Abraham Lincoln

Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865) presided over the Civil War as the 16th president of the United States. Idolized by the North and hated by the South, Lincoln pursued his goal of keeping the Union together despite the fervent desire by southerners to secede. Approaching secession with the mind of the attorney that Lincoln was, he declared it illegal and managed, or mismanaged in the view of some, the resultant war. He is also famous for having declared: "Congressmen who willfully take action during wartime that damage morale and undermine the military are saboteurs, and should be arrested, exiled or hanged."

Homeschooled in his youth, Lincoln became a successful railroad attorney in Illinois who was known for his integrity and his piercing cross-examinations. He lost many more political races than he won, and served briefly in Congress as a Whig opposed to the Mexican War. That cost him reelection, and a decade later in 1858 he ran for the U.S. Senate against the dynamic speaker Stephen Douglas, who defeated him. But Lincoln ran a strong enough race that Douglas was forced to alienate some of his supporters with his Freeport Doctrine, and when both ran for president two years later in 1860, Lincoln won easily without even campaigning.

Lincoln was perhaps the only President who appeared to move from being an unbeliever to believer while in office. From 1861 to 1864 Lincoln relied entirely on logic. As a congressmen decades earlier, Lincoln distinguished himself by redoing the geometric proofs in the great work of Euclid. But on the way to the cemetery in Gettysburg in November 1864, Lincoln had apparently found God and inserted after "one nation" the phrase "under God" into his pre-written Gettysburg Address. After Lincoln won reelection that had been in doubt, his Second Inaugural Address was filled with religious references lacking from his First Inaugural Address.

Lincoln was shot in Washington, DC on Good Friday, April 14 1865, a few days after the Civil War ended, and died the next day. He became a martyr to the North and a cause for revenge against the South, from which the assassin (John Wilkes Booth) had come.