Name : Ashraf Sadaat ID : 8411 Date : 2011-12-07 Teacher : Jeffery .s.

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Abraham Lincoln was born February 12, 1809, the second child of Thomas Lincoln. Abraham Lincoln was the 16th President of the United States, serving from March 1861 until his assassination in April 1865. He successfully led his country through a great constitutional, military and moral crisis the American Civil War preserving the Union, while ending slavery, and promoting economic and financial modernization. Reared in a poor family on the western frontier, Lincoln was mostly self-educated. He became a country lawyer, an Illinois state legislator, and a one-term member of the United States House of Representatives, but failed in two attempts at a seat in the United States Senate. After opposing the expansion of slavery in the United States in his campaign debates and speeches, Lincoln secured the Republican nomination and was elected president in 1860. Following declarations of secession by southern slave states, war began on April 12, 1861, and he concentrated on both the military and political dimensions of the war effort, seeking to reunify the nation..

Mental health
Lincoln was contemporaneously described as suffering from "melancholy," a condition which modern mental health professionals would characterize as clinical depression. Whether Lincoln may have suffered from depression as a genetic predilection, as a reaction to multiple emotional traumas in his life, or a combination thereof is the subject of much current conjecture. What is clear is that Lincoln suffered depressed mood after major events of his life, such as the death of Ann Rutledge in August 1835, the cessation of Lincoln's engagement to Mary Todd Lincoln in January 1841 (after which several close associates feared Lincoln's suicide), and after the Second Battle of Bull Run. It is also clear that Mary Lincoln felt her husband to be too trusting, and that his melancholy tended to strike at times that he was betrayed or unsupported by those he put faith in.