This is the third part of the Abraham Lincoln Biography article.
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Towards the Presidency - Abraham Lincoln Biography
In 1846 Abraham Lincoln was elected to one term in the House of Representatives as a member of the United States Whig Party. A staunch Whig, Lincoln often referred to Whig leader Henry Clay as his political idol. As a freshman House member, Abraham Lincoln was not a particularly powerful or influential figure in Congress. He used his office as an opportunity to speak out against the war with Mexico, which he attributed to President Polk's desire for "military glory -- that attractive rainbow, that rises in showers of blood."
Abraham Lincoln was a key early supporter of Zachary Taylor's candidacy for the 1848 Whig Presidential nomination. When his term ended, the incoming Taylor administration offered him the governorship of the Oregon Territory. He declined, returning instead to Springfield, Illinois where, although remaining active in Whig Party affairs in the state, he turned most of his energies to making a living at the bar. By the mid-1850s, Abraham Lincoln had acquired prominence in Illinois legal circles, especially through his involvement in litigation involving competing transportation interests — both the river barges and the railroads.
Abraham Lincoln represented the Alton & Sangamon Railroad, for example, in an 1851 dispute with one of its shareholders, James A. Barret. Barret had refused to pay the balance on his pledge to that corporation on the ground that it had changed its originally planned route. Lincoln argued that as a matter of law a corporation is not bound by its original charter when that charter can be amended in the public interest, that the newer proposed Alton & Sangamon route was superior and less expensive, and that accordingly the corporation had a right to sue Mr. Barret for his delinquent payment. He won this case, and the decision by the Illinois Supreme Court was eventually cited by several other courts throughout the United States.
Another important example of Abraham Lincoln's skills as a railroad lawyer was a lawsuit over a tax exemption that the state granted to the Illinois Central Railroad. McLean County argued that the state had no authority to grant such an exemption, and it sought to impose taxes on the railroad notwithstanding. In January 1856, the Illinois Supreme Court delivered its opinion upholding the tax exemption, accepting Lincoln's arguments.
In addition, Abraham Lincoln worked in at least one criminal trial in 1857 when he defended William "Duff" Armstrong pro bono who was on trial for the murder of James Preston Metzker. The case is famous for when Lincoln used judicial notice, a rare tactic at that time, to show an eyewitness perjured himself on the stand claiming he witnessed the crime in the moonlight. Abraham Lincoln produced a Farmer's Almanac to show that the moon on that date was at a low angle and could not have produced enough lumination for the witness to see anything clearly. Based on this evidence, Armstrong was acquitted.
The Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, which expressly repealed the limits on slavery's spread that had been part of the Missouri Compromise of 1820, helped draw Abraham Lincoln back into electoral politics. It was a speech against Kansas-Nebraska, on October 16, 1854 in Peoria, that caused Lincoln to stand out among the other free-soil orators of the day. During his unsuccessful 1858 campaign for the United States Senate against Democrat Stephen A. Douglas, Abraham Lincoln debated Douglas in a series of events which became a national discussion on the issues that were about to split the nation in two. Douglas, proposing popular sovereignty as the solution to the slavery impasse, had sponsored the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854. During the debates, Lincoln forced Douglas to propose instead his Freeport Doctrine, which lost him further support among slave-holders. Though the Illinois state legislature chose Douglas as U.S. senator (this was before the 17th Amendment), Lincoln's eloquence during the campaign transformed him into a national political star.
Election and Early Presidency
As the campaign for the Presidential election of 1860 began, many eastern Republicans urged support for Douglas, since he was a national leader who had led the opposition to the Buchanan administration's push for the Lecompton Constitution which would have admitted Kansas as a slave state. However, Lincoln's eloquence in debating Douglas and during the campaign transformed him into a political star and he was chosen as the Republican candidate because his views on slavery were more moderate than those of the Radical Republicans. On November 6, 1860, Abraham Lincoln was elected as the 16th President of the United States, beating Douglas and two other major candidates. Lincoln was the first Republican president. Lincoln won entirely on the strength of his support in the North: he received no votes in nine states in the South - he was not even on the ballot in some of them - and won only 2 of 996 counties in the entire South. Even before Lincoln's election, leaders in the South made it clear that their States would secede in response to a Lincoln victory. A total of seven slave states left the Union before Abraham Lincoln took office, forming the Confederate States of America.
President-elect Abraham Lincoln survived an assassination attempt in Baltimore, Maryland, and on February 23, 1861 arrived secretly in disguise to Washington, DC. Southerners ridiculed Abraham Lincoln for this subterfuge, but the efforts at security may have been prudent. At Lincoln's inauguration on March 4, 1861, the Turners formed Lincoln's bodyguard; and a sizable garrison of federal troops was also present, ready to protect the president and the capital from rebel invasion. In his First Inaugural Address, Lincoln declared, "I hold that in contemplation of universal law and of the Constitution the Union of these States is perpetual. Perpetuity is implied, if not expressed, in the fundamental law of all national governments", arguing further that the purpose of the Constitution was "to form a more perfect union" than the Articles of Confederation which were explicitly perpetual, and thus the Constitution too was perpetual. He asked rhetorically that even were the Constitution construed as a simple contract, would it not require the agreement of all parties to rescind it? He also endorsed an amendment (which had already passed both houses) protecting slavery in those states in which it already existed. After Union troops at Fort Sumter were fired on and forced to surrender in April, Abraham Lincoln called for more troops from each remaining state to recapture forts and preserve the Union. In response, four more slave states seceded by May 1861, and splinter factions from Missouri and Kentucky joined the Confederacy by December.
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