American president, a young Illinois lawyer who rose to national prominence as the leading moral and intellectual opponent of slavery's expansion. A Republican, he challenged the powerful Democrat Stephen Douglas for his Senate seat in 1858 in seven public debates held across Illinois. The central question was whether slavery should expand into new territories: Douglas argued for letting settlers decide; Lincoln insisted slavery was morally wrong and incompatible with the Declaration of Independence. Douglas kept the seat, but Lincoln gained national attention and was elected president two years later.
After Lincoln's election in November 1860, southern states seceded, believing he was determined to abolish slavery (though he had promised not to). In April 1861 Confederate soldiers attacked Fort Sumter in South Carolina, starting the civil war—the bloodiest conflict in American history, killing up to 700,000 people, almost one-and-a-half times as many Americans as would die in the second world war.
Early in the war Lincoln seized on victory at Antietam to issue an ultimatum: surrender by year's end or he would abolish slavery. The South continued to fight, so on January 1st 1863 he issued the Emancipation Proclamation, freeing all slaves within the Confederacy. Slavery remained legal in the four Union states that still practised it, to avoid provoking them into joining the rebels.
In November 1863 Lincoln delivered the Gettysburg Address—272 words proclaiming that "all men are created equal" and that "government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the Earth". It established beyond question that the war was a moral enterprise, not merely an attempt to preserve the union.
Lincoln was shot in the back of the head on April 14th 1865 by John Wilkes Booth, a famous actor and Confederate sympathiser, during a performance at Ford's Theatre in Washington. Booth leapt from the presidential box onto the stage, apparently broke his leg, and escaped briefly. America lost Lincoln at a crucial moment: the civil war was ending and Reconstruction beginning. The task of leading post-war reconciliation fell instead to the more ornery, less capable Andrew Johnson.
The sooner all the animals are extinct, the sooner we'll find their money.