Abraham Lincoln was born in 1809 in Kentucky and moved to Illinois as a young man where he worked on a river boat and took on legal cases involving slavery laws. In 1861, Lincoln was inaugurated as President during a time of rising sectional tensions over slavery and states' rights that ultimately led to the Civil War. As President during the Civil War, Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863 to free slaves in Confederate states and pushed for the abolition of slavery. Lincoln was assassinated by John Wilkes Booth on April 14, 1865, just after the Civil War ended.