How Did Abraham Lincoln Affect His Future

Abraham Lincoln was the sixteenth President of the United States. He was the first President to be assassinated. Often times his assassination overshadows his greatest achievement, The Emancipation Proclamation. Some people claim that Lincoln only freed the slaves because he had to so he could end the war. Was Abraham Lincoln politically inclined to free the slaves or did he truly care for them? The events of Lincolns past truly affected his future.
Lincoln was born and raised in Hodgenville, Kentucky by his parents Tom and Nancy Lincoln. He had two siblings, his older sister Sarah and younger brother Thomas. Sadly Thomas died before his first birthday. Shortly after Thomas’s death, the family moved to Indiana due to many factors like slavery and land disputes. Unfortunately, six years after the death of Abraham’s younger brother his mother passed away as well, Abraham was only nine years old. His father got remarried to a widow from Elizabethtown Kentucky, named Sarah Bush Johnston. With …show more content…
He was working in New Orleans, Louisiana a shopkeeper from Indiana hired him and a few other boys for a job. The job, take a boat load of overstocked goods down the Ohio and Mississippi rivers on a flat boat and sell the goods and the boat. Abraham was in New Orleans for a month, while in the city his world changed. According to David Press, Lincoln had almost no personal experience with African Americans, slave or free. Abraham had strong beliefs that coincided with influential members of his life. He shared the views of his parents, Abraham saw slavery as immoral and wrong. While in New Orleans Lincoln saw a slave market, He saw that there were family’s being ripped apart. It was common for a black father to be sold to one man and the wife and children to another. “This experience helped to intensify his position on slavery” (Graves, 23-24). Many years passed and Lincoln worked hard and learned as much as he