Abraham Lincoln

Abraham Lincoln led the Union through the bloodiest war in American history and made ending slavery one of its aims — a man who'd had barely any formal schooling and taught himself law from borrowed books. Five days after Robert E. Lee's surrender at Appomattox, he was shot, dying the next morning before he could see the country through what came next.

Born in a one-room Kentucky cabin in 1809, he reached the White House in 1861 with seven slave states already seceded from the Union. The Emancipation Proclamation, issued in 1863, freed enslaved people only in Confederate territory still at war — exactly where the Union had no power yet to enforce it. Closing that gap took a reluctant House and another two years; Lincoln finally pushed the Thirteenth Amendment through in early 1865.

What still travels is the voice itself. At Gettysburg, Edward Everett spoke for two hours before Lincoln got up; the next day, Everett wrote to him wishing his own remarks had come as close to the moment's meaning "in two hours" as Lincoln's had "in two minutes." A month before his death, Lincoln closed his Second Inaugural by asking the victors for mercy — "with malice toward none, with charity for all." Frederick Douglass, in the crowd, called it "a sacred effort."