Emancipation Proclamation

Abraham Lincoln was born to a poor family in Kentucky on February 12, 1809, and raised mostly in Indiana. He was almost entirely self-taught until he became an adult, when he eventually studied law. He worked in various occupations as a rail-splitter, boatman, storekeeper, and town postmaster before becoming a successful lawyer. He served in the Illinois state legislature and in the US Congress before becoming the 16th president of the United States, serving from March 4, 1861, until his death by an assassin’s bullet on April 15, 1865. He was a member of the Whig Party before joining the Republican Party.

Lincoln was vocal about his anti-slavery position. He felt it was the most critical issue facing the nation. In 1858, launching a campaign for the US Senate, he delivered one of his most famous and eloquent speeches, called the “House Divided Speech.” In it, he declared, “A house divided against itself cannot stand. I believe this government cannot endure, permanently, half slave and half free. […] It will become all one thing, or all the other.” The foreboding tone reflected the national mood.

Lincoln ran for the presidency two years later in 1860 on an anti-slavery platform that was also not pro-abolition. Some historians have depicted Lincoln in a simple way as the “Great Emancipator,” while others have suggested that he was a reluctant emancipator, or worse. Although he personally believed slavery was wrong, and he fought to keep it from advancing to the new states that were then joining the union, he understood the Constitution to impose strict limits on the federal government and on the power of the executive to intervene in any decisive way. In his first inaugural address on March 4, 1861, in the name of preserving the union, he spoke directly to Southern slaveholding states, saying, “I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the States where it exists” (“Lincoln’s First Inaugural.” Dickinson.edu). However, scarcely more than a month later, on April 12, 1861, the US Civil War began anyway, when Confederate soldiers stormed a fort where Union forces were positioned, launching the Battle of Fort Sumter.

During the war, Lincoln famously drew upon his constitutional authority as commander-in-chief of the military to exercise certain emergency privileges—bypassing Congress to enlarge the army in a proclamation, for example. As the war progressed, he was gradually won over to the idea, first enunciated by John Quincey Adams and supported by several abolitionists, that a war would grant the federal government the authority to abolish slavery on the precedent of established international law. He was also won over by the idea that the laws of war regarding confiscation could be applied to give freedom to enslaved people, and this was accomplished in the two Confiscation Acts of 1861 and 1862. By the time of his assassination, Lincoln was campaigning for a constitutional amendment abolishing slavery (the 13th Amendment) and had expressed his support for the enfranchisement of Black men—at a time when only six Northern states enfranchised Black men.

Five days after the Civil War’s end, April 14, 1865, he was fatally shot by John Wilkes Booth, an actor and Confederate spy, at the Ford’s Theatre in Washington, DC. He died the following morning.