Blog Post: Abraham Lincoln

 I am Abraham Lincoln. Most people know me as the 16th president of the United States, and the person who delivered the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863. 

I was born on February 12, 1809, in Hardin County, Kentucky. My parents were both uneducated, and I somehow learned how to read, write, and cipher.

My mother passed away when I was 10. My father moved to Indiana when I was 8 years old. It was a wild region, with many bears and other wild animals still in the woods. There I grew up. 

When I came of age I made extraordinary efforts to attain knowledge while working on a farm, splitting rails for fences, and keeping a store in New Salem, Illinois. I was a captain in the Black Hawk War. 

I married Mary Todd and had four boys, only one of whom lived to maturity. 

I spent eight years in the Illinois legislature and rode the circuit of courts for many years. From 1834 to 1840, I held a seat in the Illinois legislature. At the same time, I practiced law in Illinois, and at that time I became one of the state’s most renowned lawyers. 

I first entered national politics in 1847 while serving a single term in Congress. I was a part of the Whig Party but later changed to the Republican Party. 

In the fall of 1854, I gave a three-hour speech in Peoria, Illinois. I presented more clearly than ever my moral, legal, and economic opposition to slavery—and then I admitted that I didn’t know exactly what should be done about it within the current political system. 

In 1858 I ran against Stephen A. Douglas for Senator. I lost the election, but in debating with Douglas I gained a national reputation that won me the Republican nomination for President in 1860. In 1860 I was nominated at the Republican National Convention to be the party’s presidential candidate and I embarked on a presidential campaign that I would win. 

When I became president I did not have any position towards slavery. I once said, Abraham Lincoln, “I am rather inclined to silence, and whether that be wise or not, it is at least more unusual nowadays to find a man who can hold his tongue than to find one who cannot.” 

Abe Lincoln Quote, “I have said a hundred times, and I have now no inclination to take it back, that I believe there is no right, and ought to be no inclination in the people of the free States to enter into the slave States, and interfere with the question of slavery at all”.

Abe Lincoln Quote, “I say that we must not interfere with the institution of slavery in the states where it exists, because the constitution forbids it, and the general welfare does not require us to do so”.

One of the solutions that I talked about was, “My first impulse would be to free all the slaves and send them to Liberia, to their own native land”. NPR-Transcript

At this point, I do not really see black people as an intrinsic part of American society. They are a kind of an alien group who have been uprooted from their own society and unjustly brought across the ocean.

On January 1, 1863, I issued the Emancipation Proclamation that declared forever free those slaves within the Confederacy. This is my most famous speech and is still talked about to this day. 

I was shot while sitting in Ford’s Theater by John Wilkes Booth, on the night of April 14, 1865.  I died on the morning of April 15, 1865.