Who’s Abraham Lincoln and what did he do?
Abraham Lincoln (February 12, 1809 – April 15, 1865), was the sixteenth President of the United States. He successfully led the country through its greatest internal crisis, the American Civil War, preserving the Union and ending slavery. Assassinated as the war was drawing to a close, Lincoln had been the first Republican elected to the Presidency. Before his presidency, he was a lawyer, an Illinois state legislator, a member of the United States House of Representatives, and twice an unsuccessful candidate for election to the Senate. As an outspoken opponent of the expansion of slavery in the United States, Lincoln won the Republican Party nomination in 1860 and was elected president later that year. His tenure in office was occupied primarily with the defeat of the secessionist Confederate States of America in the American Civil War. He introduced measures that resulted in the abolition of slavery, issuing the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863 and promoting the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which passed Congress before Lincoln’s death and was ratified by the states later in 1865.