On April 14, 1865, Abraham Lincoln sat in the presidential box at Ford’s Theater in Washington, watching a comedy. The four-year war that had nearly torn the nation apart was over. The Union he had fought to preserve stood intact. Just after 10:15 p.
m. , as the audience laughed at a line onstage, the actor John Wilkes Booth slipped into the box and fired a single shot from a small derringer into the back of Lincoln’s head. The bullet passed through his brain. Lincoln never regained consciousness and died the following morning.
The man who had guided the United States through its darkest crisis was gone at the very moment of victory. Lincoln’s rise to that point had been anything but inevitable. He was born on February 12, 1809, in a one-room log cabin with a dirt floor near Hodgenville, Kentucky. His parents, Thomas and Nancy Hanks Lincoln, were poor farmers; Thomas could barely sign his own name.
Formal schooling was almost nonexistent on the frontier, and Lincoln later estimated he had less than a year of classroom education in total. When he was seven, the family moved to the wilderness of Spencer County, Indiana. His mother died of milk sickness when he was nine. His father remarried Sarah Bush Johnston, a kind stepmother who encouraged the boy’s hunger for books.
Lincoln borrowed whatever he could find—the Bible, Shakespeare, Aesop’s fables, biographies of Washington and Franklin—and read by firelight after long days of labor. In 1830 the family moved again, this time to Illinois. At twenty-one, Lincoln struck out on his own, working as a flatboatman hauling goods down the Mississippi to New Orleans, where he saw the horrors of slavery firsthand. He settled in New Salem, Illinois, where he worked as a store clerk, postmaster, and surveyor, and served briefly as a militia captain in the Black Hawk War of 1832 without seeing combat.
Politics soon called. In 1834 he won election to the Illinois legislature as a Whig. He taught himself law, was admitted to the bar in 1836, and built a successful practice in Springfield. He married Mary Todd in 1842; they had four sons, though only one, Robert, would survive to adulthood.
Lincoln served a single term in the U. S. House of Representatives from 1847 to 1849, where he opposed the Mexican-American War, then largely returned to law. The 1850s dragged him back into politics.
The Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, which allowed new territories to decide on slavery through popular sovereignty, outraged him. He helped organize the Republican Party in Illinois and, in 1858, challenged Stephen A. Douglas for a U. S.
Senate seat. He lost the race, but his performance in their famous debates made him a national figure. “A house divided against itself cannot stand,” he warned, arguing the nation could not endure permanently half slave and half free. In 1860, the Republicans nominated the relatively unknown Lincoln for president.
The Democratic Party fractured along sectional lines, and Lincoln won with less than forty percent of the popular vote and no support from the southern states. Southern leaders saw his election as a mortal threat to slavery. Between November 1860 and his inauguration in March 1861, seven Deep South states seceded and formed the Confederate States of America under Jefferson Davis. Lincoln arrived in Washington under threat of assassination.
In his first inaugural address he insisted he had no authority to interfere with slavery where it already existed, but he declared secession illegal and vowed to hold federal property. “We are not enemies, but friends,” he pleaded. The South did not listen. On April 12, 1861, Confederate forces opened fire on Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor.
The Civil War had begun. Lincoln had almost no military experience; Jefferson Davis was a West Point graduate and former secretary of war. Yet Lincoln proved one of the most effective wartime presidents in history. He called for 75,000 volunteers, suspended habeas corpus in certain areas to detain Confederate sympathizers, spent money without prior congressional approval, and instituted a military draft.
These measures were controversial, but Lincoln believed the survival of the Union justified them. The early war went badly. The Union suffered a stunning defeat at the First Battle of Bull Run in July 1861. Lincoln cycled through a series of disappointing generals: Irvin McDowell, George B.
McClellan twice, John Pope, Ambrose Burnside, Joseph Hooker. McClellan in particular frustrated him. A superb organizer who built the Army of the Potomac, he was chronically overcautious, always demanding more troops and rarely striking decisively. After the Battle of Antietam in September 1862, the bloodiest single day in American history, Lincoln removed him for good when McClellan failed to pursue Robert E.
Lee’s retreating army. Lincoln was a hands-on commander-in-chief. He studied military strategy, visited troops, and pressed his generals for action. He understood the North’s advantages in population, industry, and railroads.
He also understood politics. He had to keep the border slave states—Kentucky, Missouri, Maryland, Delaware—in the Union. “I hope to have God on my side,” he reportedly said, “but I must have Kentucky. ”
For the first year and a half, Lincoln insisted the war’s primary goal was preserving the Union, not ending slavery.
He overruled generals like John C. Frémont, who tried to free slaves in their districts on their own authority. In a public letter to editor Horace Greeley in August 1862, he wrote that his paramount object was to save the Union, “and is not either to save or to destroy slavery. ” Yet he was evolving.
