Abraham Lincoln

by Read Listen Learn

Abraham Lincoln

Six days after the end of the American Civil War in 1865, Abraham (or Abe) Lincoln was dead. His life was a fantastic journey from his one-room family home in Kentucky, where he was born in 1809, to the White House in Washington. Although he had only one year at school, he taught himself and became a lawyer. He believed in business and, when he became President, he modernised the American economy and banks. He wanted and got more railways and factories. But we do not remember Lincoln for these things. Abraham Lincoln is – for the American people and the world – the President who won the Civil War, kept America together and stopped slavery forever.

Abe taught himself as a young man. His father was not interested in books or learning. The future President opened and quickly sold a shop when he was a young man but then decided to work in the law. Again, he taught himself. Lincoln, in fact, said: “I studied with nobody”. In 1864, his hard work paid off and he started working as a lawyer. And he was good at it. He became famous.

But Lincoln was also interested in politics. We often think that he was against slavery from the beginning, but he was a very clever politician and he only fought when he thought he could win. At different times, he said different things about slavery. For example, in the beginning of his political career, he did not want any new states to accept slavery, but – he said – he was happy for states where there were already slaves to continue with them. He also believed that free slaves should return to Africa, to a country that the Americans made and called ‘Liberia’ – which means ‘freedom’. Later, he told the people that the Civil War was to keep the United States united. It was not about slaves. However, slavery was very important for him from his first day as a politician to his last day alive.

American school children study Lincoln’s life from start to finish, but people from outside the U.S. perhaps think that it was easy for Lincoln to become President because, these days, he is so famous and popular. In fact, he did not win his first political contest and he even left politics for a time. When he decided to run for President, it was not an easy race. It got even harder when he won because seven states from the south of the country immediately said they were going to leave the U.S.A. and make a separate country. Lincoln told them that he was happy for them to keep their slaves, but they did not believe it.

Lincoln tried hard to stop the war between the northern and southern states, but he could not. The South was the first to attack, although many people told the President to hit first and hit hard. He refused. The war was a long and hard one. It was not always clear that the North was going to win. The fighting lasted four years and there were 600,000 dead soldiers at the end of it. The Southern states were broken, hungry and angry. There was going to be a long, hard road in front of Lincoln and the country to re-build the economy and make the South forget that they had lost so many sons, fathers and husbands, that they had lost their farms and their futures.

But Lincoln was not the man who was going to do this difficult job. On 14 April, 1865, Lincoln went to the theatre with his wife and some friends. An actor, John Wilkes Booth, who was sorry that the South lost the war, shot the President in the back of the head from only a couple of metres away. Lincoln died a few hours later.