Abraham Lincoln Essay

     Abraham Lincoln was born on February 12, 1809 in Harden Country, Kentucky. From an early age he was known as Abe. Lincoln later moved to Kentucky with his parents. Lincoln always wanted to be a

Lincoln ran unsuccessfully for the Illinois legislature in 1832. Two years later he was elected to the lower house for the first of four successive terms (until 1841) as a Whig. His membership in the Whig Party was natural. Lincoln's father was a Whig, and the party's ambitious program of national economic development was the perfect solution to the problems Lincoln had seen in his rural, hardscrabble Indiana past. His first platform (1832) announced that "Time and experience . . . verified . . . that the poorest and most thinly populated countries would be greatly benefitted by the opening of good roads, and in the clearing of navigable streams. . . . There cannot justly be any objection to having rail roads and canals."

During the time he was in the Whig Party, he argued against the Democratic Party on racist ground. While campaigning for William Henry Harrison, a fellow Whig member, he denounced the Democratic Party’s Presidential nominee Martin Van Buren for his support of black citizens to have voting rights in New York. Lincoln also fought in cases where he represented the Negroes and won some cases while losing some. Two of the cases he won were the Bailey v. Cromwell (1841) and the People v. Pond (1845). On both cases he represented a black women and her children and defended for harboring the fugitive slave John Hauley. There was one case where he did not win which were the Matson v. Rutherford where he represent a slave owner claiming the return of fugitive slaves in 1847. However, in the 1850s, with the breakup of the Whig Party, he parted way and later resurface in the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 and gave out his “Peoria Speech” on October 16, 1854 declaring his opposition to slavery, which he later reused it in his route to the

Abraham Lincoln and John F. Kennedy each began their political careers at an early age. Abraham Lincoln ran for the Illinois legislature in 1832 when he was just 23 years old but he was unsuccessful. However, two years later, he was elected to the Lower House for the first four successive terms as a Whig until 1841. Lincoln was married to Mary Todd Lincoln on November 4, 1842. In 1847 to 1949 Lincoln served as a member of the United States House of Representatives where he opposed the Mexican War. In 1854 there was a Kansas-Nebraska Act presented before Congress which would open lands previously closed to slavery to the possibility of its spread by local opinion. Lincoln strongly opposed slavery and viewed it as immoral so when the act passed in 1854 Lincoln was loosing interest in politics. In 1856 he joined the newly reformed Republican Party and two years later campaigned for the Senate against Douglas. Lincoln appeared with Douglas in seven debates. This was his first considerable national fame. However, he did not win the Senate seat. The democratic holdovers in the upper house elected Douglas. John F. Kennedy became involved in politics after World War II. In 1946 he was elected to the U.S. Congress, representing a district in greater Boston. He was a

When Abraham Lincoln was elected as the first republican president, he only received 40% of the popular votes; he also beat three other candidates on top of that. Lincoln was responsible for a lot of changes and is also known as an icon in American History. Lincoln was a Kentucky-born lawyer and a former Whig Representative to the Congress. Lincoln was going up against Stephen Douglas in the Senate race; Douglas argued that the states should have a right to be a slave state or a free state, while Lincoln argued against slavery and the spread of it. Unsurprisingly, Lincoln had lost the Senate race, but his campaign against slavery brought national attention to the Republican Party, in 1860, Lincoln had won the Republican party’s nomination

Lincoln 's first time to be elected to office came, when he ran unsuccessfully for the Illinois state legislature. Two years later, he ran again and it was a victory for Lincoln, becoming a part of the Whig party in the General Assembly for the next eight years. All when his was happening, Lincoln 's law career began to take off and he was beginning to start being noticed. He was admitted to the bar in 1837, and moved to Springfield, the new state capital, later that

In 1860 Abraham Lincoln was elected President. He won the presidential votes of the Republican Party. Lincoln ran against Stephen Douglas. In one of their campaigns in Hartford, Connecticut, Lincoln spoke on the Democratic bushwhacking (Doc F). Part of their campaign were to talk about the slavery. Though Lincoln, a republican, and Douglas, a democratic, their views on slavery were entirely different. Lincoln argued against the spread of slavery while Douglas argued that each territory should have the right

