Abraham Lincoln Research Paper

Abraham Lincoln was born on February 12, 1809 in Hodgenville, Kentucky. Abraham was born into a log cabin and his family was not all that rich. Throughout his childhood, his sister Sarah always encouraged him to challenge himself and also encouraged him to start reading and to learn more about the world. This was difficult for him because his family moved very often when he was a young boy and teenager. After his family moved to Illinois when he was 21, Lincoln did odd jobs to get some income until he took a flat boat down to New Orleans and met Todd Stuart. Todd Stuart was an experienced lawyer and took Lincoln under his arm and taught Lincoln how to be a lawyer and even gave him some law books to study. Eventually in 1836, Lincoln received

Lincoln ran three times for the Illinois General Assembly and won twice but he did not run a fourth time so he could be able to run for the U.S. Senate. In the Illinois legislature, he served with Ninian Wirt Edwards, who was the son of a former governor of Illinois. Edwards’ wife was the former Elizabeth Todd of Lexington, Kentucky. When her younger sister, Mary, came from Lexington, Lincoln said, "Mary could make a bishop forget his prayers." Lincoln and Mary liked each other very much but unfortunately they separated from each other around December of 1840. More than a year later, a friend brought them back together, and they were married on November 4, 1842. In 1846, Lincoln was elected into the U.S. House of Representatives. There, he gave his famous “Spot” speech which changed the house’s view on Lincoln drastically. He did not run for reelection in Congress because he wanted to spend more time practicing law and to focus more on supporting his growing family of four

He grew up with nine siblings on a farm in Maryland, which used slaves as their source of manual labor. His father was a well-known actor, John W. Booth decided to follow in his father’s footsteps and made his first performance when he was seventeen and then joined a Shakespearian acting company in Richmond, Virginia. Since he grew up on a farm with slaves, Booth was a die-hard Southerner. Booth hated anti-slavery and therefore he hated Abraham Lincoln because of Lincoln’s views on slavery. When Lincoln was elected president in 1860 and the Anti- Slavery Republican Party started to rise in the Northern States, Booth got so angry he said this to his sister, “So help me holy God! My soul, life, and possessions are for the South.” After 1860, Booth’s career as an actor took off well thought the war. One of the plays he was in was called “The Marble Heart” at Ford’s Theater, which on November 9, 1863, Abraham Lincoln was watching from the presidential booth. Later, when Lincoln was making his second inaugural speech in 1865, Booth and a couple of his friends were with him standing in the crowd. As soon as Lincoln called for limited Negro Suffrage, Booth muttered to his companions, "That means nigger citizenship. That is the last speech he will ever make." After that quote he tried to get one of them to kill the president then but failed in doing so. Five days prior to Lincoln’s assassination, Robert E. Lee