Abraham Lincoln (February 12, 1809 - April 15, 1865) was the 16th President of the United States, serving from March 1861 until his assassination in April 1865. Lincoln successfully led the United States through its greatest 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, and became a country lawyer, a Whig Party leader, Illinois state legislator during the 1830s, and a one-term member of the United States House of Representatives during the 1840s. Lincoln won the Republican Party nomination in 1860 and was elected president later that year. His tenure in office was occupied primarily with the defeat of the secessionist Confederate States of America in the American Civil War. He introduced measures that resulted in the abolition of slavery, issuing his Emancipation Proclamation in 1863 and promoting the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution. As the civil war was drawing to a close, Lincoln became the first American president to be assassinated; he had the largest funeral in the nation's history and his legacy became iconic for American nationalism and freedom. Francis Fisher Browne (December 1, 1843 - 1913) was an American editor, poet, and critic. Browne was born in South Halifax, Vermont. After his high school education, Browne enlisted in the Forty-sixth Massachusetts Volunteers (1862-63). He went on to study law in Rochester and Ann Arbor; edited the Lakeside Monthly (Chicago) (1869-74), The Alliance (1878-79), and The Dial (1880-1913), a semi-monthly literary review.