Abraham Lincoln

Abraham Lincoln was born in a one-room log cabin on the Kentucky frontier and had less than a year of formal schooling in his whole life. What he had instead was a borrowed book read by firelight, a restless mind, and a hunger to understand. He split rails, kept a store, taught himself law, and rose — slowly, stubbornly — to the highest office in a country that was about to tear itself in two.

He became president as the Union dissolved, and he carried the war's unbearable weight for four years with a grief that aged his face beyond his years. He signed the Emancipation Proclamation, called the nation to a 'new birth of freedom' at Gettysburg, and pushed through the amendment that ended slavery for good. He spoke not of triumph but of healing — 'with malice toward none, with charity for all' — and was murdered just as the guns fell silent, on the threshold of the peace he had won.

He was melancholy, funny, plainspoken, and immovable on the things that mattered. We honor him as the rail-splitter who held a country together by force of conscience — and who proved that the most ordinary beginnings can give rise to the most extraordinary resolve.