THE WRITINGS OF ABRAHAM LINCOLN




VOLUME 1.




INTRODUCTORY

Immediately after Lincoln's re-election to the Presidency, in an
off-hand speech, delivered in response to a serenade by some of
his admirers on the evening of November 10, 1864, he spoke as
follows:

"It has long been a grave question whether any government not too
strong for the liberties of its people can be strong enough to
maintain its existence in great emergencies.  On this point, the
present rebellion brought our republic to a severe test, and the
Presidential election, occurring in regular course during the
rebellion, added not a little to the strain....  The strife of
the election is but human nature practically applied to the facts
in the case.  What has occurred in this case must ever occur in
similar cases.  Human nature will not change.  In any future
great national trial, compared with the men of this, we shall
have as weak and as strong, as silly and as wise, as bad and as
good.  Let us therefore study the incidents in this as philosophy
to learn wisdom from and none of them as wrongs to be avenged....
Now that the election is over, may not all having a common
interest reunite in a common fort to save our common country?
For my own part, I have striven and shall strive to avoid placing
any obstacle in the way.  So long as I have been here, I have not
willingly planted a thorn in any man's bosom.  While I am deeply
sensible to the high compliment of a re-election and duly
grateful, as I trust, to Almighty God for having directed my
countrymen to a right conclusion, as I think for their own good,
it adds nothing to my satisfaction that any other man may be
disappointed or pained by the result."

This speech has not attracted much general attention, yet it is
in a peculiar degree both illustrative and typical of the great
statesman who made it, alike in its strong common-sense and in
its lofty standard of morality.  Lincoln's life, Lincoln's deeds
and words, are not only of consuming interest to the historian,
but should be intimately known to every man engaged in the hard
practical work of American political life.  It is difficult to
overstate how much it means to a nation to have as the two
foremost figures in its history men like Washington and Lincoln.
It is good for every man in any way concerned in public life to
feel that the highest ambition any American can possibly have
will be gratified just in proportion as he raises himself toward
the standards set by these two men.

It is a very poor thing, whether for nations or individuals, to
advance the history of great deeds done in the past as an excuse
for doing poorly in the present; but it is an excellent thing to
study the history of the great deeds of the past, and of the
great men who did them, with an earnest desire to profit thereby
so as to render better service in the present.  In their
essentials, the men of the present day are much like the men of
the past, and the live issues of the present can be faced to
better advantage by men who have in good faith studied how the
leaders of the nation faced the dead issues of the past.  Such a
study of Lincoln's life will enable us to avoid the twin gulfs of
immorality and inefficiency--the gulfs which always lie one on
each side of the careers alike of man and of nation.  It helps
nothing to have avoided one if shipwreck is encountered in the
other.  The fanatic, the well-meaning moralist of unbalanced
mind, the parlor critic who condemns others but has no power
himself to do good and but little power to do ill--all these were
as alien to Lincoln as the vicious and unpatriotic themselves.
His life teaches our people that they must act with wisdom,
because otherwise adherence to right will be mere sound and fury
without substance; and that they must also act high-mindedly, or
else what seems to be wisdom will in the end turn out to be the
most destructive kind of folly.

Throughout his entire life, and especially after he rose to
leadership in his party, Lincoln was stirred to his depths by the
sense of fealty to a lofty ideal; but throughout his entire life,
he also accepted human nature as it is, and worked with keen,
practical good sense to achieve results with the instruments at
hand.  It is impossible to conceive of a man farther removed from
baseness, farther removed from corruption, from mere self-
seeking; but it is also impossible to conceive of a man of more
sane and healthy mind--a man less under the influence of that
fantastic and diseased morality (so fantastic and diseased as to
be in reality profoundly immoral) which makes a man in this work-
a-day world refuse to do what is possible because he cannot
accomplish the impossible.

In the fifth volume of Lecky's History of England, the historian
draws an interesting distinction between the qualities needed for
a successful political career in modern society and those which
lead to eminence in the spheres of pure intellect or pure moral
effort. He says:

"....the moral qualities that are required in the higher spheres
of statesmanship [are not] those of a hero or a saint. Passionate
earnestness and self-devotion, complete concentration of every
faculty on an unselfish aim, uncalculating daring, a delicacy of
conscience and a loftiness of aim far exceeding those of the
average of men, are here likely to prove rather a hindrance than
an assistance. The politician deals very largely with the
superficial and the commonplace; his art is in a great measure
that of skilful compromise, and in the conditions of modern life,
the statesman is likely to succeed best who possesses secondary
qualities to an unusual degree, who is in the closest
intellectual and moral sympathy with the average of the
intelligent men of his time, and who pursues common ideals with.
mow than common ability....  Tact, business talent, knowledge of
men, resolution, promptitude and sagacity in dealing with
immediate emergencies, a character which lends itself easily to
conciliation, diminishes friction and inspires confidence, are
especially needed, and they are more likely to be found among
shrewd and enlightened men of the world than among men of great
original genius or of an heroic type of character."

The American people should feel profoundly grateful that the
greatest American statesman since Washington, the statesman who
in this absolutely democratic republic succeeded best, was the
very man who actually combined the two sets of qualities which
the historian thus puts in antithesis.  Abraham Lincoln, the
rail-splitter, the Western country lawyer, was one of the
shrewdest and most enlightened men of the world, and he had all
the practical qualities which enable such a man to guide his
countrymen; and yet he was also a genius of the heroic type, a
leader who rose level to the greatest crisis through which this
nation or any other nation had to pass in the nineteenth century.

THEODORE ROOSEVELT

SAGAMORE HILL,
OYSTER BAY, N. Y.,
September 22, 1905.




INTRODUCTORY NOTE

"I have endured," wrote Lincoln not long before his death, "a
great deal of ridicule without much malice, and have received a
great deal of kindness not quite free from ridicule."  On Easter
Day, 1865, the world knew how little this ridicule, how much this
kindness, had really signified.  Thereafter, Lincoln the man
became Lincoln the hero, year by year more heroic, until to-day,
with the swift passing of those who knew him, his figure grows
ever dimmer, less real.  This should not be.  For Lincoln the
man, patient, wise, set in a high resolve, is worth far more than
Lincoln the hero, vaguely glorious.  Invaluable is the example of
the man, intangible that of the hero.

And, though it is not for us, as for those who in awed stillness
listened at Gettysburg with inspired perception, to know Abraham
Lincoln, yet there is for us another way whereby we may attain
such knowledge--through his words--uttered in all sincerity to
those who loved or hated him. Cold, unsatisfying they may seem,
these printed words, while we can yet speak with those who knew
him, and look into eyes that once looked into his.  But in truth
it is here that we find his simple greatness, his great
simplicity, and though no man tried less so to show his power, no
man has so shown it more clearly.

