Abraham Lincoln

Abraham Lincoln led the United States through the Civil War, its greatest constitutional and moral crisis, and preserved the Union. A self-educated Illinois lawyer, he won the presidency in 1860 on a platform of halting slavery's expansion, prompting Southern secession.

He issued the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863, redefining the war as a fight against slavery, and delivered the Gettysburg Address, recasting the nation's purpose around human equality. He guided the Thirteenth Amendment, abolishing slavery, through Congress. Days after the Confederacy's surrender in April 1865, he was assassinated by John Wilkes Booth—the first American president to be murdered in office.

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