Who Was Martha Ballard?

Who was Martha Ballard? She was a mother, a wife, a homemaker, a healer and a midwife. Martha Moore was born in Oxford, Massachusetts in 1735. Most of her life is unknown because unfortunately until she got married there is no story to her life. There is no history on what her childhood was like, what kind of education, if any, she received, or what career choices she had. We only know of what happened around the time of her birth and childhood. One event had occurred around her time of birth was the spread of scarlet fever across New England. In 1754, Martha married her husband Ephraim Ballard. Soon after, she became to create life and have nine children, six girls and three boys. Their names were: Cyrus (Sept. 11, 1756), Lucy (Aug. 28, 1758), Martha (Apr. 17, 1761), Johnathan (Mar. 4, 1763), Triphena (Mar. 26, 1765), Dorothy (May 17, 1767), Hannah (Aug. 6, 1769), DoroAbraham Lincoln Listeni/ˈeɪbrəhæm ˈlɪŋkən/ (February 12, 1809 – April 15, 1865) was the 16th President of the United States, serving from March 1861 until his assassination in April 1865. Lincoln led the United States through its Civil War—its bloodiest war and its greatest moral, constitutional and political crisis.[1][2] In doing so, he preserved the Union, abolished slavery, strengthened the federal government, and modernized the economy.

Lincoln grew up on the western frontier in Kentucky and Indiana. Largely self-educated, he became a lawyer in Illinois, a Whig Party leader, and a member of the Illinois House of Representatives, where he served from 1834 to 1846. Elected to the United States House of Representatives in 1846, Lincoln promoted rapid modernization of the economy through banks, tariffs, and railroads. Because he had originally agreed not to run for a second term in Congress, and his opposition to the Mexican–American War was unpopular among Illinois voters, Lincoln returned to Springfield and resumed his successful law practice. Reentering politics in 1854, he became a leader in building the new Republican Party, which had a statewide majority in Illinois. In 1858, while taking part in a series of highly publicized debates with his opponent and rival, Democrat Stephen A. Douglas, Lincoln spoke out against the expansion of slavery, but lost the U.S. Senate race to Douglas.

In 1860 Lincoln secured the Republican Party presidential nomination as a moderate from a swing state. With very little support in the slaveholding