When Abraham Lincoln was elected president in 1860, seven slave states left the Union to form the Confederate States of America, and four more joined when hostilities began between North and South. Then a bloody civil war engulfed the nation as Lincoln promised to preserve the Union, enforce United States law, and end secession. The war lasted over four years with a staggering loss of over 600,000 American casualties. all slaves within the Confederacy, turning the war from a battle to preserve the Union to a battle for freedom.

He was the first Republican president, and the Union victory ended the claim that state sovereignty replaced federal authority once and for all. Killed by an assassin's bullet less than a week after the Confederate forces surrendered, Lincoln left the nation a more perfect union, earning the admiration of most Americans as the nation's greatest president.

Born in abject poverty in a Kentucky log cabin in 1809, Lincoln grew up on the Kentucky-Indiana border, where he was mostly self-taught and fond of jokes. hard work and books. He served for a time as a soldier in the Black Hawk's War, taught himself law, and served as a Whig politician in the Illinois state legislature in the 1830s and 1840s.

He moved from state politics to the US House of Representatives in 1847, where he spoke out against the US war with Mexico. In the mid-1850s, Lincoln left the Whig Party to join the new Republican Party.

In 1858 he competed in a race for the US Senate against one of the nation's most popular politicians, Senator Stephen Douglas. The debates made him a contender for the Republican presidential nomination of 1860.