What was one important thing that Abraham Lincoln did?

Why this is the answer

Lincoln has three accepted answers on the official list: he freed the slaves (Emancipation Proclamation), he saved or preserved the Union, and he led the United States during the Civil War. Any one of them is a complete answer. It is also one of the questions marked with an asterisk, and applicants who are 65 or older and have been legal permanent residents for 20 years or more may study just the starred questions, this one included. The three answers fit together once you see where Lincoln started. He was the 16th President and held office from 1861 to 1865. When the southern states broke away, he refused to accept it. In his view their separation was unconstitutional, so for him the war was a fight to keep the country in one piece. That is the "saved the Union" answer. And since he was the President while the war was fought, "led the United States during the Civil War" counts as well. The Emancipation Proclamation came in 1863, in the middle of the fighting. The two words explain it: emancipation means freedom, and a proclamation is an announcement. It declared enslaved people in the rebelling Confederate states free. In practice most of them did not actually gain their freedom until the war was over, and slavery ended across the whole country only with the 13th Amendment, ratified on December 6, 1865, months after Lincoln's death. Gettysburg belongs to the same year. A major Union victory there stopped the Confederate army from invading the North, a national cemetery was set aside for the dead, and in November 1863 Lincoln spoke at its dedication, urging the living to save the Union so that government of the people, by the people, for the people would not perish. The South surrendered in April 1865. A few days later, on April 14, John Wilkes Booth, a southern supporter, killed him at Ford's Theatre in Washington, D.C. The usual trap is to stretch the Proclamation. It applied to the states in rebellion, so don't say it ended slavery everywhere; that took the amendment. Stick to one of the three official phrases. Question 76, which asks what the Proclamation did, accepts "freed the slaves" or the narrower versions that name the Confederacy or most Southern states, so learning this one prepares you for that one. If you want a single picture, imagine Lincoln holding the map of a divided country in one hand and the Proclamation in the other.