Abraham Lincoln grew up in a tiny log cabin in Kentucky and had less than a year of formal schooling in his whole life. He taught himself law by reading borrowed books at night by candlelight, and slowly built a reputation as a smart, funny lawyer with surprising patience and a deep love of jokes and stories.
In 1860 he was elected the 16th president of the United States - and almost immediately the country split in two. Eleven Southern states left to form their own country, the Confederacy, mainly because they wanted to keep enslaving people. The American Civil War began.
Lincoln spent four years holding the country together. In 1863 he signed the Emancipation Proclamation, freeing enslaved people in the rebel states, and he pushed for the Thirteenth Amendment, which abolished slavery everywhere in the U.S. Just days after the war ended in 1865, he was shot at a Washington theater by an angry actor and died the next morning.
