Lincoln, Abraham

(1809–1865) was the sixteenth president of the United States, serving from 1861 until his assassination. Lincoln successfully led his country through its greatest constitutional, military and moral crisis – the American Civil War – preserving the Union while ending slavery, and promoting economic and financial modernization. Brought up in a poor family on the western frontier, Lincoln was mostly self-educated. His death was the first assassination of a US president and sent the nation into mourning. Scholars and the public consistently rank Lincoln as one of the three greatest US presidents, the others being George Washington and Franklin D. Roosevelt.