Abraham Lincoln

#1In 1858, Abraham Lincoln wanted to become a United States senator from Illinois. Standing in his way was Stephen A. Douglas, already one of the biggest names in American politics.

#2The two met in seven debates across Illinois. Again and again, they came back to slavery—especially whether it could keep spreading into the western territories. Newspapers printed the exchanges, and Lincoln's name started traveling far beyond his home state.

#3Then he lost.

#4Voters didn't directly elect senators yet; state legislatures did. Douglas had enough legislative support to keep his seat.

#5So Lincoln didn't get the office he'd been fighting for.

#6But he didn't vanish either.

#7Lincoln kept the texts of the Lincoln–Douglas debates and helped turn them into something people could keep reading. The Senate seat was gone. The audience the campaign had created wasn't.

#8Less than two years later, the man who couldn't become senator from Illinois became the Republican nominee for president.

#9The familiar version of Lincoln's life goes something like this: fail, lose an election, lose another one, keep going, become president.

#10It's memorable.

#11It's also not quite his career.

#12Lincoln lost his first Illinois legislative race in 1832, then won in 1834. He won three more terms after that. In 1846, voters sent him to the U.S. House.

#13So the interesting part isn't that he lost everything until the presidency rescued him.

#14It's what happened after some of the losses that mattered.

#15His single term in Congress didn't launch him into national prominence. In 1849, he wanted the federal post of commissioner of the General Land Office and didn't get it. He went back to Springfield and focused again on his law practice.

#16For a while, national politics seemed to be moving on without him.

#17Then came the Kansas–Nebraska Act in 1854. It reopened the possibility that slavery could spread into territories where its future had seemed more restricted.

#18That pulled Lincoln back into politics.

#19He tried for the Senate in 1855 and failed. He challenged Douglas in 1858 and failed again.

#20But this time he lost the office and came away with something else.

#21People across the country knew who he was.

#22Lincoln kept speaking after 1858.

#23In February 1860, he appeared at Cooper Union in New York City. Now the audience included eastern political leaders and major newspapers—the people deciding whether this western lawyer belonged in a presidential conversation.

#24Lincoln made a careful case that restricting slavery's spread into federal territories wasn't some brand-new radical idea. He tied the argument to the political record of the nation's founders.

#25Years in court had taught him how to break a complicated argument into pieces people could follow.

#26The speech worked.

#27Lincoln still wasn't the Republican Party's biggest star.

#28That was William H. Seward.

#29But now Lincoln was a serious alternative.

#30And that mattered, because Seward had a problem.

#31The Republican convention opened in Chicago in May 1860.

#32Seward led the first ballot.

#33No surprise.

#34But fame had also given him enemies. Some Republicans worried he would look too radical in the general election. Others were staring at states like Pennsylvania and Indiana and asking a more practical question: who could actually win there?

#35Lincoln sat in a useful middle ground.

#36He wasn't unknown anymore. He was firmly against the expansion of slavery. And he hadn't accumulated as many political enemies as Seward.

#37His allies in Chicago were working the delegates too. David Davis, Norman Judd, and others were counting votes and trying to make Lincoln the acceptable second choice for people who couldn't get their first.

#38Seward led the first ballot. Lincoln closed fast on the second. More votes moved on the third.

#39Lincoln had the nomination.

#40The loser of the 1858 Illinois Senate race was suddenly the Republican candidate for president.

#41Then he won the election.

#42And almost immediately, his political career stopped being the biggest thing at stake.

#43Lincoln won about 40 percent of the popular vote in 1860. The Democratic Party had split into competing northern and southern camps, while Lincoln dominated much of the North and won a clear Electoral College majority.

#44South Carolina seceded in December.

#45Before Lincoln even took office, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas followed. Seven states formed the Confederacy.

#46Lincoln's election didn't create the slavery crisis. The country had been fighting over slavery and its expansion for decades. There had been bloodshed in Kansas, the Supreme Court's Dred Scott decision, John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry, and one political battle after another over the West.

#47Lincoln's victory was a trigger inside that much older conflict.

#48For the first time, a party committed to stopping slavery's territorial expansion had captured the presidency.

