During the American Civil War, Abraham Lincoln presided over the Union and liberated enslaved people in the United States.He found the Union troops. Through this war, he wanted to destroy slavery.He was born on February 12, 1809, near Hodgenville, Kentucky, and died on April 15, 1865, in Washington, D.C. Among American heroes, President Abraham Lincoln continues to have a special place in the hearts of his fellow citizens as well as individuals from other countries. He was only 56 years old when he passed away.This allure stems from his unique life story, from his modest beginnings to a tragic death, as well as his unusually human and humanistic demeanor. He has a place in history as a union savior and emancipator of oppressed people. His importance remains and rises, owing to his eloquence as a democratic voice.He believed the Union was worth preserving, not just for its own sake, but also because it represented an ideal, that of self-government. On May 30, 1922, the President Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. was dedicated to him. Before him, James Buchanan was the President.After reading about his contribution to the Kansas Nebraska Act, also check out Abraham Lincoln nicknames and Abraham Lincoln presidency.Abraham Lincoln Civil War QuotesLincoln was born in the wilderness, in a cabin south of Hodgenville, Kentucky, and when he was two years old, he moved to a nearby farm in the Knob Creek valley. His first memories of this house were of a flash flood that swept away the crop that his father had sown.Thomas Lincoln, his father, was a descendant of a weaver’s apprentice who immigrated to Massachusetts from England in 1637. Thomas was a hardy pioneer, albeit not as successful as some of Lincoln’s forefathers. He married Nancy Hanks on June 12, 1806.President Abraham Lincoln needed popular support to win the war. The reunification of the north and south was necessary. Even before that, a degree of cohesiveness in the north was important. Lincoln had the difficult challenge of enlisting the support of as many diverse organizations and individuals as possible for his administration.He had the ability to appeal to fellow politicians and communicate with them in their own language. One such instance includes when Lincoln warned the people who seceded, ‘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.’ He swore to protect the federal government he was in charge of.He had a knack for mending fences and retaining the allegiance of those who were at odds with one another. He made effective use of the spoils system he inherited, using government employment as a tool to boost his administration and achieve his goals.Abraham Lincoln Civil War FactsDespite becoming a renowned lawyer, Lincoln lacked a college education. His complete schooling, as determined by traveling instructors, is considered to be less than a year. When he was a member of the Whig Party, he also presented a case in the Supreme Court.Lincoln spent four straight years in the Illinois state legislature before entering national politics. Though attorneys are frequently seen as untrustworthy, Honest Abe’s reputation for honesty and fairness helped him win local elections.Lincoln was known as ’the President of Firsts’. He was the first US President to have a beard, own a patent, and appear in an inaugural photograph. Lincoln’s wife was a wealthy woman. She was the daughter of a slave-owning family. Lincoln married Mary Todd, a Kentucky woman, on November 4, 1842. Many of Mary Todd’s half-brothers worked in the Confederate Army during the Civil War and were killed in action.Lincoln was not a supporter of abolition. Lincoln had long been linked with abolitionists, and on January 1, 1863, he issued the Emancipation Proclamation, thereby abolishing slavery and liberating around 3 million slaves. During the Civil War, his major goal was to keep the Union together.Both the north and the south had abolitionists, slavery advocates, pro-unionists, and neutral feelings, but it was Confederate forces of secessionists who started the war by shooting at Fort Sumter on April 12, 1861.On the night of his killing, the bill to establish the US Secret Service was on the President’s desk. One of the Secret Service’s main responsibilities is to safeguard national leaders such as the President. Lincoln’s life may have been spared if they had been present. Lincoln’s bodyguard was not there during his assassination.During intermission, the President’s bodyguard, John Parker, abandoned his position to see a play at Ford’s Theatre in Washington, D.C., and walked to the bar next door. It was the same establishment where John Wilkes Booth was also present.Lincoln’s son was spared by John Wilkes Booth’s brother. Edwin Booth, who was a well-known