By the summer of 1862, he had concluded that emancipation was a military necessity. Slave labor sustained the Confederate war effort; freeing the enslaved would weaken the South, encourage Black men to join the Union Army, and prevent European recognition of the Confederacy. On July 22, 1862, Lincoln presented a draft Emancipation Proclamation to his cabinet. Secretary of State William Seward advised waiting for a Union victory so it would not look like an act of desperation.
That victory came at Antietam. Five days later, on September 22, 1862, Lincoln issued the preliminary proclamation, warning that if the rebellious states did not return to the Union by January 1, 1863, their slaves would be “then, thenceforward, and forever free. ” On New Year’s Day 1863, he signed the final Emancipation Proclamation. It applied only to areas still in rebellion, framed as a war measure under his authority as commander-in-chief.
But its impact was revolutionary. It transformed the war from a fight to restore the old Union into a fight for human freedom. Nearly 180,000 Black soldiers would eventually serve in the Union Army. The summer of 1863 brought the turning points.
In the East, Lee invaded Pennsylvania. From July 1 to 3, the two armies clashed at Gettysburg in the largest battle ever fought on American soil. After three days of savage fighting, including Pickett’s Charge, Lee was forced to retreat. On July 4, in the West, Ulysses S.
Grant completed the siege of Vicksburg, Mississippi. The Confederate stronghold on the Mississippi surrendered, and the river was now entirely under Union control, splitting the Confederacy in two. Lincoln had finally found his general. In early 1864 he brought Grant east and made him general-in-chief of all Union armies.
Grant’s relentless strategy of simultaneous advances on multiple fronts, combined with William Tecumseh Sherman’s destructive march through Georgia and the Carolinas, ground the Confederacy down. Lincoln faced a tough reelection campaign in 1864 against George McClellan. Early in the year the war looked stalemated and Northern morale was low, but Sherman’s capture of Atlanta in September turned the tide. Lincoln won a solid victory, ensuring the war would continue until unconditional surrender.
On April 9, 1865, Lee surrendered the Army of Northern Virginia to Grant at Appomattox Courthouse. Other Confederate forces soon followed. The war was effectively over. More than 600,000 Americans had died.
The Union was preserved, and slavery was dying. Lincoln turned to reconstruction. In his second inaugural address on March 4, 1865, he spoke not of vengeance but of healing: “With malice toward none, with charity for all. ” On April 11, speaking from the White House, he publicly endorsed limited Black suffrage, particularly for those who had served in the Union Army.
In the crowd that night was John Wilkes Booth. A famous Shakespearean actor, Confederate sympathizer, and white supremacist, he had earlier plotted to kidnap Lincoln. With the Confederacy collapsing, the plot turned to murder. Booth assembled a small group of conspirators to decapitate the Union government: he would kill Lincoln, Lewis Powell would kill Secretary of State Seward, and George Atzerodt would kill Vice President Andrew Johnson.
On the evening of April 14, Good Friday, Lincoln attended the comedy “Our American Cousin” at Ford’s Theater with his wife. Their guests were Major Henry Rathbone and his fiancée, Clara Harris. General Grant had declined the invitation, and Lincoln’s bodyguard left his post during intermission. Around 10:15 p.
m. , Booth entered the presidential box and fired once into the back of Lincoln’s head. Rathbone lunged at him; Booth slashed the major’s arm with a knife, then vaulted over the railing onto the stage twelve feet below, breaking his left leg when his spur caught on a flag. Rising, he shouted “Sic semper tyrannis”—thus always to tyrants, the Virginia state motto—and possibly “The South is avenged,” before escaping through a back door and riding away.
Doctors carried Lincoln across the street to the Petersen boarding house. He never regained consciousness and died at 7:22 a. m. on April 15, 1865, at age fifty-six.
Secretary of War Edwin Stanton is said to have murmured, “Now he belongs to the ages. ” Powell attacked Seward in his home, nearly killing him, but Seward survived. Atzerodt lost his nerve and never attempted to kill Johnson. Booth fled into Virginia.
Twelve days later, Union troops cornered him in a tobacco barn near Port Royal. When he refused to surrender, the barn was set afire, and Sergeant Boston Corbett shot and killed him. Four conspirators, including Mary Surratt, were hanged. Lincoln did not live to oversee reconstruction.
His vision of a relatively lenient peace gave way to harsher policies under the Radical Republicans and Andrew Johnson’s ineffective leadership. Yet his achievements stand monumental. He preserved the United States as one nation, destroyed the institution of slavery, and expanded the meaning of American freedom. From a dirt-floor cabin in Kentucky to the White House, from self-taught lawyer to wartime commander who mastered strategy and politics under unimaginable pressure, Abraham Lincoln became the leader the nation needed.
His assassination turned him into a martyr, but his greatness lies in the choices he made while the fate of the republic hung in the balance.