Krissann barreto biography of abraham lincoln

When Abraham Lincoln was elected President in , seven slave states left the Union to form the Confederate States of America, and four more joined when hostilities began between the North and South. A bloody civil war then engulfed the nation as Lincoln vowed to preserve the Union, enforce the laws of the United States, and end the secession.

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The war lasted for more than four years with a staggering loss of more than , Americans dead. Midway through the war, Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, which freed all slaves within the Confederacy and changed the war from a battle to preserve the Union into a battle for freedom. He was the first Republican President, and Union victory ended forever the claim that state sovereignty superseded federal authority.

Killed by an assassin's bullet less than a week after the surrender of Confederate forces, Lincoln left the nation a more perfect Union and thereby earned the admiration of most Americans as the country's greatest President. Born dirt-poor in a log cabin in Kentucky in , Lincoln grew up in frontier Kentucky and Indiana, where he was largely self-educated, with a taste for jokes, hard work, and books.

He served for a time as a soldier in the Black Hawk War, taught himself law, and held a seat in the Illinois state legislature as a Whig politician in the s and s. From state politics, he moved to the U. House of Representatives in , where he voiced his opposition to the U. In , he went up against one of the most popular politicians in the nation, Senator Stephen Douglas, in a contest for the U.

Lincoln lost that election, but his spectacular performance against Douglas in a series of nationally covered debates made him a contender for the Republican presidential nomination. In the campaign for President, Lincoln firmly expressed his opposition to slavery and his determination to limit the expansion of slavery westward into the new territories acquired from Mexico in His election victory created a crisis for the nation, as many Southern Democrats feared that it would just be a matter of time before Lincoln would move to kill slavery in the South.

Rather than face a future in which black people might become free citizens, much of the white South supported secession. This reasoning was based upon the doctrine of states' rights, which placed ultimate sovereignty with the states.