Abraham Lincoln, called the Great Liberator, rose from a Kentucky farm to boyhood in what is now Spencer County, Indiana, then built his life in his home where he lived a quarter of a century, saw his children born, and buried one child before leaving for the presidency. Frederick Douglass said Lincoln's great mission was to save the country from dismemberment and ruin and to free it from slavery, and Lincoln accomplished both by leading the nation through a bloody civil war and signing the Emancipation Proclamation. His life ended at Ford's Theater on April 14, 1865, after which Edwin M. Stanton said, "Now he belongs to the ages," and Lincoln endured as a national symbol whose spirit still lives.
