Abraham Lincoln — Biography Reading Comprehension Lesson

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Abraham Lincoln

Abraham Lincoln was born on February 12, 1809, in a one-room log cabin in Hardin County, Kentucky. He grew up in poverty on the frontier, moving with his family to Indiana and later Illinois. His mother, Nancy Hanks Lincoln, died when he was nine years old. Lincoln had almost no formal schooling — he estimated his total education amounted to about a year. Yet he was a relentless self-teacher, reading by firelight and borrowing books from neighbors. He taught himself law by studying borrowed legal books and was admitted to the bar in 1836.

Lincoln served in the Illinois state legislature and ran an unsuccessful campaign for the U.S. Senate in 1858, during which he engaged in a series of famous debates with incumbent Senator Stephen Douglas. Those Lincoln-Douglas debates — centered on the expansion of slavery into new territories — made Lincoln nationally famous. In 1860, he won the Republican nomination for president. His election in November 1860 triggered the secession of Southern states, and by the time of his inauguration on March 4, 1861, the Confederate States of America had already been formed.

The Civil War began just six weeks after Lincoln took office. He proved to be a determined and capable wartime leader, working closely with his generals and never wavering from his commitment to preserving the Union. On January 1, 1863, he issued the Emancipation Proclamation, declaring that all enslaved people in Confederate states in rebellion were legally free. While the Proclamation did not immediately free everyone, it fundamentally changed the character of the war — it became not just a fight to save the Union, but a fight to end slavery.

Lincoln won reelection in 1864, and in his second inaugural address he called for ‘malice toward none, with charity for all’ — a vision of healing for a nation torn apart by war. The Civil War ended in April 1865 with the surrender of Confederate General Robert E. Lee. Lincoln had guided the nation through its greatest crisis and preserved the Union. He was the first president to advocate for allowing some Black Americans — particularly soldiers who had served in the war — to vote.

On April 14, 1865, just five days after the war ended, Lincoln was shot by John Wilkes Booth, a Confederate sympathizer, while attending a play at Ford’s Theatre in Washington, D.C. He died the following morning. The nation mourned deeply. Lincoln is consistently ranked by historians as one of the greatest — and most transformative — presidents in American history. The Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., stands as a permanent tribute to his leadership, his humanity, and his legacy of freedom and equality.

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