Thus these writings of Abraham Lincoln are associated with those
of Washington, Hamilton, Franklin, and of the other "Founders of
the Republic," not that Lincoln should become still more of the
past, but, rather, that he with them should become still more of
the present.  However faint and mythical may grow the story of
that Great Struggle, the leader, Lincoln, at least should remain
a real, living American.  No matter how clearly, how directly,
Lincoln has shown himself in his writings, we yet should not
forget those men whose minds, from their various view-points,
have illumined for us his character.  As this nation owes a great
debt to Lincoln, so, also, Lincoln's memory owes a great debt to
a nation which, as no other nation could have done, has been able
to appreciate his full worth.  Among the many who have brought
about this appreciation, those only whose estimates have been
placed in these volumes may be mentioned here.  To President
Roosevelt, to Mr. Schurz and to Mr. Choate, the editor, for
himself, for the publishers, and on behalf of the readers, wishes
to offer his sincere acknowledgments.

Thanks are also due, for valuable and sympathetic assistance
rendered in the preparation of this work, to Mr. Gilbert A.
Tracy, of Putnam, Conn., Major William H. Lambert, of
Philadelphia, and Mr. C. F. Gunther, of Chicago, to the Chicago
Historical Association and personally to its capable Secretary,
Miss McIlvaine, to Major Henry S. Burrage, of Portland, Me., and
to General Thomas J. Henderson, of Illinois.

For various courtesies received, the editor is furthermore
indebted to the Librarian of the Library of Congress; to Messrs.
McClure, Phillips & Co., D. Appleton & Co., Macmillan & Co.,
Dodd, Mead & Co., and Harper Brothers, of New York; to Houghton,
Mifflin & Co., Dana, Estes & Co., and L. C. Page & Co., of
Boston; to A. C. McClurg & Co., of Chicago; to The Robert Clarke
Co., of Cincinnati, and to the J. B. Lippincott Co., of
Philadelphia.

It is hardly necessary to add that every effort has been made by
the editor to bring into these volumes whatever material may
there properly belong, material much of which is widely scattered
in public libraries and in private collections. He has been
fortunate in securing certain interesting correspondence and
papers which had not before come into print in book form.
Information concerning some of these papers had reached him too
late to enable the papers to find place in their proper
chronological order in the set. Rather, however, than not to
present these papers to the readers they have been included in
the seventh volume of the set, which concludes the " Writings."

[These later papers are, in this etext, re-arranged into
chronologic order.  D.W.]


October, 1905,

A. B. L.






ABRAHAM LINCOLN:

AN ESSAY BY CARL SHURZ

No American can study the character and career of Abraham Lincoln
without being carried away by sentimental emotions.  We are
always inclined to idealize that which we love,--a state of mind
very unfavorable to the exercise of sober critical judgment.  It
is therefore not surprising that most of those who have written
or spoken on that extraordinary man, even while conscientiously
endeavoring to draw a lifelike portraiture of his being, and to
form a just estimate of his public conduct, should have drifted
into more or less indiscriminating eulogy, painting his great
features in the most glowing colors, and covering with tender
shadings whatever might look like a blemish.

But his standing before posterity will not be exalted by mere
praise of his virtues and abilities, nor by any concealment of
his limitations and faults.  The stature of the great man, one of
whose peculiar charms consisted in his being so unlike all other
great men, will rather lose than gain by the idealization which
so easily runs into the commonplace.  For it was distinctly the
weird mixture of qualities and forces in him, of the lofty with
the common, the ideal with the uncouth, of that which he had
become with that which he had not ceased to be, that made him so
fascinating a character among his fellow-men, gave him his
singular power over their minds and hearts, and fitted him to be
the greatest leader in the greatest crisis of our national life.

His was indeed a marvellous growth.  The statesman or the
military hero born and reared in a log cabin is a familiar figure
in American history; but we may search in vain among our
celebrities for one whose origin and early life equalled Abraham
Lincoln's in wretchedness.  He first saw the light in a miserable
hovel in Kentucky, on a farm consisting of a few barren acres in
a dreary neighborhood; his father a typical "poor Southern
white," shiftless and without ambition for himself or his
children, constantly looking for a new piece of land on which he
might make a living without much work; his mother, in her youth
handsome and bright, grown prematurely coarse in feature and
soured in mind by daily toil and care; the whole household
squalid, cheerless, and utterly void of elevating inspirations...
Only when the family had "moved" into the malarious backwoods of
Indiana, the mother had died, and a stepmother, a woman of thrift
and energy, had taken charge of the children, the shaggy-headed,
ragged, barefooted, forlorn boy, then seven years old, "began to
feel like a human being."  Hard work was his early lot.  When a
mere boy he had to help in supporting the family, either on his
father's clearing, or hired out to other farmers to plough, or
dig ditches, or chop wood, or drive ox teams; occasionally also
to "tend the baby," when the farmer's wife was otherwise engaged.
He could regard it as an advancement to a higher sphere of
activity when he obtained work in a "crossroads store," where he
amused the customers by his talk over the counter; for he soon
distinguished himself among the backwoods folk as one who had
something to say worth listening to.  To win that distinction, he
had to draw mainly upon his wits; for, while his thirst for
knowledge was great, his opportunities for satisfying that thirst
were wofully slender.

In the log schoolhouse, which he could visit but little, he was
taught only reading, writing, and elementary arithmetic.  Among
the people of the settlement, bush farmers and small tradesmen,
he found none of uncommon intelligence or education; but some of
them had a few books, which he borrowed eagerly.  Thus he read
and reread, AEsop's Fables, learning to tell stories with a point
and to argue by parables; he read Robinson Crusoe, The Pilgrim's
Progress, a short history of the United States, and Weems's Life
of Washington.  To the town constable's he went to read the
Revised Statutes of Indiana.  Every printed page that fell into
his hands he would greedily devour, and his family and friends
watched him with wonder, as the uncouth boy, after his daily
work, crouched in a corner of the log cabin or outside under a
tree, absorbed in a book while munching his supper of corn bread.
In this manner he began to gather some knowledge, and sometimes
he would astonish the girls with such startling remarks as that
the earth was moving around the sun, and not the sun around the
earth, and they marvelled where "Abe" could have got such queer
notions.  Soon he also felt the impulse to write; not only making
extracts from books he wished to remember, but also composing
little essays of his own.  First he sketched these with charcoal
on a wooden shovel scraped white with a drawing-knife, or on
basswood shingles.  Then he transferred them to paper, which was
a scarce commodity in the Lincoln household; taking care to cut
his expressions close, so that they might not cover too much
space,--a style-forming method greatly to be commended.  Seeing
boys put a burning coal on the back of a wood turtle, he was
moved to write on cruelty to animals.  Seeing men intoxicated
with whiskey, he wrote on temperance.  In verse-making, too, he
tried himself, and in satire on persons offensive to him or
others,--satire the rustic wit of which was not always fit for
ears polite.  Also political thoughts he put upon paper, and some
of his pieces were even deemed good enough for publication in the
county weekly.

