Lincoln warned the South in his Inaugural Address: "In your hands, my
dissatisfied fellow countrymen, and not in mine, is the momentous issue of
civil war. The government will not assail you.... You have no oath registered
in Heaven to destroy the government, while I shall have the most solemn one to
preserve, protect and defend it." 

Lincoln thought secession illegal, and was willing to use force to defend
Federal law and the Union. When Confederate batteries fired on Fort Sumter and
forced its surrender, he called on the states for 75,000 volunteers. Four more
slave states joined the Confederacy but four remained within the Union. The
Civil War had begun. 

The son of a Kentucky frontiersman, Lincoln had to struggle for a living and
for learning. Five months before receiving his party's nomination for
President, he sketched his life: 

"I was born Feb. 12, 1809, in Hardin County, Kentucky. My parents were both
born in Virginia, of undistinguished families--second families, perhaps I
should say. My mother, who died in my tenth year, was of a family of the name
of Hanks.... My father ... removed from Kentucky to ... Indiana, in my eighth
year.... It was a wild region, with many bears and other wild animals still in
the woods. There I grew up.... Of course when I came of age I did not know
much. Still somehow, I could read, write, and cipher ... but that was all." 

Lincoln made extraordinary efforts to attain knowledge while working on a farm,
splitting rails for fences, and keeping store at New Salem, Illinois. He was a
captain in the Black Hawk War, spent eight years in the Illinois legislature,
and rode the circuit of courts for many years. His law partner said of him,
"His ambition was a little engine that knew no rest." 

He married Mary Todd, and they had four boys, only one of whom lived to
maturity. In 1858 Lincoln ran against Stephen A. Douglas for Senator. He lost
the election, but in debating with Douglas he gained a national reputation that
won him the Republican nomination for President in 1860. 

As President, he built the Republican Party into a strong national
organization. Further, he rallied most of the northern Democrats to the Union
cause. On January 1, 1863, he issued the Emancipation Proclamation that
declared forever free those slaves within the Confederacy. 

Lincoln never let the world forget that the Civil War involved an even larger
issue. This he stated most movingly in dedicating the military cemetery at
Gettysburg: "that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in
vain--that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom--and that
government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from
the earth." 

Lincoln won re-election in 1864, as Union military triumphs heralded an end to
the war. In his planning for peace, the President was flexible and generous,
encouraging Southerners to lay down their arms and join speedily in reunion. 

The spirit that guided him was clearly that of his Second Inaugural Address,
now inscribed on one wall of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D. C.: "With
malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as God
gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in; to
bind up the nation's wounds.... " 

On Good Friday, April 14, 1865, Lincoln was assassinated at Ford's Theatre in
Washington by John Wilkes Booth, an actor, who somehow thought he was helping
the South. The opposite was the result, for with Lincoln's death, the
possibility of peace with magnanimity died.