Abraham Lincoln

In the winter of 1860/1 the United States, less than a century old, fell apart, divided by differing attitudes to slavery. When Abraham Lincoln was inaugurated as President in April, although seven states had already seceded unresisted, he was insistent that the Union could not be dissolved. But the Southerners believed their prosperity depended on the peculiar institution and felt their whole way of life threatened by the new Republican party. Four years later, and at a cost of 600,000 lives, the bloody war had secured the Union and slavery had been abolished. Throughout, Lincoln was the lynchpin of this pivotal change in the nation. This short biography tells the story of how this man, born in a log cabin and almost entirely self-educated, rose, in the nation's gravest hour, to determine its fate, only to die at the hands of an assassin in the moment of victory.