Abraham Lincoln, the son of a Kentucky frontiersman, struggled for both a living and an education from childhood. Born on February 12, 1809, in Hardin County, Kentucky, to parents born in Virginia, he lost his mother in his tenth year and moved with his father to Indiana in his eighth year, where he grew up in a wild region and gained only limited schooling, though he learned to read, write, and cipher. He worked on a farm, split rails for fences, and kept store at New Salem, Illinois, while making extraordinary efforts to gain knowledge. He served as a captain in the Black Hawk War, spent eight years in the Illinois legislature, and rode the circuit of courts for many years as a lawyer whose ambition, his law partner said, knew no rest. He married Mary Todd, and they had four sons, only one of whom lived to maturity. In 1858 he ran against Stephen A. Douglas for Senator and lost, but their debates gave him a national reputation that helped win him the Republican nomination for President in 1860. As President, he insisted that the Civil War involved a larger issue, expressing at Gettysburg his resolve that the nation should have a new birth of freedom and that government of the people, by the people, for the people should not perish from the earth. Reelected in 1864 as Union victories signaled the war's approaching end, he planned for peace with flexibility and generosity, urging Southerners to lay down their arms and quickly rejoin the nation. On Good Friday, April 14, 1865, he was assassinated at Ford's Theatre in Washington by John Wilkes Booth.