[originaltext] Abraham Lincoln was born in Kentucky on February 12, 1809. Wh

Abraham Lincoln was born in Kentucky on February 12, 1809. When he was a small boy, his family moved to Indiana.  Here, his mother taught him to road and write.  Lincoln had very little formal education, but he became one of the best-educated men of the Great West.
    When Lincoln was a young man, his family moved again to the new state of Illinois. Lincoln had to earn a living at an early age, but in his leisure time he studied law. He soon became one of the best- known lawyers in the state capital of Illinois. It was here that Lincoln became famous for his debates with Stephen Douglas on the subject of slavery.
    In 1860, Lincoln was elected President of the United States. He was the candidate of the Republican Party. This party opposed the creation of new slave states. Soon after his election, some of the Southern states withdrew from the Union and set up the Confederate States of America. This action brought on the terrible Civil War which lasted from 1861 to 1865.
    On January 1,1863, during the war, Lincoln issued his famous Emancipation Proclamation. In this document, Lincoln proclaimed that all the slaves in Southern states were to be free from that day on. In 1865, after the war ended, the Thirteenth Amendment was added to the Constitution of the United States. This amendment put an end to slavery everywhere in the United States.
    Early in 1865, the Civil War came to an end with the defeat of the South by the North. Only a few days after the end of the war, Lincoln was shot by an actor named John Wilkes Booth. The President died on April 14, 1865. In his death, the world lost one of the greatest men of all time.