and turned them into rock and roll, becoming the most famous singer of his century.
• Who Was Emily Dickinson? — Emily Dickinson was an American poet who wrote nearly 1,800 poems in private in Amherst, Massachusetts, and was barely published in her lifetime.
• Who Was Faiz Ahmed Faiz? — Faiz Ahmed Faiz was Pakistan's most celebrated modern Urdu poet, whose verse joined romantic lyricism with resistance to injustice.
• Who Was Franz Beckenbauer? — Franz Beckenbauer was a German footballer known as Der Kaiser, who won the World Cup as captain in 1974 and as manager in 1990.
• Who Was Freddie Mercury? — Freddie Mercury was the lead singer of Queen, a four-octave voice and fearless showman who wrote Bohemian Rhapsody and We Are the Champions.
• Who Was Frida Kahlo? — Frida Kahlo was a Mexican painter known for uncompromising, brilliantly coloured self-portraits exploring identity, the body and death.
• Who Was Galileo Galilei? — Galileo Galilei reshaped astronomy with his telescopic discoveries of 1610, defended a Sun-centred universe, and was tried by the Inquisition in 1633.
• Who Was Genghis Khan? — Genghis Khan united the Mongol tribes and built the largest contiguous land empire in history, a conqueror and lawgiver whose legacy is still argued over.
• Who Was George Washington? — George Washington won American independence, presided over the Constitutional Convention, and as first president defined the office — then walked away.
• Who Was Guglielmo Marconi? — Guglielmo Marconi was an Italian inventor who built the first practical wireless telegraph and sent the first transatlantic radio signal in 1901.
• Who Was Henry Ford? — Henry Ford was an American industrialist who founded the Ford Motor Company, built the Model T and perfected the moving assembly line.
• Who Was Isaac Newton? — Isaac Newton wrote the laws of motion and universal gravitation, invented calculus and transformed optics, leaving a lasting legacy in science.
• Who Was James Watt? — James Watt did not invent the steam engine, but his separate condenser of 1765 made it efficient enough to power the Industrial Revolution.
• Who Was Jane Austen? — Jane Austen published six novels in her lifetime, anonymously, and died at 41. This explains her life, her novels, her irony and her growing reputation.
• Who Was Jesus Christ? — Jesus of Nazareth is the central figure of Christianity, the world's largest religion. This explains his life in the Gospels, his teachings and his legacy.
• Who Was Johan Cruyff? — Johan Cruyff was the star of Total Football, won three Ballon d'Or awards, and as a manager built the Barcelona team that shaped modern football.
• Who Was Johannes Gutenberg? — Johannes Gutenberg built the first mechanised printing press in Europe and printed the Gutenberg Bible around 1455, changing how the world shared ideas.
• Who Was John Keats? — John Keats died of tuberculosis in Rome at 25, having written his six great odes in a single year. This explains his short life, his poetry and his fame.
• Who Was Joseph Stalin? — Joseph Stalin led the Soviet Union from the 1920s until 1953, industrialised the country and led it through the Second World War, ruling through terror.
• Who Was Julius Caesar? — Julius Caesar conquered Gaul, crossed the Rubicon and remade Rome's calendar and government, and was murdered by senators who feared he would be king.
• Who Was Kobe Bryant? — Kobe Bryant won five NBA championships with the Los Angeles Lakers and became known for the Mamba Mentality, on and off the court.
• Who Was Leo Tolstoy? — Leo Tolstoy wrote War and Peace and Anna Karenina, then abandoned literary fame for a radical moral philosophy that influenced Gandhi and the world.
• Who Was Leonardo da Vinci? — Leonardo da Vinci painted the Mona Lisa and The Last Supper and filled notebooks with anatomy and engineering, becoming the symbol of the Renaissance.
• Who Was Ludwig van Beethoven? — Ludwig van Beethoven wrote nine symphonies, 32 piano sonatas and the Missa Solemnis, much of it while deaf. This explains his life and legacy.
• Who Was Mahatma Gandhi? — Mahatma Gandhi led India to independence through nonviolent resistance, and his ideas shaped civil-rights movements worldwide.
• Who Was Mao Zedong? — Mao Zedong founded the People's Republic of China in 1949 and led it until 1976, bringing unification and the Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution.
• Who Was Margaret Thatcher? — Margaret Thatcher was the first woman to serve as British prime minister, leading the UK from 1979 to 1990 through reform, the Falklands War and division.
• Who Was Marie Curie? — Marie Curie discovered polonium and radium and remains the only person to win Nobel Prizes in two different sciences, a pioneer of radioactivity research.
• Who Was Marilyn Monroe? — Marilyn Monroe was the biggest star of the 1950s, the blonde bombshell of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and Some Like It Hot, who fought the studio system.
• Who Was Mark Twain? — Mark Twain, born Samuel Langhorne Clemens, wrote Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn and became America's most famous humorist.
