Abraham Lincoln Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865), sixteenth president of the United States, was born February 12, 1809, on his parents’ farm in Kentucky. In his early twenties, he moved to New Salem, Illinois, where he worked as a storekeeper, riverboat pilot, postmaster, and surveyor. Lincoln served as a militia captain in the Black Hawk War of 1832 and was elected as a Whig to the Illinois State Legislature in 1834. He was reelected in 1836, 1838, and 1840; in 1837 he began a law practice in the new state capital, Springfield. Lincoln married Mary Todd in 1842 and won election to the U.S. Congress in 1846. He declined to run for reelection to Congress two years later, in keeping with a Whig arrangement to rotate officeholders, and returned to Springfield to practice law.

Although primarily focused on helping build the nascent Republican Party organization in Illinois and tending to his increasingly successful law practice during the 1850s, Lincoln was drawn back into electoral politics, motivated by several important events, including Senator Stephen Douglas’s sponsorship of the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 and the Supreme Court’s 1857 Dred Scott decision. Lincoln’s famous “House Divided” speech launched his 1858 senatorial campaign against Douglas, a campaign that represented the culmination of twenty years of political and personal rivalry between the two men that reached back to the state legislature and the courtship of Mary Todd. Though Lincoln lost the Senate campaign, his performance in contesting one of the nation’s most prominent politicians put him on the national political map. The Cooper Union speech of February 1860, and the East Coast lecture tour of which it formed a part, put his name and the Republican approach to slavery— maintaining it where it was already established, but refusing to allow its spread into new territories and states—before a still wider audience. Lincoln garnered the Republican nomination for president in Chicago, Illinois, that spring and defeated three rivals to win the presidency in November 1860.

Lincoln faced a crisis from the moment of his election: ten Southern states had left him off their ballots entirely, and seven had seceded and formed the Confederate States of America before he was even sworn in. Hostilities erupted when Confederate troops fired on Union attempts to resupply Fort Sumter, off the South Carolina coast, in April 1861. Lincoln and the nation were shocked by the fiasco at Bull Run in July 1861, in which outnumbered Confederate forces routed Union troops. The year 1862 saw the president increasingly disillusioned by the inaction of General George McClellan and displeased with the lack of response from border states (Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky, Missouri) to his offer of compensated emancipation. In April 1862, Congress approved legislation ending slavery in the District of Columbia, but Lincoln was looking to make a more serious move against slavery, which he increasingly saw as incompatible with the future of the United States as a nation where all men were created equal. The Emancipation Proclamation, which took effect on January 1, 1863, freed slaves in Confederate territories in rebellion against the national government. In July of that year, the tide of the war finally turned after the Union victory at Gettysburg, and after nearly four years and more than six hundred thousand combined casualties, the Civil War (1861–1865) ended when Confederate General Robert E. Lee surrendered to Union General Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Courthouse in Virginia, on April 9, 1865. Just four days later, Lincoln was shot by Confederate supporter John Wilkes Booth while watching a performance at Ford’s Theater in Washington. He died the next morning.

Despite an elementary-level education, an undistinguished early political career, and his own apparent lack of Christian faith, Lincoln crafted some of the most memorable speeches in the American political tradition and displayed a deep appreciation for the ability of religious imagery to provide comfort and meaning in the nation’s darkest hour. Three of his speeches—the Cooper Union speech (1860), the Gettysburg Address (1863), and the Second Inaugural (1865)—have occasioned scholarly treatments all their own, and Lincoln’s commitment to the ideals of the American Union continues to inspire struggles for liberty in the United States and around the world. African American activist and civil rights crusader Martin Luther King Jr., for example, acknowledged the importance of delivering his noted “I Have a Dream” speech in the shadow of the Lincoln Memorial in 1963.

Bibliography:

Basler, Roy P., ed. The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1953.
Donald, David Herbert. Lincoln. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995.
Guelzo, Allen C. Abraham Lincoln: Redeemer President. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1999.
Holzer, Harold. Lincoln at Cooper Union: The Speech That Made Abraham Lincoln President. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2004.
Peterson, Merrill. Lincoln in American Memory. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995.
White, Ronald C., Jr. Lincoln’s Greatest Speech: The Second Inaugural. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2002.
Wills, Garry. Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words That Remade America. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992.

This example Abraham Lincoln Essay is published for educational and informational purposes only. If you need a custom essay or research paper on this topic please use our writing services. EssayEmpire.com offers reliable custom essay writing services that can help you to receive high grades and impress your professors with the quality of each essay or research paper you hand in.