Thus he won a neighborhood reputation as a clever young man,
which he increased by his performances as a speaker, not seldom
drawing upon himself the dissatisfaction of his employers by
mounting a stump in the field, and keeping the farm hands from
their work by little speeches in a jocose and sometimes also a
serious vein.  At the rude social frolics of the settlement he
became an important person, telling funny, stories, mimicking the
itinerant preachers who had happened to pass by, and making his
mark at wrestling matches, too; for at the age of seventeen he
had attained his full height, six feet four inches in his
stockings, if he had any, and a terribly muscular clodhopper he
was.  But he was known never to use his extraordinary strength to
the injury or humiliation of others; rather to do them a kindly
turn, or to enforce justice and fair dealing between them.  All
this made him a favorite in backwoods society, although in some
things he appeared a little odd, to his friends.  Far more than
any of them, he was given not only to reading, but to fits of
abstraction, to quiet musing with himself, and also to strange
spells of melancholy, from which he often would pass in a moment
to rollicking outbursts of droll humor.  But on the whole he was
one of the people among whom he lived; in appearance perhaps even
a little more uncouth than most of them,--a very tall, rawboned
youth, with large features, dark, shrivelled skin, and rebellious
hair; his arms and legs long, out of proportion; clad in deerskin
trousers, which from frequent exposure to the rain had shrunk so
as to sit tightly on his limbs, leaving several inches of bluish
shin exposed between their lower end and the heavy tan-colored
shoes; the nether garment held usually by only one suspender,
that was strung over a coarse homemade shirt; the head covered in
winter with a coonskin cap, in summer with a rough straw hat of
uncertain shape, without a band.

It is doubtful whether he felt himself much superior to his
surroundings, although he confessed to a yearning for some
knowledge of the world outside of the circle in which he lived.
This wish was gratified; but how?  At the age of nineteen he went
down the Mississippi to New Orleans as a flatboat hand,
temporarily joining a trade many members of which at that time
still took pride in being called "half horse and half alligator."
After his return he worked and lived in the old way until the
spring of 1830, when his father "moved again," this time to
Illinois; and on the journey of fifteen days "Abe" had to drive
the ox wagon which carried the household goods.  Another log
cabin was built, and then, fencing a field, Abraham Lincoln split
those historic rails which were destined to play so picturesque a
part in the Presidential campaign twenty-eight years later.

Having come of age, Lincoln left the family, and "struck out for
himself."  He had to "take jobs whenever he could get them."  The
first of these carried him again as a flatboat hand to New
Orleans.  There something happened that made a lasting impression
upon his soul: he witnessed a slave auction.  "His heart bled,"
wrote one of his companions; "said nothing much; was silent;
looked bad.  I can say, knowing it, that it was on this trip that
he formed his opinion on slavery.  It run its iron in him then
and there, May, 1831.  I have heard him say so often."  Then he
lived several years at New Salem, in Illinois, a small mushroom
village, with a mill, some "stores" and whiskey shops, that rose
quickly, and soon disappeared again.  It was a desolate,
disjointed, half-working and half-loitering life, without any
other aim than to gain food and shelter from day to day.  He
served as pilot on a steamboat trip, then as clerk in a store and
a mill; business failing, he was adrift for some time.  Being
compelled to measure his strength with the chief bully of the
neighborhood, and overcoming him, he became a noted person in
that muscular community, and won the esteem and friendship of the
ruling gang of ruffians to such a degree that, when the Black
Hawk war broke out, they elected him, a young man of twenty-
three, captain of a volunteer company, composed mainly of roughs
of their kind.  He took the field, and his most noteworthy deed
of valor consisted, not in killing an Indian, but in protecting
against his own men, at the peril of his own life, the life of an
old savage who had strayed into his camp.

The Black Hawk war over, he turned to politics.  The step from
the captaincy of a volunteer company to a candidacy for a seat in
the Legislature seemed a natural one.  But his popularity,
although great in New Salem, had not spread far enough over the
district, and he was defeated.  Then the wretched hand-to-mouth
struggle began again.  He "set up in store-business" with a
dissolute partner, who drank whiskey while Lincoln was reading
books.  The result was a disastrous failure and a load of debt.
Thereupon he became a deputy surveyor, and was appointed
postmaster of New Salem, the business of the post-office being so
small that he could carry the incoming and outgoing mail in his
hat.  All this could not lift him from poverty, and his surveying
instruments and horse and saddle were sold by the sheriff for
debt.

But while all this misery was upon him his ambition rose to
higher aims.  He walked many miles to borrow from a schoolmaster
a grammar with which to improve his language.  A lawyer lent him
a copy of Blackstone, and he began to study law.

People would look wonderingly at the grotesque figure lying in
the grass, "with his feet up a tree," or sitting on a fence, as,
absorbed in a book, he learned to construct correct sentences and
made himself a jurist.  At once he gained a little practice,
pettifogging before a justice of the peace for friends, without
expecting a fee.  Judicial functions, too, were thrust upon him,
but only at horse-races or wrestling matches, where his
acknowledged honesty and fairness gave his verdicts undisputed
authority.  His popularity grew apace, and soon he could be a
candidate for the Legislature again.  Although he called himself
a Whig, an ardent admirer of Henry Clay, his clever stump
speeches won him the election in the strongly Democratic
district.  Then for the first time, perhaps, he thought seriously
of his outward appearance.  So far he had been content with a
garb of "Kentucky jeans," not seldom ragged, usually patched, and
always shabby.  Now, he borrowed some money from a friend to buy
a new suit of clothes--"store clothes" fit for a Sangamon County
statesman; and thus adorned he set out for the state capital,
Vandalia, to take his seat among the lawmakers.

His legislative career, which stretched over several sessions--
for he was thrice re-elected, in 1836, 1838, and 1840--was not
remarkably brilliant.  He did, indeed, not lack ambition.  He
dreamed even of making himself "the De Witt Clinton of Illinois,"
and he actually distinguished himself by zealous and effective
work in those "log-rolling" operations by which the young State
received "a general system of internal improvements" in the shape
of railroads, canals, and banks,--a reckless policy, burdening
the State with debt, and producing the usual crop of political
demoralization, but a policy characteristic of the time and the
impatiently enterprising spirit of the Western people.  Lincoln,
no doubt with the best intentions, but with little knowledge of
the subject, simply followed the popular current.  The
achievement in which, perhaps, he gloried most was the removal of
the State government from Vandalia to Springfield; one of those
triumphs of political management which are apt to be the pride of
the small politician's statesmanship.  One thing, however, he did
in which his true nature asserted itself, and which gave distinct
promise of the future pursuit of high aims.  Against an
overwhelming preponderance of sentiment in the Legislature,
followed by only one other member, he recorded his protest
against a proslavery resolution,--that protest declaring "the
institution of slavery to be founded on both injustice and bad
policy."  This was not only the irrepressible voice of his
conscience; it was true moral valor, too; for at that time, in
many parts of the West, an abolitionist was regarded as little
better than a horse-thief, and even "Abe Lincoln" would hardly
have been forgiven his antislavery principles, had he not been
known as such an "uncommon good fellow."  But here, in obedience
to the great conviction of his life, he manifested his courage to
stand alone, that courage which is the first requisite of
leadership in a great cause.

