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Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865)

Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865) was the sixteenth president of the United States. Largely self-taught, Lincoln studied law as a young man and spent eight years in the Illinois state legislature before being elected president in 1860. By the time Lincoln took office, seven states had seceded from the Union, and his first inaugural address was a conciliatory speech calling for national unity. Four years later, slavery had been abolished and the Civil War was drawing to a close. Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address was delivered on March 4, 1865; several weeks after delivering these words, he was assassinated.