actor, dragged President Abraham Lincoln’s son to safety at a railroad stop after he had fallen on the tracks.Lincoln is routinely recognized as one of the country’s ’top three’ presidents. Most academic historians, political scientists, and the general public consider Lincoln to be one of the three all-time greats, along with George Washington and Franklin D. Roosevelt.The Role Of Abraham Lincoln In The Civil WarSecession was unlawful in Lincoln’s opinion, and he was ready to use force to maintain federal government law and the Union. When Confederate cannons fired on Fort Sumter, forcing it to surrender, Lincoln began his appeal for 75,000 recruits from the states.Four additional slave states joined the Confederacy, while four others stayed in the Union. The Civil War had officially begun.Lincoln used the same leadership style that had served him well as a politician. Rather than creating policies and long-term plans, he preferred to react to issues and conditions that others had created. He wasn’t unprincipled; rather, he was a practical man, cognitively quick and adaptable, and eager to try something new if one action or judgment proved unsatisfactory in practice.Lincoln experimented with commanding people and organizations from 1861-1864, hesitant to push his ideas to his generals. He put George B. McClellan in control of the forces as a whole after accepting Scott’s resignation (November 1861). After a few months, he reduced McClellan to command the Army of the Potomac alone because of his tardiness.Lincoln spoke personally with the generals, giving personal proposals in his own name, in addition to providing formal commands through Halleck. He advised generals opposing Robert E. Lee that the goal was to destroy Lee’s army rather than take Richmond or expel the invaders off Northern land.While the war was on, the opposing party survived and thrived. It was composed of war Democrats and peace Democrats, known as ‘Copperheads,’ some of whom worked with the Confederates. Lincoln did everything he could to enlist the help of the Democrats, such as getting Congress to approve the 13th Amendment in a timely manner. He reached out to the peace Democrats as much as he could. Governor Horatio Seymour of New York was one of them, and he complained about the draught quota for his state.He reduced Congressman Clement L. Vallandigham of Ohio’s jail term to confinement within Confederate lines. When dealing with anyone accused of treason, Lincoln gave his generals the authority to conduct arbitrary arrests. He rationalized his actions by claiming that he had no choice but to accept some temporary sacrifices of portions of the Constitution in order to preserve the Union and, consequently, the Constitution as a whole. He gave his generals an order to suspend publications if they spoke against the war, and he quickly rescinded a military order silencing the hostile ‘Chicago Times’.Lincoln was a conservative in his soul, but he had allies among the radicals as well, and he worked hard to preserve his leadership over both. He informed his government, picked several of his opponents for the 1860 candidates, and ensured that every major political party was represented. He wisely chose Seward, an exceptional Conservative, and Salmon P. Chase, an outstanding Radical. Until Chase’s retirement in 1864, he cleverly surmounted cabinet conflicts and retained these two polar opposites among his formal advisers.The Wade-Davis manifesto signaled a movement inside the party to unseat Lincoln as the party’s choice for reelection to the post of president. He waited calmly and patiently for the movement to crumble, but the party remained deeply divided long after it had. At that point, John C. Frémont, a rival Republican candidate nominated by a breakaway faction considerably earlier, was still in the race. Leading Radicals vowed that if Lincoln could get his conservative postmaster general, Montgomery Blair, to quit, Frémont would be forced to withdraw. Blair resigned after Frémont withdrew. In time for the 1864 election, the party was reunited.Lincoln was the principal planner of his own political campaign in 1864, as he was in 1860. He helped run the Republican Speakers’ Bureau, counseled state committees on campaign strategy, hired and fired government officials to boost party support, and did all he could to get as many soldiers and sailors to vote as possible. The majority of military personnel voted Republican. General George B. McClellan, his Democratic opponent, was defeated by a large popular majority (55%) in his reelection bid.On a vessel in Hampton Roads, Virginia, he met with Confederate officials on February 3, 1865. If the South agreed to end the war, he pledged to be generous with pardons, but he insisted on