Abraham Lincoln

The sixteenth President of the United States, and before that a captain of volunteers who then served twice as a private.

He was born in a one-room cabin in Hardin County, Kentucky, on the twelfth of February 1809. His mother died when he was nine. He had perhaps a year of formal schooling in his whole life and taught himself the rest, reading borrowed books by firelight.

In April 1832, when he was twenty-three and had been in New Salem barely a year, the Black Hawk War called for volunteers. The men of his company elected him their captain. He said long afterwards that no success in his life had given him so much satisfaction. His company was mustered out at the end of May and he re-enlisted the same day as a private, and again in June, serving under men who had lately answered to him. He was discharged on the tenth of July. He saw no fighting, and joked about it in Congress years later - he had, he said, fought and bled on the mosquitoes.

He went into the Illinois legislature, then the law, then a single term in the House. He lost a Senate race in 1858 and won the presidency in 1860, and seven states had left the Union before he was sworn in.

He commanded, as president, the armies of a country at war with itself - and among the officers who served under him were men from the militia of 1832. Thirty years after his own company elected him, every one of them answered to him again.

He was shot at Ford's Theatre on the evening of Good Friday, the fourteenth of April 1865, five days after Lee surrendered at Appomattox, and died the next morning at twenty-two minutes past seven. He was fifty-six.

His wife Mary and their sons Robert and Thomas. Three of their four children died before he did.