February 12, 2007

• Abraham Lincoln was born on this day near
  Hodgenville, Kentucky (1809). Though he's generally considered possibly
  the greatest president in our country's history, fairly little is known
  about his early life. Unlike most presidents, he never wrote any
  memoirs. We know that he was born in a log cabin and had barely a year
  of traditional
  schooling. His mother died when he was nine, and he spent much of his
  adolescence working with an ax. But when he was in his early 20s,
  Lincoln apparently decided to make himself into a respectable man.
  Residents of the town of New Salem, Illinois, said that they remembered
  Lincoln just
  appearing in their town one day. People remembered him because he was
  one of the tallest people anyone had ever seen, about 6 foot 4, and the
  pants that he wore were so short that they didn't even cover his ankles.

  As people got to know him, they found he had a wonderful sense of
  humor. And he was a hard worker, taking jobs as a miller, storekeeper,
  surveyor, and postman. Meanwhile, he joined a debate society, read
  books on grammar and rhetoric, and studied to become a lawyer. But he
  suffered from wild mood swings. He once became so depressed that he
  considered suicide.

  Lincoln had grown up at a time when politics seemed like a truly
  noble profession, and he thought that maybe he could achieve the
  greatness he'd dreamed of as a politician. He served a few terms in the
  Illinois State Legislature, and then he was elected to the U.S.
  Congress. But
  while he was in Washington, he couldn't get a single bill passed. After
  two years, he left office, assuming his political career was finished.

  So he went back to his law practice and became an enormously
  successful lawyer. He handled more than 5,000 cases over the course of
  his law career, making him one of the busiest lawyers in the state. And
  then, in 1854, he heard about the Kansas-Nebraska Bill, sponsored by
  the
  senator from Illinois, Stephen Douglas, which would have allowed for
  the expansion of slavery into territories in the North. Lincoln hadn't
  ever been an abolitionist, but he saw the Kansas-Nebraska Bill as a
  great wedge issue that could help him make a real mark in the world.

  His campaign for senator of Illinois in 1858 turned him into a
  national figure, and though he lost the race, two years later he
  managed to maneuver himself into the nomination for president in 1860
  and he won. Lincoln spent little more than four years serving as
  president,
  and for most of those four years, there weren't many people who thought
  he was doing a good job. The Civil War went on for longer than most
  people thought it would, and it was far more brutal than anyone
  expected. Lincoln had a hard time getting his generals to aggressively
  pursue the enemy, and
  the Confederates came close to capturing Washington, D.C.

  It was only in the last few months of his life that it seemed the North
  would win the war and the Union would be preserved. In the second week
  of April 1865, he received word that that Robert E. Lee had surrendered
  his army. On the afternoon of April 14, 1865, Lincoln took a ride in an
  open
  carriage with his wife, and he was the happiest she'd ever seen him. He
  told her, "I consider this
  day, the war has come to a close." That same night, he and his wife
  went to the theater, and Lincoln was murdered by John Wilkes Booth. - The Writer's Almanac.

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