Abraham Lincoln

Abraham Lincoln, the son of a farmer, was born near Hodgenville, Kentucky, on 12th February, 1809. Although his parents were virtually illiterate, and he spent only a year at school, he developed a love of reading. In March 1830, the Lincoln family moved to Illinois.

After helping his father clear and fence his father's new farm, Lincoln moved to New Salem, where he worked as a storekeeper, postmaster and surveyor. He took a keen interest in politics and supported the Whig Party. In 1834 Lincoln was elected to the Illinois State Legislature where he argued that the role of federal government was to encourage business by establishing a national bank, imposing protective tariffs and improving the country's transport system.

In his spare time Lincoln continued his studies and became a lawyer after passing his bar examination in 1836. There was not much legal work in New Salem and the following year he moved to Springfield, the new state capital of Illinois.

In November, 1842, Lincoln married Mary Todd, the daughter of a prosperous family from Kentucky. The couple had four sons: Robert Lincoln (1843-1926), Edward Baker Lincoln (1846-50), William Lincoln (1850-62) and Thomas Lincoln (1853-1871). Three of the boys died young and only Robert lived long enough to marry and have children.

In 1844 Lincoln formed a legal partnership with William Herndon. The two men worked well together and shared similar political views. Herndon later claimed that he was instrumental in changing Lincoln's views on slavery.

Lincoln continued to build up his legal work and in 1850 obtained the important role as the attorney for the Illinois Central Railroad. He also defended the son of a friend, William Duff Armstrong, who had been charged with murder. Lincoln successfully undermined the testimony of the prosecution's star witness, Charles Allen, and Armstrong was found not guilty.

In the Illinois State Legislature Lincoln spoke against slavery but believed that Southern states had the right to maintain their current system. When Elijah Lovejoy, an anti-slavery newspaperman was killed, Lincoln refused to condemn lynch-law and instead criticized the extreme policies of the American Anti-Slavery Society.

In 1856 Lincoln joined the Republican Party and challenged Stephen A. Douglas for his seat in the Senate. Lincoln was opposed to Douglas's proposal that the people living in the Louisiana Purchase (Louisiana, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Missouri, Nebraska, Iowa, the Dakotas, Montana, and parts of Minnesota, Colorado and Wyoming) should be allowed to own slaves. Lincoln argued that the territories must be kept free for "poor people to go and better their condition".

Lincoln raised the issue of slavery again in 1858 when he made a speech at Quincy, Illinois. Lincoln commented: "We have in this nation the element of domestic slavery. The Republican Party think it wrong - we think it is a moral, a social, and a political wrong. We think it is wrong not confining itself merely to the persons of the States where it exists, but that it is a wrong which in its tendency, to say the least, affects the existence of the whole nation. Because we think it wrong, we propose a course of policy that shall deal with it as a wrong. We deal with it as with any other wrong, insofar as we can prevent it growing any larger, and so deal with it that in the run of time there may be some promise of an end to it."