Abraham Lincoln was born on February 12 1809 to farmer Thomas Lincoln and Nancy Lincoln  in a one-room log cabin in Sinking Spring Farm in southeast Hardin County, Kentucky. Abraham had an older sister Sarah and a younger brother Thomas, who died in infancy.

In 1816, the Lincoln family left Kentucky to make a new start in Perry County, Indiana. Lincoln's parents belonged to a faction of the Baptist church that disapproved of slavery and this affiliation may account for Abraham's later statement that he was "naturally anti-slavery". The new place Indiana was a wild region, with many bears and other wild animals still in the woods. The Lincoln’s life near Little Pigeon Creek, in Perry (now Spencer) County, was not easy as young Lincoln was raised to work in the farm and his life in this unbroken forest as a fight with trees and logs and grubs.

The unhappiest period of his boyhood followed the death of his mother in the autumn of 1818. As a ragged nine-year-old, he saw her buried in the forest, then faced a winter without the warmth of a mother's love. Fortunately, before the onset of a second winter, his father brought home from Kentucky a new mother a widow by the name Sarah Bush Johnston. In 1830, fearing a milk sickness outbreak, the family migrated and settled on public land in Macon County, Illinois.

The son of a Kentucky frontiersman, young Lincoln had to struggle to live and learn. He helped to clear the fields and to take care of the crops but at early age acquired a dislike for hunting and fishing. In after-years he recalled the “panther's scream,” the bears that “preyed on the swine,” and the poverty of Indiana frontier life, which was “pretty pinching at times.”

Both his parents were almost completely illiterate and he had very little formal education consisted of about 18 months of schooling; but he was an avid reader and largely self-educated. His stepmother doubtless encouraged Lincoln's taste for reading. He once said that as a boy, he had gone to school “by little”—a little now and a little then—and his entire schooling amounted to no more than one year's attendance. Young Lincoln used to trudge for miles to borrow a book. There was absolutely nothing to excite his ambition for education. "Still, somehow," he remembered, "he could read, write, and cipher to the Rule of Three; but that was all." Apparently young Lincoln did not read a large number of books but thoroughly absorbed the few that he did read. These included Parson Weems's Life and Memorable Actions of George Washington, Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, and Aesop's Fables.

Early in life Lincoln had been something of a skeptic and freethinker. Lincoln was fond of the Bible and knew it well. However, Lincoln largely rejected organized religion. He was fond of Shakespeare and he also liked the works of John Stuart Mill, particularly On Liberty, but disliked heavy or metaphysical works. He enjoyed the poems of Lord Byron, Robert Burns and William Knox.  He liked to relax with the comic writings of Petroleum V. Nasby, Orpheus C. Kerr, and Artemus Ward, or with a visit to the popular theatre. Good-natured though somewhat moody, talented as a mimic and storyteller, Lincoln readily attracted friends. He was also skilled with an axe and a talented local wrestler, the latter of which helped give him self-confidence. Lincoln avoided hunting and fishing because he did not like killing animals, even for food.

There were few people who strongly or directly influenced Lincoln's moral and intellectual development and perspectives. There was no teacher, mentor, church leader, community leader, or peer that Lincoln would credit in later years as a strong influence on his intellectual development. Lacking a formal education, Lincoln's personal philosophy was shaped by "an amazingly retentive memory and a passion for reading and learning." It was Lincoln's reading, rather than his relationships, that were most influential in shaping his personal beliefs.

Having just reached the age of 21, he was about to begin life on his own. After his arrival in Illinois, having no desire to be a farmer, Lincoln tried his hand at a variety of occupations. As a    rail-splitter, he helped to clear and fence his father's new farm. As a flat-boatman, he made a voyage down the Mississippi River to New Orleans, Louisiana. Upon his return to Illinois he settled in New Salem. There also he tried various occupations such as storekeeper, postmaster and surveyor. With the coming of the Black Hawk War in 1832, he enlisted as a volunteer and was elected captain of his company a distinction that gave him "much satisfaction." It opened new avenues for his life.

Meanwhile, aspiring to be a legislator, Lincoln began his political career for the Illinois State Legislature in 1832 at age of 23 but was defeated in his first try. Two years later he was elected to the lower house for the first of four successive terms (until 1841) as a Whig Party. Lincoln was a strong supporter of the American Whig version of liberal capitalism 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. As such Lincoln stated his political opposition to slavery during the early part as a legislator.

Encouraged by Whig legislator John Todd Stuart, Lincoln decided to become a lawyer and began teaching himself law. In 1836, having passed the bar examination, he began to practice law with numerous partners, building reputation as a formidable adversary during cross-examinations and closing arguments, thus becoming an able and successful lawyer. After leaving the State Legislature Lincoln married Mary Todd from a wealthy slaveholding family based in Lexington, Kentucky in 1842 and they had four boys, only one (Robert) of whom lived to maturity.

During his single term in Congress (1847–49) as a member of the U.S. House of Representatives from Illinois, Lincoln strongly opposed the Mexican War.  As a result of his criticisms of the war, he became less popular among the voters in his own congressional district. Thus by the age of 40, frustrated in politics, he did not run for Congress again and instead return to Springfield and peruse the law profession once again.

