Abraham Lincoln was born on 12 February 1809 in a one-room log cabin in Kentucky and raised on the frontier. He was self-educated and became a lawyer, an Illinois state legislator and a member of the U.S. House of Representatives. Angered by the Kansas–Nebraska Act of 1854, which opened the territories to slavery, he became a leader of the new Republican Party.
He won the presidential election of 1860, became the first Republican president, and led the United States through the Civil War, playing a major role in the abolition of slavery. On 14 April 1865, five days after the Confederate surrender at Appomattox, he was shot by John Wilkes Booth at Ford’s Theatre in Washington, and he died the next day.