The presidency of Abraham Lincoln began when he took office as the 16th President of the United States on March 4, 1861. It ended with his death on April 15, 1865. During his presidency he claimed more prerogatives than any other president had done before him. As a result, the small and relatively limited powers of the president grew enormously during his time in office. When Lincoln won the 1860 presidential election, he did it without the support of any of the Southern states. Since the 1830s, Southern states had talked about secession, but it became a serious issue in 1860. Between the election and Lincoln's Inauguration in March of 1861, seven states had seceded from the Union. They formed the Confederate States of America (CSA). When Confederates attacked Fort Sumter on April 12, 1861 and captured it the next day, this started the American Civil War. While having little previous military experience, Lincoln still managed to stand out as a great war president. In 1863, his Emancipation Proclamation freed the slaves in Southern states. It led directly to the abolition of slavery in the United States. Given later that year, his Gettysburg Address is and remains one of the most important speeches in American history. In 1865, as the Civil war was ending he was shot and killed by John Wilkes Booth, a Confederate sympathizer. His death made Lincoln a martyr to the Union cause. He is widely recognized as the greatest president in U.S. history.
Lincoln's 1860 presidential campaign
By this time Lincoln was well-known in Illinois politics. In 1858 he had debated Stephen A. Douglas in a bid for the United States Senate and lost. At the time, U.S. senators were elected by their state legislatures. So both Lincoln and Douglas were trying for their respective parties to win control of the Illinois legislature. Although Illinois was a free state, the main issue of all seven debates was slavery.
Lincoln spent the next 16 months making speeches for a number of Republican candidates in the North. This both made him many political friends and also was in preparation for his run for President. Up to this time the strongest candidate was William H. Seward of New York. Seward was strongly opposed to slavery anywhere in the U.S. Lincoln took a more moderate view and was opposed to the spread of slavery in new states to the West.
As Lincoln became more popular in the newly-formed Republican Party he was invited to give speeches in a number of states. In October of 1859, he was invited to speak at Henry Ward Beecher's church in Brooklyn, New York. Lincoln spent months preparing for this speech; more time than he had spent on any speech he had given during the senatorial debates. At the last minute, the site for his speech was moved to the Cooper Union in Manhattan. Lincoln knew why he had been asked to give the address. He was being promoted as an alternative to Seward and other possible Republican candidates. The Cooper Union address got Lincoln the attention he needed to become the Republican candidate for president in 1860.
In April 1860, the Democrats held their political convention, the Southern Democrats walked out and the convention closed without nominating a candidate. The two sides each held their own conventions two months later. Stephen Douglas was the candidate of the Northern Democrats. John C. Breckinridge ran for the Southern Democrats. John Bell, the Senator from Tennessee, ran for the Constitutional Union Party. The split in the Democratic party almost guaranteed Lincoln could win the presidency. At the beginning of 1860, Lincoln was not a major candidate for President. On November6, 1860, with 39% of the popular vote and a majority in the Electoral College, Lincoln was elected President. Voter turnout for the election was 81.2%, the second highest in American history.