Abraham Lincoln

Abraham Lincoln

Before being able to evaluate Lincoln as a president and a war leader you need to evaluate him and understand him as a person. This gives you a greater insight into his psyche and helps you to infer the reasoning behind the courses of action he decided to take. Abraham Lincoln was born on February 12, 1809, on his father’s large but “Barren” farm near Hogdenville Kenucky. Growing up on his father’s farm he was put to work at an early age. From the age of eight, until he left home at twenty three, he was treated like a slave by his father. On days when Lincoln didn’t have any work to do on the family farm his father would rent him out to do work for the neighbors farms near by. As a boy he was never interested in orthodox Christianity of his father, but began cultivating a belief in fatalism. Lincoln’s early belief in fatalism derived some of his most notable traits: his compassion, his tolerance, his humbleness, his willingness to overlook mistakes, and his ability to change his mind or his policies when they are not working. He kept this belief through out his life, stating about his life, “In telling this tale I attempt no compliment to my own sagacity. I claim not to have controlled events, but confess plainly that events have controlled me”. Having little formal education he was forced to seek education through reading any thing he could get his hands on. He would read the bible, Shakespeare, fables, and was especially interested in history and held a reverence for the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. Often he would memorize whole passages from stories or books he especially liked, and would go on to quote them later in his political speeches, most notably a passage from the fable of the lion and the four bulls

“A kingdom divided against cannot stand”

In the years after leaving his fathers farm Lincoln took on many odd jobs. He continued his self-education while serving as storekeeper, militia captain in the Black Hawk War, and postmaster. During this time he set his sites on studying law and was licensed to practice law in 1836. His political aspirations began with a failed race for the state legislature, before winning and serving four terms as a Whig. After a term served in the House of Representatives, and a failed well publicized Senate race against Stephen Davis, he was nominated by the Republican Party as their presidential candidate and won the election of 1860.

From the start of the war Lincolns mind was focused on one goal, keeping the Union together. Lincoln was a true believer in the importance of holding the union together, not only for the benefit of the Unites States, but for the benefit of the whole world by proving that a democratic government can exist in the world. Lincoln saw that the United States had become a symbol of hope and democracy to people and countries through out the world, and believed that the future of democracy itself and could depend on the outcome of the war. In a speech to congress Lincoln stated,

“This is essentially a people's contest,” It was the destiny of the Union “to demonstrate to the world that those who can fairly carry out an election can also suppress a rebellion; and ballots are the rightful successors to bullets.

In the Gettysburg address Lincoln used the importance of the unified country and the continuation of a democratic nation to help rationalize the continued war and the tremendous loss of life. The speech lasting less than three minuets explained the reasoning behind the war better and more simply than any before it.

“Fourscore and seven years ago our fathers brought forth, upon this continent, a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of it, as a final resting place for those who died here, that the nation might live. This we may, in all propriety do. But in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow, this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have hallowed it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here; while it can never forget what they did here. It is rather for us the living, we here be dedicated to the great task remaining before us--that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they here gave the last full measure of devotion--that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain, that this nation shall have a new birth of freedom,