#49Lincoln said he wasn't going to abolish slavery immediately inside states where it already existed. He also said he didn't believe the Constitution gave him that power.

#50But he wouldn't give way on expansion.

#51For secessionists in the Deep South, that threatened slavery's long-term political future.

#52Then Confederate forces attacked Fort Sumter in April 1861. Lincoln called for 75,000 troops. Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Arkansas joined the Confederacy.

#53The political crisis was now a war.

#54Lincoln had figured out how to win votes.

#55He hadn't figured out how to win this.

#56Lincoln's military experience was thin. He'd briefly served as a militia captain during the Black Hawk War. Now he was commander in chief in a conflict larger than anything the United States had fought before.

#57One of the first generals to inspire real confidence was George B. McClellan.

#58McClellan could build an army. He trained and organized the Army of the Potomac, and his soldiers loved him.

#59Then Lincoln wanted him to use it.

#60McClellan often believed the Confederate force in front of him was much larger than it really was. He wanted more troops, more preparation, more certainty.

#61Lincoln kept looking at the calendar.

#62If the Union waited a day, the Confederacy got that day too.

#63At Antietam in September 1862, McClellan stopped Robert E. Lee's invasion of the North. Lincoln finally had the military moment he'd been waiting for and used it to issue the preliminary version of the Emancipation Proclamation.

#64But Lee's army got back into Virginia.

#65Lincoln wanted pursuit.

#66McClellan didn't move with the urgency he wanted.

#67So Lincoln removed him.

#68Then he tried someone else.

#69Ambrose Burnside came next. He'd already resisted taking command of the Army of the Potomac because he doubted he was the right man for it.

#70At Fredericksburg, his army suffered a terrible defeat.

#71Then came Joseph Hooker. Lincoln knew Hooker had reportedly talked about the army and government needing a dictator. He still gave him command and, in a remarkable letter, essentially told him to bring military success first.

#72Hooker lost at Chancellorsville.

#73George G. Meade followed.

#74At Gettysburg in July 1863, Meade defeated Lee.

#75A huge Union victory.

#76And Lee got away again.

#77His army crossed back into Virginia.

#78Lincoln kept changing commanders while the larger problem survived: the Confederacy's main eastern army was still intact.

#79So the president started learning the war himself—maps, telegrams, strategy, arguments with generals.

#80And while that was happening, the war years tore through his own family too.

#81Willie Lincoln had once traveled with his father to Chicago and written a friend about their hotel room.

#82There was a little bed for him and a big bed for his father. Small towels for Willie. Big ones for his father.

#83Before the monuments, Abraham Lincoln was simply the dad sleeping in the larger bed.

#84In February 1862, Willie and his younger brother Tad became sick.

#85Willie died in the White House on February 20.

#86Mary Todd Lincoln was devastated. For a time she could barely leave her bed and couldn't bear to go into Willie's room.

#87Lincoln was grieving too.

#88The work on his desk didn't stop.

#89Even while Willie was dangerously ill, appeals involving other people's lives were still arriving for the president to decide.

#90His own child was dying upstairs while other families waited to learn what Abraham Lincoln would do about theirs.

#91And outside the White House, the war kept creating more families with an empty room.

#92When Lincoln won the Republican nomination in 1860, Ulysses S. Grant was nowhere near national fame.

#93He'd left the Army. Farming hadn't worked out. Money was a constant problem. By 1860, he was helping with his family's leather goods business in Galena, Illinois.

#94Then the Civil War put him back in uniform.

#95Fort Donelson. Shiloh. Vicksburg. Chattanooga.

#96Grant made mistakes, and his victories could be brutally expensive.

#97But there was a difference Lincoln couldn't miss.

#98Grant moved.

#99If an operation went wrong, he kept operating. If he won, he didn't treat that victory as the end of the problem.

#100And Lincoln hadn't personally discovered him.

#101In fact, Lincoln and Grant didn't meet face to face until 1864.

#102Grant produced the results first.

#103Lincoln watched.

#104Congress revived the rank of lieutenant general, and Lincoln chose Grant.

#105Grant came to Washington in March 1864. That was the first time the two men actually met.