Together with his reputation and influence as a politician grew
his law practice, especially after he had removed from New Salem
to Springfield, and associated himself with a practitioner of
good standing.  He had now at last won a fixed position in
society.  He became a successful lawyer, less, indeed, by his
learning as a jurist than by his effectiveness as an advocate and
by the striking uprightness of his character; and it may truly be
said that his vivid sense of truth and justice had much to do
with his effectiveness as an advocate.  He would refuse to act as
the attorney even of personal friends when he saw the right on
the other side.  He would abandon cases, even during trial, when
the testimony convinced him that his client was in the wrong.  He
would dissuade those who sought his service from pursuing an
obtainable advantage when their claims seemed to him unfair.
Presenting his very first case in the United States Circuit
Court, the only question being one of authority, he declared
that, upon careful examination, he found all the authorities on
the other side, and none on his.  Persons accused of crime, when
he thought them guilty, he would not defend at all, or,
attempting their defence, he was unable to put forth his powers.
One notable exception is on record, when his personal sympathies
had been strongly aroused.  But when he felt himself to be the
protector of innocence, the defender of justice, or the
prosecutor of wrong, he frequently disclosed such unexpected
resources of reasoning, such depth of feeling, and rose to such
fervor of appeal as to astonish and overwhelm his hearers, and
make him fairly irresistible.  Even an ordinary law argument,
coming from him, seldom failed to produce the impression that he
was profoundly convinced of the soundness of his position.  It is
not surprising that the mere appearance of so conscientious an
attorney in any case should have carried, not only to juries, but
even to judges, almost a presumption of right on his side, and
that the people began to call him, sincerely meaning it, "honest
Abe Lincoln."

In the meantime he had private sorrows and trials of a painfully
afflicting nature.  He had loved and been loved by a fair and
estimable girl, Ann Rutledge, who died in the flower of her youth
and beauty, and he mourned her loss with such intensity of grief
that his friends feared for his reason.  Recovering from his
morbid depression, he bestowed what he thought a new affection
upon another lady, who refused him.  And finally, moderately
prosperous in his worldly affairs, and having prospects of
political distinction before him, he paid his addresses to Mary
Todd, of Kentucky, and was accepted.  But then tormenting doubts
of the genuineness of his own affection for her, of the
compatibility of their characters, and of their future happiness
came upon him.  His distress was so great that he felt himself in
danger of suicide, and feared to carry a pocket-knife with him;
and he gave mortal offence to his bride by not appearing on the
appointed wedding day.  Now the torturing consciousness of the
wrong he had done her grew unendurable.  He won back her
affection, ended the agony by marrying her, and became a faithful
and patient husband and a good father.  But it was no secret to
those who knew the family well that his domestic life was full of
trials.  The erratic temper of his wife not seldom put the
gentleness of his nature to the severest tests; and these
troubles and struggles, which accompanied him through all the
vicissitudes of his life from the modest home in Springfield to
the White House at Washington, adding untold private heart-
burnings to his public cares, and sometimes precipitating upon
him incredible embarrassments in the discharge of his public
duties, form one of the most pathetic features of his career.

He continued to "ride the circuit," read books while travelling
in his buggy, told funny stories to his fellow-lawyers in the
tavern, chatted familiarly with his neighbors around the stove in
the store and at the post-office, had his hours of melancholy
brooding as of old, and became more and more widely known and
trusted and beloved among the people of his State for his ability
as a lawyer and politician, for the uprightness of his character
and the overflowing spring of sympathetic kindness in his heart.
His main ambition was confessedly that of political distinction;
but hardly any one would at that time have seen in him the man
destined to lead the nation through the greatest crisis of the
century.

His time had not yet come when, in 1846, he was elected to
Congress.  In a clever speech in the House of Representatives he
denounced President Polk for having unjustly forced war upon
Mexico, and he amused the Committee of the Whole by a witty
attack upon General Cass.  More important was the expression he
gave to his antislavery impulses by offering a bill looking to
the emancipation of the slaves in the District of Columbia, and
by his repeated votes for the famous Wilmot Proviso, intended to
exclude slavery from the Territories acquired from Mexico.  But
when, at the expiration of his term, in March, 1849, he left his
seat, he gloomily despaired of ever seeing the day when the cause
nearest to his heart would be rightly grasped by the people, and
when he would be able to render any service to his country in
solving the great problem.  Nor had his career as a member of
Congress in any sense been such as to gratify his ambition.
Indeed, if he ever had any belief in a great destiny for himself,
it must have been weak at that period; for he actually sought to
obtain from the new Whig President, General Taylor, the place of
Commissioner of the General Land Office; willing to bury himself
in one of the administrative bureaus of the government.
Fortunately for the country, he failed; and no less fortunately,
when, later, the territorial governorship of Oregon was offered
to him, Mrs. Lincoln's protest induced him to decline it.
Returning to Springfield, he gave himself with renewed zest to
his law practice, acquiesced in the Compromise of 1850 with
reluctance and a mental reservation, supported in the
Presidential campaign of 1852  the Whig candidate in some
spiritless speeches, and took but a languid interest in the
politics of the day.  But just then his time was drawing near.

The peace promised, and apparently inaugurated, by the Compromise
of 1850 was rudely broken by the introduction of the Kansas-
Nebraska Bill in 1854.  The repeal of the Missouri Compromise,
opening the Territories of the United States, the heritage of
coming generations, to the invasion of slavery, suddenly revealed
the whole significance of the slavery question to the people of
the free States, and thrust itself into the politics of the
country as the paramount issue.  Something like an electric shock
flashed through the North.  Men who but a short time before had
been absorbed by their business pursuits, and deprecated all
political agitation, were startled out of their security by a
sudden alarm, and excitedly took sides.  That restless trouble of
conscience about slavery, which even in times of apparent repose
had secretly disturbed the souls of Northern people, broke forth
in an utterance louder than ever.  The bonds of accustomed party
allegiance gave way.  Antislavery Democrats and antislavery Whigs
felt themselves drawn together by a common overpowering
sentiment, and soon they began to rally in a new organization.
The Republican party sprang into being to meet the overruling
call of the hour.  Then Abraham Lincoln's time was come.  He
rapidly advanced to a position of conspicuous championship in the
struggle.  This, however, was not owing to his virtues and
abilities alone.  Indeed, the slavery question stirred his soul
in its profoundest depths; it was, as one of his intimate friends
said, "the only one on which he would become excited"; it called
forth all his faculties and energies.  Yet there were many others
who, having long and arduously fought the antislavery battle in
the popular assembly, or in the press, or in the halls of
Congress, far surpassed him in prestige, and compared with whom
he was still an obscure and untried man.  His reputation,
although highly honorable and well earned, had so far been
essentially local.  As a stump-speaker in Whig canvasses outside
of his State he had attracted comparatively little attention; but
in Illinois he had been recognized as one of the foremost men of
the Whig party.  Among the opponents of the Nebraska Bill he
occupied in his State so important a position, that in 1856 he
was the choice of a large majority of the "Anti-Nebraska men" in
the Legislature for a seat in the Senate of the United States
which then became vacant; and when he, an old Whig, could not
obtain the votes of the Anti-Nebraska Democrats necessary to make
a majority, he generously urged his friends to transfer their
votes to Lyman Trumbull, who was then elected.  Two years later,
in the first national convention of the Republican party, the
delegation from Illinois brought him forward as a candidate for
the vice-presidency, and he received respectable support.  Still,
the name of Abraham Lincoln was not widely known beyond the
boundaries of his own State.  But now it was this local
prominence in Illinois that put him in a position of peculiar
advantage on the battlefield of national politics.  In the
assault on the Missouri Compromise which broke down all legal
barriers to the spread of slavery Stephen Arnold Douglas was the
ostensible leader and central figure; and Douglas was a Senator
from Illinois, Lincoln's State.  Douglas's national theatre of
action was the Senate, but in his constituency in Illinois were
the roots of his official position and power.  What he did in the
Senate he had to justify before the people of Illinois, in order
to maintain himself in place; and in Illinois all eyes turned to
Lincoln as Douglas's natural antagonist.

