Abraham Lincoln: Martyr

01VOA Learning English presents America's Presidents.

02Today we are talking about Abraham Lincoln.

03He was the 16th President of the United States.

04Many Americans consider him one of the country's greatest leaders.

05Yet people alive when Lincoln was elected in 1860 would probably be surprised by modern-day opinions about him.

06He had little formal education or government experience.

07During the presidential campaign, critics made fun of his appearance and his simple way of talking.

08They warned that he was not very intelligent and would harm the nation's image.

09Some of his opponents, especially in southern states, had even bigger concerns.

10They were afraid Lincoln would use the power of the federal government to end slavery in their states.

11They were right.

12Abraham Lincoln was born in the frontier state of Kentucky.

13His family was very poor and had a simple home, a log cabin.

14Lincoln had to support his parents and his sister by working, so he rarely went to school.

15Instead, he taught himself by reading books.

16Eventually, he became a lawyer in the state of Illinois.

17As a young man, Lincoln was known for several qualities.

18He was tall and thin.

19He was very strong.

20His neighbors remembered him cutting down trees.

21And he was honest.

22The people he defended in court called him Honest Abe.

23In time, Lincoln was elected to the Illinois General Assembly, the state's legislature.

24He also served one term as a congressman in the U.S.

25House of Representatives.

26But he was not popular there.

27Voters did not like his opposition to the country's war with Mexico.

28So Lincoln withdrew from politics and turned his attention to his family.

29He had married a southern belle named Mary Todd in 1842.

30They had four sons, but two died when they were very young.

31Lincoln also developed his legal career representing railroad companies.

32Some people thought he might become the best railroad lawyer in the country.

33But that is not what happened.

34In the 1850s, Lincoln returned to national politics.

35The division over the issue of slavery was a deepening.

36Lincoln was not an anti-slavery activist, an abolitionist.

37But he did not support the country's policies on slavery.

38Lincoln believed slavery violated the American Declaration of Independence, which said all men had the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

39To be clear, Lincoln did not believe that black people should have the same rights as white U.S.

40citizens.

41But he did not agree that one person should own other people or profit from their work while they earned nothing and were held captive.

42Lincoln decided to compete in elections for a seat in the U.S.

43Senate.

44He was chosen as the candidate of a new anti-slavery party.

45Members called themselves Republicans.

46During the election campaign, Lincoln famously discussed the issue of slavery in a series of debates with Stephen Douglas, the Democratic Party's candidate.

47Lincoln's words moved some voters, but they did not earn him enough votes to get elected.

48So, while Douglas took the seat in the Senate, Lincoln prepared to run for president.

49Lincoln said that, if he were elected, he would not expand slavery to new territories in the country's West.

50But he promised not to interfere with slavery in the southern states, where it already existed.

51Voters in southern slaveholding states did not trust Lincoln.

52Not a single southern state supported him in the election of 1860.

53But he won anyway.

54The support of anti-slavery northerners gave him the presidency.

55In answer, seven southern states withdrew from the Union.

56Four more later joined them.

57These states formed a new government called the Confederate States of America, or the Confederacy.

58Confederate officials chose their own president and wrote their own constitution, which permitted each state control over its own laws, especially laws that protected slavery.

59Confederate officials said they no longer recognized the power of the U.S.

60federal government or its chief executive.

61As that chief executive, Lincoln would have to decide what to do.

62President Lincoln's first test came a little more than a month after the U.S.

63federal government or its chief executive.

64The event involved Fort Sumter, a federal military base on an island off the coast of South Carolina.

65Soldiers on the base needed food.

66Lincoln said he would send some by ship.

67But Confederate officials considered the port part of South Carolina, which belonged to the Confederacy.

68They demanded that the Union soldiers leave the fort.

69But Union forces and the U.S.

70president ignored the Confederates' demands.

71As promised, Lincoln sent the supply ships.

72As expected, Confederate soldiers attacked.

73A day and a half later, the fort's Union soldiers surrendered.

74The clash did not last long, and no one was killed in the fighting.

75But the battle at Fort Sumter marked the official beginning of hostilities between the Union and the Confederacy.

76Lincoln immediately took action to answer the loss at Fort Sumter.

77He called on state militias for troops and asked for a special meeting of Congress.

78The president was careful not to ask Congress to make an official declaration of war, in part because he did not want to recognize the Confederacy as a separate nation.

79Instead, he called the southern states' opposition a rebellion.

80However, the conflict between the southern Confederacy and the Northern Union was a civil war.

81Neither side expected the fighting to last very long, a few weeks or maybe months.

82Instead, the civil war lasted four and a half years.

83Most of the major battles took place near Washington, D.C., in the states of Maryland, Virginia, and Pennsylvania.

84Soldiers and civilians also clashed in the west, in Tennessee, as well as in the southern states of Mississippi, South Carolina, and Georgia.

85But the war involved the entire country.

86At least four million men fought in it.

87Among the soldiers were African American and Native American men.

88The conflict divided families.

89Brothers, fathers, and sons fought against each other.

90Women in both the North and South also supported the war effort.

91They cooked meals, made and repaired clothing for the troops, served as nurses, and cared for the soldiers.

92Both white and African American women also took over the work of men who had left to fight.

93And more than 620,000 men died.

94Recent scholarship says as many as 750,000.

95The Civil War remains the bloodiest war in American history.

96And it changed the country.

97The war radically affected American politics, economics, and society.

98Abraham Lincoln was the U.S.

99president through all of it.

100Next week, we will talk more about Lincoln's presidency and his legacy.

101I'm Kelly Jean Kelly.

102The Civil War.

103The Civil War.

104The Civil War.

105The Civil War.

106The Civil War.