Abraham Lincoln

Abraham Lincoln was born on 12 February 1809 in a one-room log cabin in what is now LaRue County, Kentucky. He grew up on frontier farms in Kentucky and then Indiana, and at twenty-one moved with his family to Illinois, settling at New Salem.

When the Black Hawk War began in 1832, the men of his Sangamon County rifle company elected him captain on 21 April; he won about three votes in four. By the end of the month the company had been taken into the 4th Regiment of Mounted Volunteers in Samuel Whiteside's brigade. It was mustered out on 27 May.

Lincoln re-enlisted two days later as a private in Captain Elijah Iles's company, mustered in by Lieutenant Robert Anderson, and served until 16 June. On 20 June he joined Captain Jacob Early's independent spy company, also as a private, and was discharged on 10 July 1832. He fought in no engagement. He did see the dead left after the fighting, and helped bury men killed at the second fight at Kellogg's Grove on 26 June. Later in life he received federal land warrants for the service, 160 acres in all.

He went on to the Illinois legislature, one term in the U.S. House, and in 1860 was elected the sixteenth President. He led the Union through the Civil War.

On the evening of 14 April 1865 he was shot at Ford's Theatre in Washington, and died the next morning, 15 April. He was buried at the Lincoln Tomb in Oak Ridge Cemetery, Springfield, Illinois.

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.