Who was President during the Civil War?

Abraham Lincoln was President during the entire Civil War, serving from March 4, 1861 until his assassination on April 15, 1865, and is generally regarded as the greatest American president for his leadership in preserving the Union, ending slavery, and articulating the meaning of American democracy. Lincoln was born in a log cabin in Hardin County, Kentucky on February 12, 1809 to Thomas Lincoln, an illiterate farmer, and Nancy Hanks Lincoln. The family moved to Indiana in 1816 and to Illinois in 1830. Lincoln's mother died when he was nine. He had less than a year of formal schooling but read voraciously, taught himself surveying and law, and was admitted to the Illinois bar in 1836.

He served four terms in the Illinois House of Representatives from 1834 to 1842 and one term in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1847 to 1849, opposing the Mexican-American War. After a decade of law practice in Springfield, Illinois, the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 drew him back into politics. He delivered the famous Peoria speech against the Act on October 16, 1854, ran unsuccessfully for the Senate in 1854 and 1858 (losing the latter to Stephen Douglas after the celebrated Lincoln-Douglas debates), and won the Republican presidential nomination in May 1860. He won the November 6, 1860 election with 39.8 percent of the popular vote in a four-way race.

Seven Southern states seceded between his election and inauguration. The remaining four seceded after he called for 75,000 volunteers on April 15, 1861, the day after Fort Sumter fell. As President, Lincoln managed an unprecedented military and political crisis. He named four major Union army commanders before settling on Ulysses S. Grant in March 1864. He suspended habeas corpus in some areas to suppress disloyal activity, a controversial use of executive power upheld in some cases and overturned in others by the courts.

He issued the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863 freeing enslaved people in Confederate states. He delivered the Gettysburg Address on November 19, 1863 and his Second Inaugural Address on March 4, 1865, two of the greatest speeches in American history. He pushed Congress to pass the Thirteenth Amendment abolishing slavery, which the House approved on January 31, 1865. He won reelection on November 8, 1864 against former General George B. McClellan.

He visited the captured Confederate capital of Richmond on April 4, 1865 and walked through the city with his son Tad. After Lee's surrender on April 9, 1865, Lincoln's last public address on April 11, 1865 endorsed limited Black suffrage, prompting John Wilkes Booth in the audience to vow revenge. Booth shot Lincoln at Ford's Theatre on April 14, 1865 and Lincoln died the next morning at age 56.