Abraham Lincoln

As America’s 16th president, Abraham Lincoln left a towering legacy. His deep belief in the founding principles of American democracy—that every human deserved liberty and the opportunity for self-determination—compelled him to free enslaved African Americans. But when it came to ...read more

The Lincoln Memorial has been one of America’s most iconic landmarks since opening in 1922. The neoclassical monument honoring Abraham Lincoln is the most visited tourist site in Washington, D.C. It appears on the back of pennies and five-dollar bills. It has been both a backdrop ...read more

On March 4, 1861, Abraham Lincoln climbed into an open carriage to travel to the United States Capitol to be sworn in as the country’s 16th president. There, in his inaugural address, he movingly called for unity in the deeply divided nation, famously appealing to “the better ...read more

On the night of December 31, 1862, a day before he issued the final Emancipation Proclamation to effectively end slavery in America, President Abraham Lincoln signed a contract with Bernard Kock, an entrepreneur and Florida cotton planter. Their agreement: to use federal funds to ...read more

Abraham Lincoln aged significantly during the Civil War, unsurprising to those who were close to him. “[H]e was in mind, body and nerves a very different man” in 1865 than in 1861, wrote his secretary, John Hay. The war wasn’t his only burden. He was grappling, politically and ...read more

After dying from a bullet wound on April 15, 1865, Abraham Lincoln was not permitted to rest in peace—not immediately at least. Even in death, the assassinated president was called upon to make one final sacrifice to the Union as his body was paraded across a grief-laden country ...read more

Abraham Lincoln stands as one of the most revered presidents in U.S. history, but what did Americans of his time think of him? Judging from political cartoons from the 1860s, when the nation’s bitter Civil War raged, he cut a far less heroic figure. As lithograph publishers, ...read more

In the middle of the 19th century, as the United States was ensnared in a bloody Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln and abolitionist Frederick Douglass stood as the two most influential figures in the national debate over slavery and the future of African Americans. They met ...read more

There’s perhaps no better way to grasp Abraham Lincoln’s outsized American legacy than through his writing. From his time as a twenty-something political hopeful to his tragic death, Lincoln was a voluminous writer, authoring hundreds of letters, speeches, debate arguments and ...read more

Abraham Lincoln summed up his early years on the frontier in Kentucky and Indiana as "the short and simple annals of the poor." But the hardships he endured there as a youth weren’t unique. Life was harsh for most frontier families in the early 1800s. “Life on the frontier was ...read more

During Abraham Lincoln’s final year in Springfield, Illinois, in 1860, before he was elected America's 16th president, folks would sometimes observe him in shirtsleeves, engaged in a fast-paced game of “Fives” with other young men in a vacant lot just off the public square. The ...read more

Abraham Lincoln came from the humblest of beginnings. His wife Mary Todd hailed from a wealthy clan. Their lives together were marked by personal tragedy. Lincoln’s mother, sister and three of his sons died young. Losing the boys crushed Lincoln and Mary, who also ...read more

From August to October of 1858, Abraham Lincoln, the Republican candidate for U.S. Senate from Illinois, took on the incumbent Democratic Senator Stephen A. Douglas in a series of seven debates. Thousands of spectators and newspaper reporters from around the country watched as ...read more

In his decade as a professional actor, 26-year-old John Wilkes Booth played some of the most prestigious theaters in the United States. But the assassin of Abraham Lincoln delivered his final, and perhaps most memorable, performance in a tobacco-curing barn near Port Royal, ...read more

As part of an illustrious family of stage actors, John Wilkes Booth was already a familiar figure to many Americans before he entered the presidential box of Ford’s Theatre on April 14, 1865. The Booth name had been emblazoned on playbills of American theaters for decades before ...read more

Nearly 150 years before the advent of texts, tweets and e-mail, President Abraham Lincoln became the first “wired president” by embracing the original electronic messaging technology—the telegraph. The 16th president may be remembered for his soaring oratory that stirred the ...read more

President Abraham Lincoln and General Ulysses S. Grant didn’t meet often in person. But their mutual respect and trust grew deep over the final year of the Civil War as they together steered America and its armies through the most convulsive period in the nation’s history. In his ...read more

Secretary of State William Seward wrote it and Abraham Lincoln issued it, but much of the credit for the Thanksgiving Proclamation should probably go to a woman named Sarah Josepha Hale.  A prominent writer and editor, Hale had written the children’s poem “Mary Had a Little ...read more

Every U.S. president has been a member of a church, except for one: Abraham Lincoln. Famously opaque on the subject of religion, Lincoln’s personal faith was something even his closest friends said they couldn’t figure out. Lincoln rented pews for his family at First ...read more

On the night of April 14, 1865, well-known stage actor John Wilkes Booth slipped into the presidential box at Ford’s Theatre in Washington, D.C., and shot President Abraham Lincoln in the head, mortally wounding him. Booth may have fired the bullet that assassinated the ...read more