As very young men they had come to Illinois, Lincoln from
Indiana, Douglas from Vermont, and had grown up together in
public life, Douglas as a Democrat, Lincoln as a Whig.  They had
met first in Vandalia, in 1834, when Lincoln was in the
Legislature and Douglas in the lobby; and again in 1836, both as
members of the Legislature.  Douglas, a very able politician, of
the agile, combative, audacious, "pushing" sort, rose in
political distinction with remarkable rapidity.  In quick
succession he became a member of the Legislature, a State's
attorney, secretary of state, a judge on the supreme bench of
Illinois, three times a Representative in Congress, and a Senator
of the United States when only thirty-nine years old.  In the
National Democratic convention of 1852 he appeared even as an
aspirant to the nomination for the Presidency, as the favorite of
"young America," and received a respectable vote.  He had far
outstripped Lincoln in what is commonly called political success
and in reputation.  But it had frequently happened that in
political campaigns Lincoln felt himself impelled, or was
selected by his Whig friends, to answer Douglas's speeches; and
thus the two were looked upon, in a large part of the State at
least, as the representative combatants of their respective
parties in the debates before popular meetings.  As soon,
therefore, as, after the passage of his Kansas-Nebraska Bill,
Douglas returned to Illinois to defend his cause before his
constituents, Lincoln, obeying not only his own impulse, but also
general expectation, stepped forward as his principal opponent.
Thus the struggle about the principles involved in the Kansas-
Nebraska Bill, or, in a broader sense, the struggle between
freedom and slavery, assumed in Illinois the outward form of a
personal contest between Lincoln and Douglas; and, as it
continued and became more animated, that personal contest in
Illinois was watched with constantly increasing interest by the
whole country.  When, in 1858, Douglas's senatorial term being
about to expire, Lincoln was formally designated by the
Republican convention of Illinois as their candidate for the
Senate, to take Douglas's place, and the two contestants agreed
to debate the questions at issue face to face in a series of
public meetings, the eyes of the whole American people were
turned eagerly to that one point: and the spectacle reminded one
of those lays of ancient times telling of two armies, in battle
array, standing still to see their two principal champions fight
out the contested cause between the lines in single combat.

Lincoln had then reached the full maturity of his powers.  His
equipment as a statesman did not embrace a comprehensive
knowledge of public affairs.  What he had studied he had indeed
made his own, with the eager craving and that zealous tenacity
characteristic of superior minds learning under difficulties.
But his narrow opportunities and the unsteady life he had led
during his younger years had not permitted the accumulation of
large stores in his mind.  It is true, in political campaigns he
had occasionally spoken on the ostensible issues between the
Whigs and the Democrats, the tariff, internal improvements,
banks, and so on, but only in a perfunctory manner.  Had he ever
given much serious thought and study to these subjects, it is
safe to assume that a mind so prolific of original conceits as
his would certainly have produced some utterance upon them worth
remembering.  His soul had evidently never been deeply stirred by
such topics.  But when his moral nature was aroused, his brain
developed an untiring activity until it had mastered all the
knowledge within reach.  As soon as the repeal of the Missouri
Compromise had thrust the slavery question into politics as the
paramount issue, Lincoln plunged into an arduous study of all its
legal, historical, and moral aspects, and then his mind became a
complete arsenal of argument.  His rich natural gifts, trained by
long and varied practice, had made him an orator of rare
persuasiveness.  In his immature days, he had pleased himself for
a short period with that inflated, high-flown style which, among
the uncultivated, passes for "beautiful speaking." His inborn
truthfulness and his artistic instinct soon overcame that
aberration and revealed to him the noble beauty and strength of
simplicity.  He possessed an uncommon power of clear and compact
statement, which might have reminded those who knew the story of
his early youth of the efforts of the poor boy, when he copied
his compositions from the scraped wooden shovel, carefully to
trim his expressions in order to save paper.  His language had
the energy of honest directness and he was a master of logical
lucidity.  He loved to point and enliven his reasoning by
humorous illustrations, usually anecdotes of Western life, of
which he had an inexhaustible store at his command.  These
anecdotes had not seldom a flavor of rustic robustness about
them, but he used them with great effect, while amusing the
audience, to give life to an abstraction, to explode an
absurdity, to clinch an argument, to drive home an admonition.
The natural kindliness of his tone, softening prejudice and
disarming partisan rancor, would often open to his reasoning a
way into minds most unwilling to receive it.

Yet his greatest power consisted in the charm of his
individuality.  That charm did not, in the ordinary way, appeal
to the ear or to the eye.  His voice was not melodious; rather
shrill and piercing, especially when it rose to its high treble
in moments of great animation.  His figure was unhandsome, and
the action of his unwieldy limbs awkward.  He commanded none of
the outward graces of oratory as they are commonly understood.
His charm was of a different kind.  It flowed from the rare depth
and genuineness of his convictions and his sympathetic feelings.
Sympathy was the strongest element in his nature.  One of his
biographers, who knew him before he became President, says:
"Lincoln's compassion might be stirred deeply by an object
present, but never by an object absent and unseen.  In the former
case he would most likely extend relief, with little inquiry into
the merits of the case, because, as he expressed it himself, it
`took a pain out of his own heart.'"  Only half of this is
correct.  It is certainly true that he could not witness any
individual distress or oppression, or any kind of suffering,
without feeling a pang of pain himself, and that by relieving as
much as he could the suffering of others he put an end to his
own.  This compassionate impulse to help he felt not only for
human beings, but for every living creature.  As in his boyhood
he angrily reproved the boys who tormented a wood turtle by
putting a burning coal on its back, so, we are told, he would,
when a mature man, on a journey, dismount from his buggy and wade
waist-deep in mire to rescue a pig struggling in a swamp.
Indeed, appeals to his compassion were so irresistible to him,
and he felt it so difficult to refuse anything when his refusal
could give pain, that he himself sometimes spoke of his inability
to say "no" as a positive weakness.  But that certainly does not
prove that his compassionate feeling was confined to individual
cases of suffering witnessed with his own eyes.  As the boy was
moved by the aspect of the tortured wood turtle to compose an
essay against cruelty to animals in general, so the aspect of
other cases of suffering and wrong wrought up his moral nature,
and set his mind to work against cruelty, injustice, and
oppression in general.