The opposition grew steadily with no unified leader until 1854 when a politician associated with the contemporary Whig party declared his opposition to the Kansas and Nebraska Act. That man’s name was Abraham Lincoln and he based his political career around the abolition of slavery. He opposed the Kansas and Nebraska Act because it gave each state the right to choose whether to make itself a slave state or not. This countered the former ways of the Missouri Act established in 1820 which declared a line of latitude to distinguish whether a new territory would be slave free or not. His main opposition was Steven Douglas who had ratified the Kansas and Nebraska Act. Douglas saw slavery as a strictly political dilemma but Lincoln found it to be a profound moral issue as well. Lincoln stated that the act would be fine if it did not compare black men to pigs and horses with this he declared that “slavery was incompatible with America democracy.” Abraham eloquently explained himself by reasoning, “If a Negro is a man, when then my ancient faith teaches me that ‘all men are created equal,’ and that there can be no moral right in connection with one man’s making a slave of another.” Later in his Peoria speech he called for the gradual abolishment of slavery. Lincoln’s views did not get him elected on many occasions but he never stopped his conquest to have justice for all.

Many Americans believed that the election of 1860 would decide the fate of the Union. The Democratic Party was the only party in the national scope. The convention in Charleston, South Carolina in 1860 split the Democratic Party. Stephen Douglas wanted his party’s presidential nomination, but he could not afford to alienate northern voters by accepting the southern position on the territories. However, "Southern Democrats insisted on recognition of their rights, as the Dred Scott decision had defined them and they moved to block Douglas’s nomination"( Bialy, 2007, p. 383). Douglas obtained a majority for his version of the platform, delegates from the South walked out of the convention. After compromise efforts the Democrats presented two

Abraham Lincoln was the Republican candidate for the election of 1860. He opposed slavery and claimed it was the main issue of the election and caused many problems. He was a former member of the Whig party and served in the House for one term from 1847

On June 16, 1858, the start of Illinois's greatest political contests took place, otherwise known as the race for the U.S. Senate between Democratic Douglas and Republican challenger Abraham Lincoln. That same night, Lincoln launched his campaign by saying that the United States could not survive for long with such a deep gulf between the North and South. He said either the opponents of slavery will stop the spread of it, or the advocates will push it forward until it is a law in all of the states. As the campaign progressed, Lincoln challenged Douglas to a series of seven open-air debated to be held through Illinois on the issue of slavery in the territories. Douglas believed deeply in allowing the residents of a territory to vote for or against

Prior to Lincoln's election in 1869, the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 allowed the expansion of slavery into the northern territories through popular sovereignty. Along with the Fugitive Slave Act, this forced the primarily Republican north to actively support slavery. Although few northerners called for the abolition of slavery, their views aligned with Republican sentiments: to contain slavery in its existing States. Consequently, Republicans gained support in the North and Western territories. Abraham Lincoln, a Republican leader from Illinois, established his stance on slavery during his 1858 Senate campaign. Aligning with Republicans, Lincoln condemned his opponents' views on slavery, denouncing the Dred Scott Decision that declared the

Abraham Lincoln was born on February 12, 1820 in a small log cabin in Kentucky. He was always a very logical politically driven young man. As stated in America’s History Volume 1: To 1877 Lincoln’s political ambition was compared to “a little engine that knew no rest” (437). He practiced law growing up and became a lawyer after he served a two year term in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1847 to 1849. Lincoln spent much of his life trying to abolish slavery. He officially declared that he was against it in his

to support the Slave Power. Lincoln argued that the authors of the Declaration of Independence never intended 'to say all were equal in color, size, intellect, moral developments, or social capacity ', but they 'did consider all men created equal—equal in certain inalienable rights, among which are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness '.After the state Republican party convention nominated him for the U.S. Senate in 1858, Lincoln delivered his House Divided Speech, drawing on Mark 3:25. He said that ahouse divided against it couldn’t stand. The speech created an evocative image of the danger of disunion caused by the slavery debate, and rallied Republicans across the North. The stage was then set for the campaign for statewide election of the Illinois legislature, which would, in turn, select Lincoln or Douglas as its U.S. senator.On November 6, 1860, Lincoln was elected the 16th president of the United States, beating Democrat Stephen A. Douglas, John C. Breckinridge of the Southern Democrats, and John Bell of the new Constitutional Union Party. He was the first president from the Republican Party. As Lincoln 's election became evident, secessionists made clear their intent to leave the Union before he took office the

Abraham Lincoln was a self-educated lawyer who did not support slavery. He surprised many people when he became the 16th President mainly because he beat out several promising contenders. During the Civil War Lincoln became quite brilliant with military strategy and an excellent wartime leader. With the Union on the brink of victory Lincoln became a martyr when he was shot and killed by a Confederate sympathizer by the name of John Wilkes Booth. Over time Lincoln became known as one of the greatest Presidents of all time.