Before the presidency, Abraham Lincoln failed at shopkeeping and taught himself law
By age 15, Abraham Lincoln had spent less than a year in any classroom. He wrestled a gang leader, ran a store that sank into debt, nearly fought a duel, and learned law from borrowed books because, as he put it, he studied with nobody. That frontier education produced the president who kept the Union whole.
Lincoln was born in a one-room Kentucky log cabin on February 12, 1809, the second child of Thomas and Nancy Hanks Lincoln, members of a Baptist church whose congregation largely opposed slavery. His father lost land in title disputes, so in 1816 the family moved to the Indiana woods. When Abraham was nine his mother died of milk sickness; his father remarried a widow, Sarah Bush Johnston, whom the boy came to call Mama. A teenage flatboat trip to New Orleans showed him slave markets up close, and it repelled him.
In 1830 the family moved on to Illinois, and Lincoln struck out alone in New Salem. His first run for the state legislature in 1832 was interrupted by service as an elected militia captain in the Black Hawk War, which brought no combat, and he lost for want of money and connections. A store bought with a hard-drinking partner, William Berry, collapsed into debt. He was village postmaster and county surveyor, borrowed Blackstone's Commentaries, and made himself a lawyer.
As a Whig admirer of Henry Clay he served four terms in the Illinois House from 1834, backing the Illinois and Michigan Canal. He married Mary Todd, the daughter of a wealthy Kentucky family, after a broken engagement; of their four sons only Robert reached adulthood. A duel with James Shields, whom Lincoln had mocked in pseudonymous letters, was called off, but the episode embarrassed him deeply.
The 1854 Kansas–Nebraska Act, which opened western territories to slavery, pulled him into the new Republican Party, and his 1858 debates with Stephen Douglas made him nationally known. His election in 1860 set off secession, and Confederate guns fired on Fort Sumter a month after he took office. He issued the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863, spoke at Gettysburg that November, and pressed for the Thirteenth Amendment. Five days after the Confederate surrender at Appomattox, John Wilkes Booth shot him at Ford's Theatre; he died on April 15, 1865, the first American president to be assassinated.
Source: Abraham Lincoln
