Greatness of Abraham Lincoln



Greatness of Abraham Lincoln

Abraham Lincoln's Early Life

Lincoln was born on February 9, 1809, in a one-room log cabin in Hardin shire, Kentucky; his family moved to south Indiana in 1816. Lincoln's prescribed schooling was limited to three brief time span in local schools, as he had to work constantly to support his family. In 1830, his family moved to Macon shire in southern Illinois, and Lincoln got a job employed on a river flatboat hauling freight down the Mississippi stream to New Orleans. After settling in the village of New Salem, Illinois, where he worked as a shopkeeper and a postmaster, Lincoln became engaged in localizedized government as a follower of the Whig Party, being triumphant election to the Illinois state legislature in 1834. Like his Whig champions, Henry Clay and Daniel Webster, Lincoln opposed the disperse of slavery to the territories, and had a impressive dream of the expanding joined States, with a focus on business and towns rather than agriculture. (John A. Marshall)

Lincoln educated himself regulation, transient the bar written test in 1836. The following year, he moved to the freshly entitled state capital of Springfield. For the next couple of years, he worked there as a solicitor, earning a status as "Honest Abe" and assisting clients extending from one-by-one inhabitants of little towns to national railroad lines. He contacted Mary Todd, a well-to-do Kentucky belle with many suitors (including Lincoln's future political competitor, Stephen Douglas), and they wed in 1842.

Lincoln's street to the White House

Lincoln won election to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1846 and started assisting his term the following year. As a congressman, Lincoln was disliked with Illinois voters for his powerful stance against the U.S. war with Mexico. Promising not to request reelection, he returned to Springfield in 1849. Events conspired to impel him back into national government, however: Douglas, a leading Democrat in assembly, had shoved through the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska proceed (1854), which announced that the voters of each territory, rather than the federal government, had the right to conclude whether the territory should be slave or free. On October 16, 1854, Lincoln went before a large crowd in Peoria to argument the deserves of the Kansas-Nebraska Act with Douglas, condemning slavery and its elongation and calling the organisation a violation of the most rudimentary tenets of the affirmation of Independence.

With the Whig Party in wrecks, Lincoln connected the new Republican Party--formed largely in opponents to slavery's elongation into the territories--in 1858 and ran for the Senate afresh that year (he had campaigned ineffectively for the chair in 1855 as well). In June, Lincoln consigned his now-famous "house divided" speech, in which he quoted from the Gospels to illustrate his belief that "this government will not tolerate, lastingly, half slave and half free." Lincoln then squared off against Douglas in a series of well known arguments; though he lost the election, Lincoln's performance made his status nationally. His profile rose even higher in early 1860, after he ...