Abraham Lincoln, the United States and the world

His assassination made him a martyr, but what was Lincoln’s true legacy? For Richard Carwardine, the President’s belief that American values can transform the world remains an inspiration…

This article was first published in the February 2009 issue of BBC History Magazine

Abraham Lincoln’s rise from rural poverty to the presidency of the United States is an embodiment of the American Dream. (MP Rice, Washington DC/Library of Congress)

by: Elinor Evans-Friday 20th January 2017

Political assassinations, however tragic, commonly gild their victims’ historical reputations. We cannot be sure what John F Kennedy would have achieved had he seen out his presidential term. Yet the bullet that killed him in Dallas in November 1963 prompted not just an outpouring of grief but a persisting sense of political greatness cruelly denied. When in April 1865 the actor John Wilkes Booth pulled the trigger to send Abraham Lincoln to a premature grave, he shot a president at his moment of greatest triumph, just days after the ending of the Civil War that had quashed rebellion and begun the final emancipation of the slaves. 

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