When Abraham Lincoln said “a house divided against itself cannot stand,” he wasn’t talking about the kind of political divisions common today. Americans may differ sharply on issues like immigration and abortion, but there is no single issue that geographically and economically ...read more

Even by today’s standards, The State of Illinois v. “Peachy” Quinn Harrison would be considered newsworthy. The prerequisite elements for a “high-profile” trial were all there: a well-liked and promising young man stabbed to death by a neighbor with whom he had grown up; a ...read more

Mary Todd Lincoln paced the parlor alone. Hours before, she had witnessed the point-blank assassination of her husband Abraham Lincoln at the nearby Ford’s Theatre; now, she had been banished from the president’s bedside by a furious Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, who kicked her ...read more

The election of 1860 was one of the most pivotal presidential elections in American history. It pitted Republican nominee Abraham Lincoln against Democratic Party nominee Senator Stephen Douglas, Southern Democratic Party nominee John Breckinridge and Constitutional Union Party ...read more

Mary Todd Lincoln has always been a puzzling, polarizing figure. As a young woman, the well-educated and ambitious Kentucky belle used her charm to help propel her husband to the White House. As first lady, she was initially praised as a gracious hostess and sparkling ...read more

On the night of April 14, 1865, John Wilkes Booth crept into the presidential box at Ford's Theatre in Washington, D.C. with one intention: to assassinate President Abraham Lincoln. Shooting him in the back of the head at point-blank range, the famous actor succeeded, inflicting ...read more

Abraham Lincoln had been on John Wilkes Booth's mind for months before he decided to shoot him at close range in a darkened theater on April 14, 1865. Around the time of Abraham Lincoln’s re-election in November 1864, Booth began scheming against the president, whom he loathed ...read more

1. Booth initially planned to kidnap Lincoln. After meeting with Confederate spies in the summer of 1864, Booth spearheaded a plot to abduct Lincoln, bring him to the Confederate capital of Richmond, Virginia, and use him as a bargaining chip to secure the release of rebel ...read more

With the fall of Petersburg and Richmond, and Lee’s surrender to Grant at Appomattox, Washington was consumed by celebration. On the evening of April 10, 1865, a crowd of some 3,000 people gathered outside the White House, hoping for some rousing words from their president. In ...read more

On March 4, 1865, with the Civil War drawing to a close, Abraham Lincoln was sworn in to a second term as U.S. president; John Wilkes Booth was in attendance. Barely six months earlier, Lincoln’s election to a second term as president had been anything but a foregone conclusion. ...read more

Despite presiding over the bloody and tumultuous Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln never tried to postpone either the 1862 midterm elections (in which his Republican Party lost seats in Congress) or the 1864 presidential election.  “We cannot have free government without ...read more

Fear as thick as the summer haze enveloped sultry Washington, D.C., on the morning of July 11, 1864. Fifty years after the British had torched the city, a foreign army had once again penetrated the United States capital. Within sight of the unfinished Capitol dome, clouds of dust ...read more

On the winter morning of January 31, 1861, Abraham Lincoln stepped inside a secluded farmhouse seemingly adrift on the vast Illinois prairie. The president-elect had left his hometown of Springfield only once in the eight months since garnering the Republican presidential ...read more

1. Lincoln is enshrined in the Wrestling Hall of Fame. The Great Emancipator wasn’t quite WWE material, but thanks to his long limbs he was an accomplished wrestler as a young man. Defeated only once in approximately 300 matches, Lincoln reportedly talked a little smack in the ...read more

1. Lincoln wasn’t an abolitionist. Abraham Lincoln did believe that slavery was morally wrong, but there was one big problem: It was sanctioned by the highest law in the land, the Constitution. The nation’s founding fathers, who also struggled with how to address slavery, did ...read more

1. The mother of John Surratt Jr., who admitted to conspiring with John Wilkes Booth to kidnap the president, but was never convicted of assisting in his murder Abraham Lincoln's assassin John Wilkes Booth originally intended to abduct the president, take him to Richmond and ...read more

Mary Todd Lincoln was born December 13, 1818, in Lexington, Kentucky. She was the first lady of the United States from 1861 to 1865, while her husband Abraham Lincoln served as the 16th president. Happy and energetic in her youth, she suffered subsequent ill health and personal ...read more

The 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, ratified in 1865 in the aftermath of the Civil War, abolished slavery in the United States. The 13th Amendment states: “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly ...read more

On February 3, 1865, President Abraham Lincoln (1809-65) and Secretary of State William H. Seward (1801-72) met with three Confederate officials, including Vice President Alexander H. Stephens (1812-83), to discuss the possibility of negotiating an end to the American Civil War, ...read more