ABSTRACT

Abraham Lincoln was born in 1809 and was assassinated on April 15, 1865, six days after the end of the Civil War. He was the sixteenth President of the United States. He is best known for leading the Union through the Civil War and for issuing the Emancipation Proclamation, freeing all enslaved people in Confederate-held territory. His father, Thomas Lincoln, was a farmer and landowner who never got beyond the subsistence stage of agriculture. He suffered loss and hardship and, in modern parlance, was rarely in tune with his unappreciative, lazy, and sometimes quarrelsome son who preferred the company of books and educational opportunities to the sweat and toil of the land.