For more that five years Lincoln took little part in politics and then a new sectional crisis gave him a chance to reemerge and rise to statesmanship. By 1856 Lincoln vied for the U.S. Senate and he joined the newly formed Republican Party and in one of his most famous speeches at Springfield in acceptance of the Republican senatorial nomination in June 16, 1858, he said: “A house divided against itself cannot stand. I believe the government cannot endure permanently half slave and half free.” During the campaign, Lincoln the underdog in the senatorial campaign challenged the incumbent Douglas for the Senate seat and the series of debates they engaged in throughout Illinois was political oratory of the highest order and generally considered the most famous political debate in American history. Lincoln won the debates but lost the election to Douglas. Although the outcome did not surprise him, it depressed him deeply. Lincoln had, nevertheless, gained considerable national fame and political reputation and soon began to be mentioned as a presidential prospect for 1860. The famous debates were published in 1860, together with a biography of Lincoln, in a best-selling book that Lincoln himself compiled and marketed as part of his campaign.

As an outspoken opponent of the expansion of slavery in the United States, Lincoln won the Republican Party nomination in 1860 and was elected as the 16th President of the United States later that year. During Lincoln's first presidency, the Southern states (called the Confederacy) seceded from the Northern states (called the Union) because Lincoln and the Northern states were against slavery.

Lincoln warned the South in his Inaugural Address: "In your hands, my dissatisfied fellow countrymen, and not in mine, is the momentous issue of civil war. The government will not assail you.... You have no oath registered in Heaven to destroy the government, while I shall have the most solemn one to preserve, protect and defend it." His conciliatory inaugural address had no effect on the Southern states and on Apr. 12, 1861, South Carolina fired on the Fort Sumter the symbol of federal authority in Charleston harbor and the Civil War began which lasted from 1861 until 1865.

Lincoln famed for his clemency for court-martialed soldiers had closely supervised the victorious war effort, especially the selection of top generals, including Ulysses S. Grant. Politics vied with war was Lincoln's major preoccupation in the presidency. Lincoln tolerated virulent criticism from the press and politicians, often restrained his commanders from overzealous arrests and showed no real tendencies toward becoming a dictator.

As a war leader, Lincoln employed the style that had served him as a politician. He preferred to react to problems and to the circumstances that others had created rather than to originate policies and lay out long-range designs. His guiding rule was: “My policy is to have no policy.”

During the course of war Lincoln signed many important legislation such as the Homestead Act in 1862, making millions of acres of government-held land in the West available for purchase at very low cost. The Morrill Land-Grant Colleges Act, also signed in 1862, provided government grants for state agricultural colleges in each state. The Pacific Railway Acts of 1862 and 1864 granted federal support for the construction of the United States' First Transcontinental Railroad, which was completed in 1869. The Emancipation Proclamation 1863, that declared forever free those slaves within the Confederacy. As a result of issuance of the Emancipation Proclamation the black troops and former slaves were used for war effort as an official government policy during civil war. His Amnesty Proclamation of 1863, offered pardons to those who had not held a Confederate civil office, had not mistreated Union prisoners and would sign an oath of allegiance.

Lincoln never let the world forget that the Civil War involved an even larger issue. This he stated most movingly in dedicating the military cemetery at Gettysburg Pennsylvania in 1963  "that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth." The Gettysburg Address is regarded as one of the most quoted and greatest speeches in United States history.

In 1864 Presidential election, Lincoln was re-elected President thus changing the very course of war and the racial future of the United States.  As Union military triumphs edge closer Lincoln held a moderate view of reconstruction, seeking to speedily reunite the nation through a policy of generous reconciliation. By 1865 a victory over the rebels was at hand, slavery was dead and Lincoln was looking to the future and subsquently in the same year, five days after General Robert E. Lee's from the secessionist Confederate States of America (southern states) surrender to General Ulysses S. Grant from the Union (northern states) effectively end the American Civil War.

Six days after the large-scale surrender of Confederate forces on Good Friday, April 14, 1865, Lincoln attended the play Our American Cousin at Ford's Theatre in Washington, D.C. there John Wilkes Booth, a well-known actor and a Confederate spy from Maryland, entered the presidential box and shot Lincoln who died the next morning. He was the first American president to be assassinated.

Abraham Lincoln nickname "Honest Abe", the 16th president of the United States, guided his country through the most devastating experience in its national history--the CIVIL WAR. He preserved the Union during the American Civil War and brought about the emancipation of the slaves and his martyrdom just at the war's end assured his continuing fame.

Among contemporary American heroes, Lincoln continues to have a unique appeal for his fellow countrymen and also for people of other lands. This charm derives from his remarkable life story—the rise from humble origins, the dramatic death—and from his distinctively human and humane personality as well as from his historical role as saviour of the Union and emancipator of the slaves. His relevance endures and grows especially because of his eloquence as a spokesman for democracy. In his view, the Union was worth saving not only for its own sake but because it embodied an ideal, the ideal of self-government. Lincoln is usually seen as personifying classical values of honesty and integrity, as well as respect for individual and minority rights, and human freedom in general. Many American organizations of all purposes and agendas continue to cite his name and image, Lincoln has been memorialized in many town, city, and county names. Lincoln's name and image appear in numerous places. Lincoln is still the only person to hold a patent (1849) and serve as President of the United States. The Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., was dedicated to him on May 30, 1922 . He is considered by many historians to have been the greatest of all American presidents.