Gettysburg 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 (1832) before being elected to the state legislature in 1834. Lincoln was admitted to the bar in 1837 and 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. Mary, quarrelsome but proud of her husband, 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 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 actually 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.

Even though Lincoln's position on slavery was not radical, the southern states made clear that they would not remain in the Union should he be elected president. This threat of secession notwithstanding, Lincoln was genuinely surprised when the South made good on its warning; his objective then was to prosecute a war that would preserve the Union.

Lincoln had little military experience, however, and initially he had little understanding of how to conduct the war. He put the Union forces in the charge of General George McClellan, an able administrator beloved by his men but also a cautious field commander who consistently overestimated the Confederate army's strengths and avoided direct engagements with Lee's forces, thus delaying a vital showdown with the rebels. Contemptuous of Lincoln, who borrowed from the Library of Congress books about military strategy, McClellan did little to advance the Union cause, except for constantly parading and training his troops. Even worse, he was touted as a potential presidential candidate, putting Lincoln in the position of gingerly dealing with a man who considered himself less of a subordinate and more of a rival for the power Lincoln held. But McClellan's replacements (the generals Henry Halleck, Ambrose Burnside, and Joseph Hooker) could not do much to weaken Lee because they did not have his genius for strategy or his bold decisiveness. Not until Meade's holding action at Gettysburg and Grant's victories in the South and West did Union prospects brighten and Lincoln's leadership surmount the early disasters of his administration.

Lincoln's steadfast reliance on 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 curtailed in the aftermath of the president's assassination.