Every sentence has a ▶ button — tap it to hear that sentence read slowly, one word at a time.
Abraham Lincoln was born on February 12, 1809, in a one-room log cabin in Kentucky.
His family was poor, and in total he went to school for less than a year.
But he loved books, and he borrowed them wherever he could.
As a young man, Lincoln split logs with an ax to make fences.
In 1831 he found work in a small store in Illinois.
One story says he walked miles to give a customer back a few cents.
People called him 'Honest Abe' — Abe is short for Abraham.
He taught himself law from borrowed books, and in 1836 he became a lawyer.
By 1860, about four million Black people in the South were slaves.
They had no freedom and could be bought and sold. Lincoln hated slavery.
In 1860 he was elected the sixteenth president of the United States.
Before the election, an eleven-year-old girl named Grace Bedell wrote him a letter.
His face was too thin, she said, and he would look much better with a beard. So Lincoln grew one.
Soon Southern states started to leave the United States, and in 1861 a terrible civil war began.
For four years, Americans fought Americans.
On January 1, 1863, Lincoln declared that the slaves in the rebel states were free.
That November he gave a short speech at Gettysburg, where thousands of soldiers had died.
The speech lasted only about two minutes, but generations of American children have learned it by heart.
In April 1865 the South's main army gave up.
Five days later, Lincoln went to see a play at Ford's Theatre in Washington.
During the play, John Wilkes Booth, an actor who supported the South, shot him.
Lincoln died the next morning. He was fifty-six.
That December, slavery finally ended in the whole country.
Today a giant statue of Lincoln sits in Washington, and the world still remembers his words at Gettysburg:
'Government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.'
