Farewell Address Study Guide

A child of impoverished pioneers, Abraham Lincoln was born on a farm in Kentucky and grew up mostly in Indiana. He was, for the most part, self-educated. He worked various jobs, including as a rail-splitter and a store clerk, before pursuing a career in law in the 1830s. Lincoln’s keen intellect and oratory skills brought him into politics, and he served as a leader of the Whig Party, an Illinois State legislator, and an Illinois Congressman. In 1856, he joined the Republican Party, which had recently been established by northern members of the Whig Party who opposed slavery. Four years later, in the 1860 election, Lincoln was elected as the first Republican president, on an anti-slavery platform. His victory triggered a crisis in the South, and many southern states left the Union to join the newly formed Confederacy. When the American Civil War broke out in April 1861, Lincoln vowed to preserve the Union and held onto his promise to end slavery. In 1863, he issued the Emancipation Proclamation, declaring all enslaved people free. Shortly after beginning his second term as president, Lincoln was assassinated by a Confederate sympathizer in April 1865. This was just a few days after the Confederate General Robert E. Lee surrendered to the Union Armies, making Lincoln’s death coincide with the end of the war. His legacy as the “Great Emancipator” and his success in leading the nation through a civil war make him one of the most known presidents in American history.

When Lincoln left Illinois for Washington, D.C., he already knew that his presidency would be tumultuous. Between Lincoln’s election victory in November 1860 and his Farewell Address in February 1861, seven southern states had already seceded from the Union and joined the Confederacy. This secession movement was in direct response to Lincoln’s election, as he was a known opponent to slavery. The causes of the Civil War go much further back than Lincoln’s presidential victory, however. The war’s outbreak was the culmination of many decades of antagonism between southern and northern states. Whereas the economies of northern states came to be diversified over the course of the 19th century by industrialization and the construction of transportation infrastructure, the economies of the southern states continued to revolve around plantation agriculture that relied heavily on the labor of enslaved people. Throughout the 19th century, as the Union gained more territory, Congress was divided between pro-slavery representatives, mostly from the South, and antislavery representatives, mostly from the North. In 1820, Congress passed the Missouri Compromise. Allowing Missouri to enter the Union as a slave state while admitting Maine as a free state, Congress was able to maintain a balance between states allowing and banning slavery. In 1854, the Kansas-Nebraska Act repealed the Missouri Compromise, allowing the territories to decide on the issue of slavery themselves. Having retired from politics to continue his legal career, Lincoln’s anger over the Kansas-Nebraska Act impelled him to return to politics. Lincoln’s attack on the act, and ultimately his well-spoken opposition to slavery, raised his political profile and set him on his path to become a presidential candidate. Although Lincoln’s election didn’t cause the Civil War, he knew that just as he was preparing to take office, the conflict that had long been brewing between the North and the South was about to erupt.

A skillful orator, Lincoln delivered many speeches before and during his presidency that have gone down in history. One of these is his First Inaugural Address from when he took office in 1861, which he used to confront the secession crisis and call for unity. A well-known part of this speech is the plea “We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies.” Lincoln’s most famous speech is arguably the Gettysburg Address, which he delivered in 1863 at the dedication of the Soldiers’ National Cemetery in Gettysburg, where the Union Armies had defeated the Confederate Armies a few months prior. Lincoln began the speech with the famous phrase “Four score and seven years ago,” in reference to the Declaration of Independence, which had been signed 87 years earlier. Although it’s an executive order rather than a speech, the Emancipation Proclamation is another text associated with Lincoln. In an important step toward the abolition of slavery, Lincoln used the document to declare that all enslaved people in Confederate-held territory were to be freed. In addition to the large number of nonfiction books about Lincoln and his speeches, he has been the protagonist of a number of fictional works. These include Gore Vidal’s historical novel Lincoln, which begins on the incumbent president’s train journey between Springfield and Washington, D.C. Another novel that takes Lincoln’s life as its basis is George Saunders’ Lincoln in the Bardo, which came out in 2017. This book is about Lincoln’s grief for his third son William Wallace, who passed away from typhoid fever at the White House in 1862. In Lincoln’s Farewell Address, he mentions the loss of his second son, who was buried in Springfield in 1850.