Abraham Lincoln
Abraham Lincoln was born on
February 12, 1809 in Hodgenville,
Kentucky. He became the 16th
president of the United
States on March 4, 1861 and was reelected in
1864. Throughout his presidency he accomplished many things. One of his greatest
accomplishments was, in my opinion, the freeing of the slaves. Abraham Lincoln
was an abolitionist. He once said: “If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong.”
Although he was opposed to slavery, he did not think it was appropriate to pass
laws to abolish slavery in states where it already existed, but he believed
that slavery should not be allowed to spread into more territories, therefore
any more states admitted to the Union would be Free states. He believed that if slavery
didn’t spread, it would eventually become extinct. He was criticized by many
abolitionists for taking such a slow approach towards freeing the slaves. In
1863, two years after the start of the Civil War, Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation,
which freed all slaves in the Confederate states. Lincoln
was afraid that after the war was over that slavery would once again become
prosperous in the United
States. A constitutional amendment would be
needed to ensure that slavery would never again exist within the United States. Lincoln proposed the Thirteenth Amendment to formally
abolish slavery within the United
States. He was assassinated on April 14,
1865 at Ford’s Theatre by John Wilkes Booth. He was the first US president in history to be
assassinated.