Which president was nicknamed honest abe

When Lincoln was nine years old, his mother died. His father—a carpenter and farmer—remarried and moved his family farther west, eventually settling in Illinois.

As a young adult, Lincoln worked as a flatboat navigator, storekeeper, soldier, surveyor, and postmaster. At age 25 he was elected to the local government in Springfield, Illinois. Once there, he taught himself law, opened a law practice, and earned the nickname "Honest Abe. He served one term in the U. House of Representatives but lost two U. Senate races. But the debates he had about the enslavement of people with his senatorial opponent, Stephen Douglas, helped him win the presidential nomination two years later.

Lincoln opposed the spread of slavery in the United States. In the four-way presidential race of , Lincoln got more votes than any other candidate.

He earned a reputation for honesty while working the circuit as a lawyer. This reputation spilled into the political arena, where he was widely perceived as just and fair-minded in debate, and adverse to gaining an advantage by foul means.

S territory, was a subject of contention and conspiracy stories. Lincoln, a member of the U. On two occasions, Lincoln pointedly asked Polk about the necessity to go to war. Let him answer with facts and not with arguments. Let him remember, he sits where Washington sat; and so remembering, let him answer as Washington would answer…so let him attempt no evasion, no equivocation. But at times, Honest Abe walks a fine line. Can it be done at all? The very same bogus tactic he indirectly accuses Douglas and the Democrats of employing, he is willing to use himself.

Four years earlier in his letter to Richard Yates , Lincoln chides Yates for not communicating. Already a subscriber? Monitor journalism changes lives because we open that too-small box that most people think they live in. We believe news can and should expand a sense of identity and possibility beyond narrow conventional expectations. Your subscription to The Christian Science Monitor has expired. You can renew your subscription or continue to use the site without a subscription.

If you have questions about your account, please contact customer service or call us at This message will appear once per week unless you renew or log out. Skip to main content Skip to main menu Skip to search Skip to footer. Search for:. Monitor Daily Current Issue. A Christian Science Perspective. Monitor Movie Guide. Monitor Daily. Photos of the Week. New Salem, Ill. With no formal schooling available to him, the young Lincoln set out to shape his own character.

Without the visual media of today, Lincoln developed himself through reading. Conscious as he was of the limitations of his rural environment, he might have read for escape—but he did not. Instead he read for discipline. He read not only to learn what others had thought and said, but to find out how they did it: he read in order to learn how to think and speak and act for himself. He sought out books about thinking—books about geometry and grammar and the hard conundrums of free will and determinism.

He read the same few books over and over, making a virtue of necessity, of course. This way, he absorbed their lessons into his very being. After the Civil War, Emerson could have added a postscript on Lincoln to his book Representative Men published in with perfect appropriateness.

Indeed, Lincoln would have illustrated the self-reliant democratic leader far better than the example Emerson actually chose, Napoleon Bonaparte. Lincoln might also have heard the other two lectures Emerson gave during his stay. Without having to read Emerson, Lincoln put into practice the philosophy that Emerson propounded. What he undertook was to engage in self-construction, in search of self-fulfillment. Moral integrity occupied the core of the kind of person Lincoln made himself.

Financial honesty represented one important aspect of this integrity. As a member of the state legislature, he worked hard to get the state capital moved to Springfield.