James Baquet

    America’s 16th president, Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865), was born in the same year as Charles Darwin, but died — tragically — much sooner.

    Every American schoolchild has learned the legend: how young Abe grew up first in Kentucky, and then Indiana, on what was then the American frontier; how he may have attended school for less than 12 months in total, and never went to college; how he would walk for miles to borrow — and later return — a book.

    All of this is essentially true. Much of what he read is what we would call the classics: “Aesop’s Fables,” the “Holy Bible,” “The Pilgrim’s Progress,” and “Robinson Crusoe.”

    Another book which must have inspired the future president was “The Life of Washington” by Parson Weems, which contains the apocryphal story of George confessing that he had cut down his father’s cherry tree. The book, like Aesop and the others, must have helped shape the character of the man who became known as “Honest Abe.”

    The family moved on to Illinois when Abe was in his early 20s. There he had a number of jobs, including clearing the trees from his father’s land, working on a riverboat (like Mark Twain), and running a store. At last he studied law (on his own; law school was not necessary in those days), which led to eight years in the Illinois state legislature and, in his late 30s, to a two-year term in the U.S. House of Representatives. He then returned to his law practice for 16 more years.

    In 1854 he ran without success for the U.S. Senate, but it brought him again to national attention. Then, in 1860, he was elected president, and guided the country through one of its darkest periods: the American Civil War, or the War Between the States (1861-1865). He was president of the Union, those northern states which were opposed to slavery, and oversaw the fight against the Confederacy, the slavery-supporting southern states.

    In 1864 he was reelected. On April 19, 1865, the war was brought to a victorious end. Five days later Lincoln was shot by John Wilkes Booth while attending a play, and he died the next morning.

    Vocabulary

    Which word above means:

    1. successful

    2. motivated, gave encouragement to

    3. the edge of a country’s settled area

    4. smaller body of America’s Congress, with two members for every state

    5. saying “I did it”

    6. government law-making body

    7. larger body of America’s Congress, with members according to the state’s population