Inspiring People

Abraham Lincoln

Some of the qualities of Abraham Lincoln were modesty, self-discipline and tolerance.

Abraham Lincoln was born on February 12, 1809 and died on April 15, 1865. He was the sixteenth President of the United States and successfully led his country through its greatest crisis, the Civil War. He was assassinated less than a month after the war's end. Before his election as President, Lincoln was a lawyer. He did not agree with slavery which was happening at the time. During his term (time as President), he helped preserve the United States by leading the defeat of the secessionist Confederate States of America in the American Civil War.

He introduced measures that resulted in the abolition of slavery, issuing his Emancipation Proclamation in 1863 and promoting the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution in 1865.

Historians say that he handled the factions of the Republican Party well, bringing leaders of each faction into his cabinet and forcing them to cooperate. Lincoln successfully defused a war scare with the United Kingdom in 1861. Under his leadership, the Union took control of the border slave states at the start of the war.

His assassination in 1865 was the first presidential assassination in U.S. history and made him a martyr for the ideal of national unity.