reunification as a condition of any peace agreement and that slavery be abolished. With the famous words, ‘with hate against none; with kindness for all,’ he encapsulated the essence of his program in his Second Inaugural Address. Because neither the Confederate commanders nor the Radical Republicans were happy with his demands, no peace could be reached until the Confederacy was defeated completely.Abraham Lincoln’s administration began on March 4, 1861, when he was sworn in as the 16th president of the United States, and concluded on April 15, 1865, when he was assassinated. Lincoln was the first member of the newly formed Republican Party to be elected to the White House. Vice President Andrew Johnson took over as his successor. The American Civil War dominated Lincoln’s presidency, and he presided over the Union victory.The Confederate attack on Fort Sumter, a federal installation within the Confederacy’s borders, started the Civil War just weeks into Lincoln’s presidency. Lincoln was tasked with overseeing both the political and military components of the Civil War, and he faced difficulties in both areas. In order to repress Confederate supporters, Lincoln ordered the suspension of the constitutionally protected right to habeas corpus in the state of Maryland as commander-in-chief. In addition, he was the first president to implement a military draught.As the Union suffered multiple early defeats on the American Civil War’s eastern front, Lincoln managed through several military leaders before settling on General Ulysses S. Grant, who had led the Union armies and union forces to several triumphs on the western front.The Emancipation Proclamation of 1863 released around 20,000 slaves in Confederate-controlled territory and made emancipation a Union military goal. Lincoln was a key figure in the passing of the 13th Amendment, which declared slavery unconstitutional in the United States in 1865. As in 1820 and 1850, Lincoln believed that Southern threats of secession were primarily bluffs and that the sectional problem would be defused.Many Southerners, on the other hand, believed that supporting Lincoln’s presidency and limiting slavery in the territories would eventually lead to the abolition of slavery in the United States. On December 20, 1860, South Carolina decided to secede, and six other Southern states followed suit within 40 days.The Confederate States of America (CSA) was created in February, and Jefferson Davis was named temporary president. Seven states had declared secession and seized federal property inside their borders by the time Lincoln took office, but the US kept control of significant military installations such as Fort Sumter near Charleston harbor and Fort Pickens near Pensacola. Fort Sumter, less secure than Fort Pickens and located in the separatist heartland of South Carolina, became a major symbolic problem in both the North and the South in early 1861.General Lee’s soldiers crossed the Potomac River into Maryland shortly after McClellan’s return to command, leading to the Battle of Antietam in September 1862. The Union victory that followed was one of the bloodiest in American history. After the Civil War ended, the Emancipation Declaration was passed on January 31, 1865.In 1864, Lincoln won every county in New England and the majority of the remaining Northern counties, but only two of the 996 counties in the South. General Sherman led Union forces from Chattanooga to Atlanta, to defeat Confederate Generals Joseph E. Johnston and John Bell Hood along the route. Sherman’s victory in the Battle of Atlanta on September 2 improved Union morale, ending a period of pessimism that had persisted throughout 1864. Hood’s army left Atlanta for the Franklin-Nashville Campaign, where they threatened Sherman’s supply lines and invaded Tennessee.Lincoln gave the Union army permission to attack Confederate infrastructure, including plantations, railroads, and bridges, in the hopes of breaking the South’s morale and weakening its economic ability to fight. Sherman’s army marched east with an uncertain objective after leaving Atlanta and his supply base, destroying nearly 20% of Georgia’s farmland in his ‘March to the Sea’. The war came to an end when General Lee surrendered on April 9, 1865.In the end, he was assassinated for his actions by John Wilkes Booth on April 15, 1865, in Ford’s theater. Wilke’s elder brother was saved by Robert Todd. To honor him, the Abraham Lincoln National Cemetery is also being built.Here at Kidadl, we have carefully created lots of interesting family-friendly facts for everyone to enjoy! 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During the American Civil War, Abraham Lincoln presided over the Union and liberated enslaved people in the United States.
