The 16th President of the United States, Abraham Lincoln

Abraham Lincoln warned the South in his inaugural address. "In your hands, my dissatisfied fellow countrymen, and not in mine, is the momentous event of civil war The government will not invade them .... You do not have any oath registered in heaven to destroy the government, while I shall have the most solemn oath to preserve, protect and defend ". Lincoln thought that the secession was illegal, and was willing to use force to defend Federal law and the Union. When the Confederate battery fired against Fort Sumter and forced its surrender, he called on states for 75,000 volunteers. Four more slave states joined the Confederacy but four remained within the Union. The civil war had begun. The son of a Kentucky border, Lincoln had to struggle to live and learn. Five months before receiving his party's nomination for President, he sketched his life: 

"I was born on February 12, 1809, in Hardin County, Kentucky My parents were both born in Virginia, of undistinguished families, secondary families should. say. My mother, who died when I was ten years old, was from a family name Hanks .... My father ... removed from Kentucky to ... Indiana, when I was eight was a region .... wild, with many bears and other wild animals in the woods. There I grew up .... of course, when I was older did not know much. still somehow, I could read, write, and cipher ... but that was all " . Lincoln made extraordinary efforts to attain knowledge while working on a farm, splitting rails for fences, and keeping a store in Salem, Illinois. The captain was Halco Black War, spent eight years in the Illinois legislature, and led the circuit of courts for many years. His partner in the law said to him, "his ambition was a little engine that knew no rest." He married Mary Todd, and they had four children, only one of whom lived to maturity. In 1858 Lincoln ran against Stephen A. Douglas for the Senate. He lost the election, but in a debate with Douglas, won great national reputation that won him the Republican nomination for president in 1860. As president, he became the Republican Party into a strong national organization. Later, he gathered most northerners to the cause of the Union Democrats. On January 1, 1863, he issued the Emancipation Proclamation that declared forever free the slaves in the Confederacy.

Lincoln never let the world forget that the Civil War involved a much larger issue. This they said, mostly carried devoted to it the Military Cemetery at Gettysburg: "This is where we meet greatly that these dead shall not have died in vain, that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom and that government of the people , by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth. " Lincoln won re-election in 1864, while the military triumphs of the union announced an end to the war. In its plan of operation for peace, the President was flexible and generous, encouraging Southerners to deliver their weapons and to quickly enter the Union. The spirit that led him was clearly in his second Inaugural Address, now inscribed on one wall of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, DC: "With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive to finish the work in which we are involved; to bind up the nation's wounds .... "on Good Friday, on April 14, 1865, Lincoln was assassinated at Ford's Theatre in Washington, by John Wilkes Booth, an actor, who somehow thought that Lincoln was helping the south. The opposite was the result, for with Lincoln's death, the possibility of peace with magnificiencia had died.