Abraham Lincoln: First Inaugural Address

About the Author

Abraham Lincoln, born on February 12, 1809, in a one-room log cabin in southeastern Kentucky, grew up in a frontier environment. He had little formal education but was a prodigious reader, favoring the Bible, Shakespeare, and biographies. As a young man he studied law. At age twenty-three he ran unsuccessfully for a seat in the General Assembly of Illinois, to which state his family had moved when he was nine. He served briefly in the Black Hawk War before being elected to the state legislature in 1834. Admitted to the bar in 1837, Lincoln proved to be a successful attorney, admired for his ability to argue on his feet in court cases.

In 1842 Lincoln married Mary Todd, the daughter of a prominent southern family. The couple had four children, but only one, Robert, survived into adulthood. Quarrelsome but proud of her husband, Mary supported Lincoln's political ambitions. He was elected for one term in the U.S. House of Representatives and made a notable speech opposing the Mexican-American War; the speech proved unpopular, however, and he did not run for reelection. Indeed, Lincoln's political career then seemed over not only because of his own politics but also because he had linked his future with that of the Whig Party, which steadily lost ground to the Democrats in the 1850s.

Lincoln's political prospects rose in 1854 when a new party, the Republicans, took control of the Illinois legislature. Lincoln was the Republican candidate for senator in the famous 1858 election, when he debated Stephen Douglas, the incumbent Democratic senator and a politician with a national profile and the ambition to be president. Although Lincoln's outstanding performance in the debates drew national attention, his party lost the statewide election, and Douglas retained his seat as senator.

While Lincoln was no abolitionist (as he did not favor immediate emancipation of the slaves), his public speeches clearly demonstrated that he thought slavery was evil. A prudent politician, he professed no desire to eliminate slavery in the South. Still, his opposition to the spread of slavery in the western territories signaled to the South that its power—sooner or later—would be curtailed as more states were added to the Union.

Even though Lincoln's position on slavery was not radical, the southern states made clear that they would not remain in the Union should Lincoln be elected president. This threat of secession notwithstanding, Lincoln was genuinely surprised when the South made good on its warning. Even after South Carolina seceded, Lincoln held out hope for some sort of compromise. He did not believe that it was in the economic interests of the South to secede, and thus he seriously underestimated that region's pride in its traditions and its fear that a northern-dominated federal government would eventually outlaw slavery and weaken the South's position in the Union. Lincoln did not understand that a majority of southerners considered his election a direct assault on their liberties.

After the fall of Fort Sumter, South Carolina, however, Lincoln could no longer doubt that war was at hand. His objective then was to prosecute a war that would preserve the Union. Not until relatively late in the war, beginning in 1863 with the Emancipation Proclamation, did the president make the freeing of the slaves a political and moral priority of a Union victory. Lincoln's steadfast reliance on General Grant—even in the face of mounting Union casualties—brought the war to a definitive end, enabling Lincoln to focus on plans for a generous reconstruction of the South, plans that, unfortunately, were aborted in the aftermath of his assassination on April 14, 1865.