As his sympathy went forth to others, it attracted others to him.
Especially those whom he called the "plain people" felt
themselves drawn to him by the instinctive feeling that he
understood, esteemed, and appreciated them.  He had grown up
among the poor, the lowly, the ignorant.  He never ceased to
remember the good souls he had met among them, and the many
kindnesses they had done him.  Although in his mental development
he had risen far above them, he never looked down upon them.  How
they felt and how they reasoned he knew, for so he had once felt
and reasoned himself.  How they could be moved he knew, for so he
had once been moved himself and practised moving others.  His
mind was much larger than theirs, but it thoroughly comprehended
theirs; and while he thought much farther than they, their
thoughts were ever present to him.  Nor had the visible distance
between them grown as wide as his rise in the world would seem to
have warranted.  Much of his backwoods speech and manners still
clung to him.  Although he had become "Mr. Lincoln" to his later
acquaintances, he was still "Abe" to the "Nats" and "Billys" and
"Daves" of his youth; and their familiarity neither appeared
unnatural to them, nor was it in the least awkward to him.  He
still told and enjoyed stories similar to those he had told and
enjoyed in the Indiana settlement and at New Salem.  His wants
remained as modest as they had ever been; his domestic habits had
by no means completely accommodated themselves to those of his
more highborn wife; and though the "Kentucky jeans" apparel had
long been dropped, his clothes of better material and better make
would sit ill sorted on his gigantic limbs.  His cotton umbrella,
without a handle, and tied together with a coarse string to keep
it from flapping, which he carried on his circuit rides, is said
to be remembered still by some of his surviving neighbors.  This
rusticity of habit was utterly free from that affected contempt
of refinement and comfort which self-made men sometimes carry
into their more affluent circumstances.  To Abraham Lincoln it
was entirely natural, and all those who came into contact with
him knew it to be so.  In his ways of thinking and feeling he had
become a gentleman in the highest sense, but the refining process
had polished but little the outward form.  The plain people,
therefore, still considered "honest Abe Lincoln" one of
themselves; and when they felt, which they no doubt frequently
did, that his thoughts and aspirations moved in a sphere above
their own, they were all the more proud of him, without any
diminution of fellow-feeling.  It was this relation of mutual
sympathy and understanding between Lincoln and the plain people
that gave him his peculiar power as a public man, and singularly
fitted him, as we shall see, for that leadership which was
preeminently required in the great crisis then coming on,--the
leadership which indeed thinks and moves ahead of the masses, but
always remains within sight and sympathetic touch of them.

He entered upon the campaign of 1858 better equipped than he had
ever been before.  He not only instinctively felt, but he had
convinced himself by arduous study, that in this struggle against
the spread of slavery he had right, justice, philosophy, the
enlightened opinion of mankind, history, the Constitution, and
good policy on his side.  It was observed that after he began to
discuss the slavery question his speeches were pitched in a much
loftier key than his former oratorical efforts.  While he
remained fond of telling funny stories in private conversation,
they disappeared more and more from his public discourse.  He
would still now and then point his argument with expressions of
inimitable quaintness, and flash out rays of kindly humor and
witty irony; but his general tone was serious, and rose sometimes
to genuine solemnity. His masterly skill in dialectical thrust
and parry, his wealth of knowledge, his power of reasoning and
elevation of sentiment, disclosed in language of rare precision,
strength, and beauty, not seldom astonished his old friends.

Neither of the two champions could have found a more formidable
antagonist than each now met in the other.  Douglas was by far
the most conspicuous member of his party. His admirers had dubbed
him "the Little Giant," contrasting in that nickname the
greatness of his mind with the smallness of his body.  But though
of low stature, his broad-shouldered figure appeared uncommonly
sturdy, and there was something lion-like in the squareness of
his brow and jaw, and in the defiant shake of his long hair.  His
loud and persistent advocacy of territorial expansion, in the
name of patriotism and "manifest destiny," had given him an
enthusiastic following among the young and ardent.  Great natural
parts, a highly combative temperament, and long training had made
him a debater unsurpassed in a Senate filled with able men.  He
could be as forceful in his appeals to patriotic feelings as he
was fierce in denunciation and thoroughly skilled in all the
baser tricks of parliamentary pugilism.  While genial and
rollicking in his social intercourse--the idol of the "boys" he
felt himself one of the most renowned statesmen of his time, and
would frequently meet his opponents with an overbearing
haughtiness, as persons more to be pitied than to be feared.  In
his speech opening the campaign of 1858, he spoke of Lincoln,
whom the Republicans had dared to advance as their candidate for
"his" place in the Senate, with an air of patronizing if not
contemptuous condescension, as "a kind, amiable, and intelligent
gentleman and a good citizen."  The Little Giant would have been
pleased to pass off his antagonist as a tall dwarf.  He knew
Lincoln too well, however, to indulge himself seriously in such a
delusion.  But the political situation was at that moment in a
curious tangle, and Douglas could expect to derive from the
confusion great advantage over his opponent.

By the repeal of the Missouri Compromise, opening the Territories
to the ingress of slavery, Douglas had pleased the South, but
greatly alarmed the North.  He had sought to conciliate Northern
sentiment by appending to his Kansas-Nebraska Bill the
declaration that its intent was "not to legislate slavery into
any State or Territory, nor to exclude it therefrom, but to leave
the people thereof perfectly free to form and regulate their
institutions in their own way, subject only to the Constitution
of the United States."  This he called "the great principle of
popular sovereignty."  When asked whether, under this act, the
people of a Territory, before its admission as a State, would
have the right to exclude slavery, he answered, "That is a
question for the courts to decide."  Then came the famous "Dred
Scott decision," in which the Supreme Court held substantially
that the right to hold slaves as property existed in the
Territories by virtue of the Federal Constitution, and that this
right could not be denied by any act of a territorial government.
This, of course, denied the right of the people of any Territory
to exclude slavery while they were in a territorial condition,
and it alarmed the Northern people still more.  Douglas
recognized the binding force of the decision of the Supreme
Court, at the same time maintaining, most illogically, that his
great principle of popular sovereignty remained in force
nevertheless.  Meanwhile, the proslavery people of western
Missouri, the so-called "border ruffians," had invaded Kansas,
set up a constitutional convention, made a constitution of an
extreme pro-slavery type, the "Lecompton Constitution," refused
to submit it fairly to a vote of the people of Kansas, and then
referred it to Congress for acceptance,--seeking thus to
accomplish the admission of Kansas as a slave State.  Had Douglas
supported such a scheme, he would have lost all foothold in the
North.  In the name of popular sovereignty he loudly declared his
opposition to the acceptance of any constitution not sanctioned
by a formal popular vote.  He "did not care," he said, "whether
slavery be voted up or down," but there must be a fair vote of
the people.  Thus he drew upon himself the hostility of the
Buchanan administration, which was controlled by the proslavery
interest, but he saved his Northern following.  More than this,
not only did his Democratic admirers now call him "the true
champion of freedom," but even some Republicans of large
influence, prominent among them Horace Greeley, sympathizing with
Douglas in his fight against the Lecompton Constitution, and
hoping to detach him permanently from the proslavery interest and
to force a lasting breach in the Democratic party, seriously
advised the Republicans of Illinois to give up their opposition
to Douglas, and to help re-elect him to the Senate.  Lincoln was
not of that opinion.  He believed that great popular movements
can succeed only when guided by their faithful friends, and that
the antislavery cause could not safely be entrusted to the
keeping of one who "did not care whether slavery be voted up or
down."  This opinion prevailed in Illinois; but the influences
within the Republican party over which it prevailed yielded only
a reluctant acquiescence, if they acquiesced at all, after having
materially strengthened Douglas's position.  Such was the
situation of things when the campaign of 1858 between Lincoln and
Douglas began.

