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Welcome!
Lincoln warned the South in his Inaugural Address: "In your hands, my
dissatisfied fellow countrymen, and not in mine, is the momentous issue of civil
war. The government will not assail you.... You have no oath registered in
Heaven to destroy the government, while I shall have the most solemn one to
preserve, protect and defend it." Lincoln thought secession illegal, and was
willing to use force to defend Federal law and the Union. When Confederate
batteries fired on Fort Sumter and forced its surrender, he called on the states
for 75,000 volunteers. Four more slave states joined the Confederacy but four
remained within the Union. The Civil War had begun. The son of a Kentucky
frontiersman, Lincoln had to struggle for a living and for learning. Five months
before receiving his party's nomination for President, he sketched his life:
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