Abraham Lincoln

Abraham Lincoln was born on 12 February 1809 on Sinking Spring Farm near Hodgenville in Kentucky, a slave state on what was then the western frontier. His parents Thomas and Nancy were Baptists who rejected slavery. Disputes over land titles drove the family across the Ohio in 1816 to free Indiana, where his mother died of 'milk sickness' two years later. His stepmother Sarah Bush Johnston encouraged his hunger for reading.

Lincoln grew up with hard farm labour and had less than twelve months of schooling in all. As a young man he took a flatboat down the Mississippi to New Orleans, where he saw a slave market. In New Salem, Illinois, he was elected captain of a militia company in the Black Hawk War of 1832. He studied law books on his own, was admitted to the bar in 1836 and in 1842 married Mary Todd, the daughter of a slaveholder from Kentucky.

As a lawyer Lincoln rode the court circuit of Illinois and became one of the best-known advocates in the state, for railway companies among others. Politically he was a Whig who believed in roads, canals, banks and education as means of social advancement. He called slavery a moral evil, but accepted that the constitution protected it in the existing states; above all he wanted to prevent it spreading to the west.

As president he put the preservation of the Union first and gradually tied the abolition of slavery to it. He kept the border states in the Union, changed generals until he found in Ulysses Grant the commander willing to fight the war through, and used his war powers broadly. In the Gettysburg Address and his second inaugural address he gave the war a meaning that went beyond victory: a 'new birth of freedom'.

During Lincoln's lifetime the United States grew from seven to more than thirty million inhabitants and pushed on to the Pacific, at the expense of the indigenous peoples and of Mexico. Every new state raised the question: slavery or not? The North industrialised and attracted immigrants; the economy of the South rested on cotton and on almost four million enslaved people.

Compromises of 1820 and 1850 kept the balance for a time, but the Kansas–Nebraska Act (1854), the Dred Scott decision (1857) and John Brown's raid (1859) hardened the divisions. The old parties fell apart; the new Republican Party had support almost only in the North. That Lincoln won without a single southern state was, for the secessionists, proof that they had lost their influence in Washington.

The Civil War was the bloodiest conflict in American history and devastated large parts of the South. The Emancipation Proclamation at first freed only slaves in areas outside the Union's control, but it changed the character of the war and made British or French support for the South politically impossible. About 180,000 Black soldiers served in the Northern army.

Lincoln's conduct of the war was also controversial. He suspended the right of habeas corpus and had thousands of civilians held without trial; newspapers were temporarily banned. Under his presidency the largest mass execution in American history was carried out after the Dakota War of 1862: 38 Dakota were hanged, while he spared the other 265 of the 303 men condemned to death. The Homestead Act and the railway acts of 1862 accelerated the colonisation of the West.

On 9 April 1865 General Lee surrendered at Appomattox. Five days later, on Good Friday, John Wilkes Booth, a supporter of the South, shot the president in the head during a performance at Ford's Theatre. Lincoln died on 15 April at 7.22 a.m. in a house across the street. A funeral train carried his body in almost two weeks through seven states to Springfield, where he was buried.

His death made him a martyr of the Union; the Thirteenth Amendment came into force in December 1865. The policy of his successor Andrew Johnson and the collapse of Reconstruction, however, left the freed people without land and, after 1877, largely without rights. In the twentieth century the Lincoln Memorial in Washington (1922) became a place of the civil rights movement: Martin Luther King gave his 'I Have a Dream' speech there in 1963.