#106Grant wanted to coordinate Union armies across several fronts at once. Lee would be kept under pressure in Virginia while other Union armies moved elsewhere. The Confederacy wouldn't be able to solve one emergency by pulling troops away from another front.

#107It matched something Lincoln had wanted for a long time.

#108Not one brilliant battle.

#109Pressure that didn't let the enemy reset.

#110At last, Lincoln seemed to have the kind of commander he'd been looking for.

#111Then the casualty lists got much worse.

#112Grant went after Lee in May 1864.

#113The Wilderness. Spotsylvania. Cold Harbor.

#114Fight, lose thousands of men, move south, fight again.

#115At Cold Harbor, Union troops attacking strong Confederate positions suffered horrifying losses.

#116Grant was doing the thing Lincoln had spent years asking his generals to do.

#117He wasn't stopping.

#118But now everyone could see what that sentence cost.

#119The war was in its fourth year, and another presidential election was coming.

#120The Democratic nominee was McClellan—the general Lincoln himself had fired.

#121Their positions had flipped. In 1862, Lincoln had judged McClellan's conduct of the war. In 1864, McClellan was asking voters to judge Lincoln's.

#122By August, Lincoln thought he might lose.

#123On August 23, he wrote a private memorandum saying his administration was very likely to be defeated. He folded it, hid the text, and had his cabinet sign the outside.

#124If he lost, he wrote, he'd have to cooperate with the president-elect before inauguration to try to save the Union.

#125Lincoln was preparing for political defeat again.

#126Then, less than two weeks later, the war map changed.

#127On September 2, 1864, William Tecumseh Sherman's army captured Atlanta, a major Confederate rail and industrial center deep in Georgia.

#128Grant was holding Lee in Virginia. Sherman was moving through Georgia. Philip Sheridan was attacking Confederate power in the Shenandoah Valley.

#129The simultaneous pressure was finally becoming visible back home.

#130Atlanta didn't single-handedly reelect Lincoln. Campaign politics mattered, and the Democrats had tensions of their own.

#131But the military picture looked very different from the one Lincoln had faced in August.

#132On November 8, he defeated McClellan with about 55 percent of the popular vote and a huge Electoral College margin.

#133Lincoln also won overwhelmingly among Union soldiers who were able to vote.

#134He had more time.

#135And by then, the war itself had changed.

#136Lincoln entered office opposed to slavery, especially its expansion, but he didn't begin by claiming presidential power to abolish it immediately in every state where it existed.

#137His first overriding war aim was preserving the Union.

#138For a time, he considered gradual emancipation, compensation for slaveholders, even colonization plans that imagined free Black Americans leaving the United States.

#139But the war didn't wait for Washington to settle the theory.

#140Enslaved people started leaving plantations and coming into Union lines.

#141That forced military officers to decide what to do with them.

#142Send them back?

#143If they did, the Confederacy regained their labor—and that labor helped free white southern men for military service.

#144Congress acted. Abolitionists pushed. Some Union generals moved ahead with emancipation policies of their own.

#145The reality of the war was changing.

#146Lincoln's policy changed with it.

#147By the summer of 1862, Lincoln had decided to use emancipation as a war measure.

#148Seward urged him to wait for a military success before announcing it. Coming after a run of Union defeats, he worried, the proclamation might look like the desperate act of a government in trouble.

#149Lincoln waited.

#150After Antietam, he issued the Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation. On January 1, 1863, the final Emancipation Proclamation took effect.

#151It didn't free every enslaved person in the country that morning. It didn't apply to loyal slave states, and in Confederate-held territory, freedom often became real only when Union forces actually arrived.

#152But the war had changed.

#153Union military advance could now destroy slavery as part of federal war policy. Black men could enlist, and roughly 180,000 would serve in the Union Army.

#154This wasn't a story of passive people simply waiting for Lincoln to free them.

#155Enslaved people had moved first. Black communities were acting. Congress and the army were moving. Abolitionists were pressing the government.

#156Lincoln's power still mattered enormously. He turned emancipation into official federal war policy.

#157After reelection, he pushed for something more permanent: the Thirteenth Amendment.

