Washington/Springfield, Illinois - Historic figures often fade over time, but slain president Abraham Lincoln infuses American daily life like few other figures in US history.

Even without last months' inauguration of the first black president of the United States, the celebration of Lincoln's 200th birthday on Thursday would have evoked the same outpouring of media attention and new books that it has.

Barack Obama put the finishing touch on Lincoln's legacy, laying his hand on the same bible that Lincoln used to be sworn in as president. Obama's inauguration came two years after he declared his candidacy for the Democratic Party's nomination in the same town - Springfield, Illinois - where Lincoln carved out his 19th-century political career.

Obama plans to fly Thursday to Springfield for Lincoln observances, part of celebrations coast to coast that are to include a simultaneous nationwide reading of Lincoln's most famous speech, the Gettysburg Address.

Lincoln is most famous for ending slavery, though historians point out that while he abhorred involuntary servitude, Lincoln's driving purpose was to hold together a country split asunder over the issue.

A month after Lincoln took office on March 4, 1861, Southern rebels fired a barrage on Fort Sumter, South Carolina, a federal Army stronghold.

Those were the opening salvos of the US Civil War, but it would be another two years before Lincoln issued his Emancipation Proclamation to end slavery in the rebel states, enacted on January 1, 1863. Some border states that had remained with the Union were exepted until after the war ended, but the significance was clear.

At the beginning, it was not at all clear, though, that unity would prevail. Lincoln's untested Union troops suffered massive defeats starting in July 1861 at the Battle of Bull Run in Manassas, Virginia, just outside Washington.

From there, confederate troops swept north to Sharpsburg, Maryland, at Antietam Creek, where storied Southern General Robert E Lee ruled the day. It was the bloodiest single-day battle in American history, with 23,000 casualties.

It took another whole year for Lincoln to reorganize his war department and find the right generals to finally oust Confederate troops from the North. Key to turning the tide was the Union victory in July 1863 at the battle of Gettsyburg, Pennsylvania.

Months later, Lincoln travelled to the small town north of Washington to commemorate the dead, delivering the famous speech that showed how uneasy Lincoln was, even after the Union victory.

He noted how the Founding Fathers had brought forth "a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal."

"Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure," he said.

He called for the country to not allow the dead to have "died in vain" for the cause "that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom - and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth."

The war lasted another two years, ending with the South's surrender on April 9, 1965, just as Lincoln was starting his second term in office. Just days later, an angry actor and Confederate sympathizer, John Wilkes Boothe, assassinated Lincoln as he watched a play at Ford's Theatre in Washington.

On Thursday, new US citizens will travel to Springfield for a festive swearing in at the Old State Capitol, where Lincoln served in the Illinois General Assembly. Obama served in the same state legislature from 1997-2004, albeit in a newer building a few blocks away.

A Lincoln bicentennial postage stamp will be issued, choirs will sing hymns and folk songs from the time of Honest Abe.

A wreath will be laid at Lincoln's tomb on a hillside overlooking his beloved Springfield. The site is commanded by a larger-than-life bronze bust designed by Gutzon Borglum, the creator of Mount Rushmore.

The large, distinctive nose is rubbed shiny by repeated, affectionate touches from visitors.

Eight months after Lincoln was killed, the country passed the 13th Amendment to the US Constitution to forever ban slavery, followed by further amendments to guarantee citizenship, equality and voting rights.

Yet it took another century and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 to start dismantling the racist barriers which continued to keep blacks from the ballot box across the US South and elsewhere. (dpa)