Lincoln opened the campaign on his side at the convention which
nominated him as the Republican candidate for the senatorship,
with a memorable saying which sounded like a shout from the
watchtower of history: "A house divided against itself cannot
stand.  I believe this government cannot endure permanently half
slave and half free.  I do not expect the Union to be dissolved.
I do not expect the house to fall, but I expect it will cease to
be divided.  It will become all one thing or all the other.
Either the opponents of slavery will arrest the further spread of
it, and place it where the public mind shall rest in the belief
that it is in the course of ultimate extinction, or its advocates
will push it forward, till it shall become alike lawful in all
the States,--old as well as new, North as well as South."  Then
he proceeded to point out that the Nebraska doctrine combined
with the Dred Scott decision worked in the direction of making
the nation "all slave."  Here was the "irrepressible conflict"
spoken of by Seward a short time later, in a speech made famous
mainly by that phrase.  If there was any new discovery in it, the
right of priority was Lincoln's.  This utterance proved not only
his statesmanlike conception of the issue, but also, in his
situation as a candidate, the firmness of his moral courage.  The
friends to whom he had read the draught of this speech before he
delivered it warned him anxiously that its delivery might be
fatal to his success in the election.  This was shrewd advice, in
the ordinary sense.  While a slaveholder could threaten disunion
with impunity, the mere suggestion that the existence of slavery
was incompatible with freedom in the Union would hazard the
political chances of any public man in the North.  But Lincoln
was inflexible.  "It is true," said he, "and I will deliver it as
written.... I would rather be defeated with these expressions in
my speech held up and discussed before the people than be
victorious without them."  The statesman was right in his far-
seeing judgment and his conscientious statement of the truth, but
the practical politicians were also right in their prediction of
the immediate effect.  Douglas instantly seized upon the
declaration that a house divided against itself cannot stand as
the main objective point of his attack, interpreting it as an
incitement to a "relentless sectional war," and there is no doubt
that the persistent reiteration of this charge served to frighten
not a few timid souls.

Lincoln constantly endeavored to bring the moral and
philosophical side of the subject to the foreground.  "Slavery is
wrong" was the keynote of all his speeches.  To Douglas's
glittering sophism that the right of the people of a Territory to
have slavery or not, as they might desire, was in accordance with
the principle of true popular sovereignty, he made the pointed
answer: "Then true popular sovereignty, according to Senator
Douglas, means that, when one man makes another man his slave, no
third man shall be allowed to object."  To Douglas's argument
that the principle which demanded that the people of a Territory
should be permitted to choose whether they would have slavery or
not "originated when God made man, and placed good and evil
before him, allowing him to choose upon his own responsibility,"
Lincoln solemnly replied: "No; God--did not place good and evil
before man, telling him to make his choice.  On the contrary, God
did tell him there was one tree of the fruit of which he should
not eat, upon pain of death."  He did not, however, place himself
on the most advanced ground taken by the radical anti-slavery
men.  He admitted that, under the Constitution, "the Southern
people were entitled to a Congressional fugitive slave law,"
although he did not approve the fugitive slave law then existing.
He declared also that, if slavery were kept out of the
Territories during their territorial existence, as it should be,
and if then the people of any Territory, having a fair chance and
a clear field, should do such an extraordinary thing as to adopt
a slave constitution, uninfluenced by the actual presence of the
institution among them, he saw no alternative but to admit such a
Territory into the Union.  He declared further that, while he
should be exceedingly glad to see slavery abolished in the
District of Columbia, he would, as a member of Congress, with his
present views, not endeavor to bring on that abolition except on
condition that emancipation be gradual, that it be approved by
the decision of a majority of voters in the District, and that
compensation be made to unwilling owners.  On every available
occasion, he pronounced himself in favor of the deportation and
colonization of the blacks, of course with their consent.  He
repeatedly disavowed any wish on his part to have social and
political equality established between whites and blacks.  On
this point he summed up his views in a reply to Douglas's
assertion that the Declaration of Independence, in speaking of
all men as being created equal, did not include the negroes,
saying: " I do not understand the Declaration of Independence to
mean that all men were created equal in all respects.  They are
not equal in color.  But I believe that it does mean to declare
that all men are equal in some respects; they are equal in their
right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness."

With regard to some of these subjects Lincoln modified his
position at a later period, and it has been suggested that he
would have professed more advanced principles in his debates with
Douglas, had he not feared thereby to lose votes.  This view can
hardly be sustained.  Lincoln had the courage of his opinions,
but he was not a radical.  The man who risked his election by
delivering, against the urgent protest of his friends, the speech
about "the house divided against itself" would not have shrunk
from the expression of more extreme views, had he really
entertained them.  It is only fair to assume that he said what at
the time he really thought, and that if, subsequently, his
opinions changed, it was owing to new conceptions of good policy
and of duty brought forth by an entirely new set of circumstances
and exigencies.  It is characteristic that he continued to adhere
to the impracticable colonization plan even after the
Emancipation Proclamation had already been issued.