#158On January 31, 1865, the House finally reached the required two-thirds vote.

#159Slavery was moving toward abolition in the Constitution itself.

#160Now Lee's army still had to be finished.

#161In the spring of 1865, the defenses around Petersburg collapsed and Lee pulled west.

#162Lincoln had seen this before.

#163After Antietam, Lee escaped. After Gettysburg, Lee escaped.

#164This time Grant stayed on him.

#165Union forces blocked roads, disrupted supplies, and kept tightening the space around the Army of Northern Virginia.

#166On April 9, Lee asked to meet.

#167The two generals sat down in Wilmer McLean's house at Appomattox Court House.

#168Lee arrived in formal gray. Grant came in a muddy field uniform. Grant had been suffering from a severe headache and later remembered that it disappeared when he received Lee's message agreeing to discuss surrender.

#169The terms were relatively generous. Confederate soldiers would be paroled and allowed to go home. Men who owned horses or mules needed for spring planting could take them.

#170Lee's army was finished.

#171And someone unexpected was in the room: Robert Todd Lincoln, the president's eldest son, serving on Grant's staff late in the war.

#172Abraham Lincoln wasn't there to see Lee surrender.

#173His son was.

#174Appomattox didn't end every Confederate army that afternoon. The Thirteenth Amendment still hadn't completed ratification. And the enormous question of what freedom and citizenship would look like after slavery was only beginning.

#175Still, Washington knew the war was nearing its end.

#176On the night of April 14, 1865, Lincoln went to Ford's Theatre to see the comedy "Our American Cousin."

#177Actor and Confederate sympathizer John Wilkes Booth entered the presidential box and shot him.

#178Lincoln died the next morning.

#179Five days after Lee's surrender.

#180Lincoln's body traveled back to Springfield on a long funeral train. Crowds gathered in cities and along railroad tracks as it moved west.

#181There was another coffin on the train.

#182Willie's.

#183He'd been buried in Washington after dying in the White House. Now his remains were being taken back to Illinois so he could be buried with his father.

#184Years earlier, Willie had written from that Chicago hotel about the little bed that belonged to him and the big bed that belonged to his father.

#185This time, father and son were traveling home together.

#186From a distance, Lincoln's life can look strangely inevitable.

#187Lose the Senate race, gain national fame. Become president. Find Grant. End slavery. Reach Appomattox.

#188It didn't feel like that while any of it was happening.

#189Lincoln genuinely wanted the Senate seat in 1858.

#190He lost.

#191What mattered was that he didn't throw away the political position the loss had created.

#192He didn't know how to command a massive war when he became president. He chose generals, lost confidence in them, changed them, and learned what kind of strategy he needed.

#193He didn't discover Grant as an unknown genius. Grant built a record first. Lincoln saw it and gave him greater authority.

#194And Lincoln's answer on slavery wasn't complete in 1860.

#195Enslaved people moved. Congress moved. The army moved. Abolitionists pushed. The war changed.

#196Lincoln changed too.

#197Not every judgment was right. His support for colonization schemes exposed serious limits in his thinking, and the country he left behind still faced unresolved battles over Black citizenship, voting rights, and Reconstruction.

#198So the most interesting part of Lincoln's story isn't simply that he never quit.

#199Again and again, he ran into something harder than failure:

#200reality refusing to work the way he'd expected.

#201When that happened, he didn't always repeat the same answer louder.

#202He changed people. He changed methods. He changed policy. He changed parts of his own thinking.

#203And he kept deciding what he wasn't willing to let go.

#204A permanently broken Union wasn't an acceptable ending.

#205And as the war changed, simply rebuilding the old Union with slavery intact stopped being an acceptable return to normal.

#206In 1858, Abraham Lincoln failed to become a senator.

#207Seven years later, his son stood in the room where Robert E. Lee surrendered.

#208What happened between those moments wasn't a story about starting over from the same place every time he failed.

#209It was a story about not starting from the same place anymore.

#210In 1864, the man trying to remove Lincoln from the White House was George B. McClellan—the general Lincoln himself had removed from command two years earlier. How did one of the Union Army's most popular generals end up campaigning against his former commander in chief?