• Who Was Maya Angelou? — Maya Angelou was a poet, memoirist and civil rights activist whose autobiography I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings made her widely read.
• Who Was Michael Jackson? — Michael Jackson, the King of Pop, made Thriller, the best-selling album in history, and changed music video, dance and pop stardom.
• Who Was Mirza Ghalib? — Mirza Ghalib (1797-1869) is the pre-eminent Urdu and Persian poet of the last Mughal era, whose ghazals on love, loss and doubt are still recited.
• Who Was Muhammad Ali Jinnah? — Muhammad Ali Jinnah was the barrister and statesman who led the All-India Muslim League and became Pakistan's first Governor-General in 1947.
• Who Was Muhammad Ali? — Muhammad Ali was the three-time heavyweight champion who called himself The Greatest, and the most famous athlete of the twentieth century.
• Who Was Napoleon Bonaparte? — Napoleon Bonaparte rose from Corsica to Emperor of the French, redrew the map of Europe, and left a legal code that still shapes law across the world.
• Who Was Nelson Mandela? — Nelson Mandela spent 27 years in prison under apartheid, then became South Africa's first democratically elected president and a Nobel Peace laureate.
• Who Was Nikola Tesla? — Nikola Tesla developed the alternating-current power system, the induction motor and the Tesla coil, making long-distance electric power practical.
• Who Was Osama bin Laden? — Osama bin Laden founded al-Qaeda in 1988 and organised the September 11, 2001 attacks, in which nearly 3,000 people were killed.
• Who Was Pablo Neruda? — Pablo Neruda was Chile's great poet, a Nobel laureate, a communist senator and a diplomat. This explains his poetry, his politics and his death.
• Who Was Pablo Picasso? — Pablo Picasso co-founded Cubism, painted Guernica, and spent 75 years breaking the rules of art — the most influential artist of the twentieth century.
• Who Was Pelé? — Pele is the only footballer to win three World Cups, the youngest winner, and the game's first global icon. This is his life, his goals and his legacy.
• Who Was Pope Francis? The People's Pope — Pope Francis, the first pope from the Americas and the first Jesuit pope, led the Catholic Church from 2013 to 2025 with an emphasis on mercy and the poor.
• Who Was Prophet Muhammad? — The Prophet Muhammad is the founder of Islam, the world's second-largest religion. This explains his life, his teachings and his legacy.
• Who Was Queen Elizabeth II? — Queen Elizabeth II reigned for 70 years, from 1952 to 2022 — the longest reign in British history. This explains her life, her reign and her legacy.
• Who Was Rabindranath Tagore? — Rabindranath Tagore was the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, and the author of the national anthems of India and Bangladesh.
• Who Was Rosa Parks? — Rosa Parks was not a tired seamstress who acted on impulse. She was a trained activist and NAACP secretary whose bus refusal was a deliberate act.
• Who Was Rosalind Franklin? — Rosalind Franklin's X-ray image, Photograph 51, gave Watson and Crick the key evidence for the double helix. This is her life and the credit debate.
• Who Was Rumi? — Rumi, the thirteenth-century Persian poet of Konya, wrote the Masnavi and the Divan-e Shams, and became the most widely read poet in the world.
• Who Was Shane Warne? — Shane Warne took 708 Test wickets, bowled the Ball of the Century in 1993 and won the 1999 World Cup with Australia. This explains his career.
• Who Was Stephen Hawking? — Stephen Hawking was a theoretical physicist who showed that black holes emit radiation and wrote A Brief History of Time. He died in 2018, aged 76.
• Who Was Steve Jobs? — Steve Jobs co-founded Apple in 1976, was forced out in 1985, built Pixar, and returned to launch the iMac, iPod, iPhone and iPad. He died in 2011, aged 56.
• Who Was Thomas Edison? — Thomas Edison held 1,093 US patents, invented the phonograph and the practical incandescent lamp, and built the first commercial electric power system.
• Who Was Vincent van Gogh? — Vincent van Gogh produced about 2,100 artworks in a single decade, including The Starry Night and Sunflowers, and became famous only after his death at 37.
• Who Was William Shakespeare? — William Shakespeare is the most performed playwright in history, yet almost nothing is reliably known about his private life.
• Who Was William Wordsworth? — William Wordsworth launched English Romanticism with Lyrical Ballads and wrote The Prelude, the great autobiographical poem. This explains his life.
• Who Was Winston Churchill? — Winston Churchill led Britain through the Second World War and won the Nobel Prize in Literature, and his record on empire is still debated.
• Who Was Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart? — Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was a child prodigy who composed more than 600 works before his death at 35, defining the Classical era.
• Why Van Gogh Became Famous After Death — Vincent van Gogh died in 1890 almost unknown, and within a few decades his paintings were among the most loved in the world.