About Lincoln

About Lincoln
Lincoln was born in 1809 in Kentucky and grew up on the frontier. His family moved to Indiana. When he was nine years old, his mother, Nancy Hanks Lincoln died. A year later, his father married Sarah Bush Johnston, whom Lincoln called "Mother."

Being self-educated, he read and reread the King James Bible, Aesop's Fables, John Bunyan's The Pilgrims Progress, Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, Mason Locke Weems' The Life of Washington, and The Autobiography of Ben Franklin.

In 1830, his family moved west of Decatur, Illinois. He moved further west to New Salem, Illinois, where he worked as a store clerk. There, Lincoln fell in love with Ann Rutledge, but was heartbroken when she died of a fever that swept through town.

He served as a captain in the Black Hawk War of 1832 before
studying Sir William Blackstone's Commentaries of the Laws of England; then he become a lawyer in 1836, and served 8 years in the Illinois General Assembly.

In 1840, he began courting Mary Todd and they became engaged and scheduled the wedding in 1841, but Lincoln called it off at the last minute. A year later, they reconciled and married in Springfield, Illinois. Together, they had four children, though sadly only one lived to reach adulthood.

Lincoln was elected to the U.S. Congress in 1847, and served one term before returning to practice law. When the Republican Party was started in 1854, Lincoln stood against Democrats who wanted to expand slavery into western territories acquired after the Mexican-American War. He gained national prominence by debating Stephen Douglas for the U.S. Senate in 1858.

He was nominated as the Republican candidate for President, and won in 1860. Lincoln warned, January 27, 1838: "At what point then is the approach of danger to be expected? I answer, if it ever reach us, it must spring up amongst us; it cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen we must live through all time, or die by suicide."

Lincoln stated at Edwardsville, Illinois, September 11, 1858: "What constitutes the bulwark of our own liberty and independence? It is not our frowning battlements, our bristling sea coasts, our army and our navy. These are not our reliance against tyranny. All of those may be turned against us … Our reliance is in the love of liberty which God has planted in us. Our defense is in the spirit which prized liberty as the heritage of all men, in all lands everywhere.

Destroy this spirit and you have planted the seeds of despotism at your own doors ... you have lost the genius of your own independence and become the fit subjects of the first cunning tyrant who rises among you."