But in this contest Lincoln proved himself not only a debater,
but also a political strategist of the first order.  The "kind,
amiable, and intelligent gentleman," as Douglas had been pleased
to call him, was by no means as harmless as a dove.  He possessed
an uncommon share of that worldly shrewdness which not seldom
goes with genuine simplicity of character; and the political
experience gathered in the Legislature and in Congress, and in
many election campaigns, added to his keen intuitions, had made
him as far-sighted a judge of the probable effects of a public
man's sayings or doings upon the popular mind, and as accurate a
calculator in estimating political chances and forecasting
results, as could be found among the party managers in Illinois.
And now he perceived keenly the ugly dilemma in which Douglas
found himself, between the Dred Scott decision, which declared
the right to hold slaves to exist in the Territories by virtue of
the Federal Constitution, and his "great principle of popular
sovereignty," according to which the people of a Territory, if
they saw fit, were to have the right to exclude slavery
therefrom.  Douglas was twisting and squirming to the best of his
ability to avoid the admission that the two were incompatible.
The question then presented itself if it would be good policy for
Lincoln to force Douglas to a clear expression of his opinion as
to whether, the Dred Scott decision notwithstanding, "the people
of a Territory could in any lawful way exclude slavery from its
limits prior to the formation of a State constitution."  Lincoln
foresaw and predicted what Douglas would answer: that slavery
could not exist in a Territory unless the people desired it and
gave it protection by territorial legislation.  In an improvised
caucus the policy of pressing the interrogatory on Douglas was
discussed.  Lincoln's friends unanimously advised against it,
because the answer foreseen would sufficiently commend Douglas to
the people of Illinois to insure his re-election to the Senate.
But Lincoln persisted.  "I am after larger game," said he.  "If
Douglas so answers, he can never be President, and the battle of
1860 is worth a hundred of this."  The interrogatory was pressed
upon Douglas, and Douglas did answer that, no matter what the
decision of the Supreme Court might be on the abstract question,
the people of a Territory had the lawful means to introduce or
exclude slavery by territorial legislation friendly or unfriendly
to the institution.  Lincoln found it easy to show the absurdity
of the proposition that, if slavery were admitted to exist of
right in the Territories by virtue of the supreme law, the
Federal Constitution, it could be kept out or expelled by an
inferior law, one made by a territorial Legislature.  Again the
judgment of the politicians, having only the nearest object in
view, proved correct: Douglas was reelected to the Senate.  But
Lincoln's judgment proved correct also: Douglas, by resorting to
the expedient of his "unfriendly legislation doctrine," forfeited
his last chance of becoming President of the United States.  He
might have hoped to win, by sufficient atonement, his pardon from
the South for his opposition to the Lecompton Constitution; but
that he taught the people of the Territories a trick by which
they could defeat what the proslavery men considered a
constitutional right, and that he called that trick lawful, this
the slave power would never forgive.  The breach between the
Southern and the Northern Democracy was thenceforth irremediable
and fatal.

The Presidential election of 1860 approached.  The struggle in
Kansas, and the debates in Congress which accompanied it, and
which not unfrequently provoked violent outbursts, continually
stirred the popular excitement.  Within the Democratic party
raged the war of factions.  The national Democratic convention
met at Charleston on the 23d of April, 1860.  After a struggle of
ten days between the adherents and the opponents of Douglas,
during which the delegates from the cotton States had withdrawn,
the convention adjourned without having nominated any candidates,
to meet again in Baltimore on the 18th of June.  There was no
prospect, however, of reconciling the hostile elements.  It
appeared very probable that the Baltimore convention would
nominate Douglas, while the seceding Southern Democrats would set
up a candidate of their own, representing extreme proslavery
principles.

Meanwhile, the national Republican convention assembled at
Chicago on the 16th of May, full of enthusiasm and hope.  The
situation was easily understood.  The Democrats would have the
South.  In order to succeed in the election, the Republicans had
to win, in addition to the States carried by Fremont in 1856,
those that were classed as "doubtful,"--New Jersey, Pennsylvania,
and Indiana, or Illinois in the place of either New Jersey or
Indiana.  The most eminent Republican statesmen and leaders of
the time thought of for the Presidency were Seward and Chase,
both regarded as belonging to the more advanced order of
antislavery men.  Of the two, Seward had the largest following,
mainly from New York, New England, and the Northwest.  Cautious
politicians doubted seriously whether Seward, to whom some
phrases in his speeches had undeservedly given the reputation of
a reckless radical, would be able to command the whole Republican
vote in the doubtful States.  Besides, during his long public
career he had made enemies.  It was evident that those who
thought Seward's nomination too hazardous an experiment would
consider Chase unavailable for the same reason.  They would then
look round for an "available" man; and among the "available" men
Abraham Lincoln was easily discovered to stand foremost.  His
great debate with Douglas had given him a national reputation.
The people of the East being eager to see the hero of so dramatic
a contest, he had been induced to visit several Eastern cities,
and had astonished and delighted large and distinguished
audiences with speeches of singular power and originality.  An
address delivered by him in the Cooper Institute in New York,
before an audience containing a large number of important
persons, was then, and has ever since been, especially praised as
one of the most logical and convincing political speeches ever
made in this country.  The people of the West had grown proud of
him as a distinctively Western great man, and his popularity at
home had some peculiar features which could be expected to
exercise a potent charm.  Nor was Lincoln's name as that of an
available candidate left to the chance of accidental discovery.
It is indeed not probable that he thought of himself as a
Presidential possibility, during his contest with Douglas for the
senatorship.  As late as April, 1859, he had written to a friend
who had approached him on the subject that he did not think
himself fit for the Presidency.  The Vice-Presidency was then the
limit of his ambition.  But some of his friends in Illinois took
the matter seriously in hand, and Lincoln, after some hesitation,
then formally authorized "the use of his name."  The matter was
managed with such energy and excellent judgment that, in the
convention, he had not only the whole vote of Illinois to start
with, but won votes on all sides without offending any rival.  A
large majority of the opponents of Seward went over to Abraham
Lincoln, and gave him the nomination on the third ballot.  As had
been foreseen, Douglas was nominated by one wing of the
Democratic party at Baltimore, while the extreme proslavery wing
put Breckinridge into the field as its candidate.  After a
campaign conducted with the energy of genuine enthusiasm on the
antislavery side the united Republicans defeated the divided
Democrats, and Lincoln was elected President by a majority of
fifty-seven votes in the electoral colleges.

The result of the election had hardly been declared when the
disunion movement in the South, long threatened and carefully
planned and prepared, broke out in the shape of open revolt, and
nearly a month before Lincoln could be inaugurated as President
of the United States seven Southern States had adopted ordinances
of secession, formed an independent confederacy, framed a
constitution for it, and elected Jefferson Davis its president,
expecting the other slaveholding States soon to join them.  On
the 11th of February, 1861, Lincoln left Springfield for
Washington; having, with characteristic simplicity, asked his law
partner not to change the sign of the firm "Lincoln and Herndon "
during the four years unavoidable absence of the senior partner,
and having taken an affectionate and touching leave of his
neighbors.

The situation which confronted the new President was appalling:
the larger part of the South in open rebellion, the rest of the
slaveholding States wavering preparing to follow; the revolt
guided by determined, daring, and skillful leaders; the Southern
people, apparently full of enthusiasm and military spirit,
rushing to arms, some of the forts and arsenals already in their
possession; the government of the Union, before the accession of
the new President, in the hands of men some of whom actively
sympathized with the revolt, while others were hampered by their
traditional doctrines in dealing with it, and really gave it aid
and comfort by their irresolute attitude; all the departments
full of "Southern sympathizers" and honeycombed with disloyalty;
the treasury empty, and the public credit at the lowest ebb; the
arsenals ill supplied with arms, if not emptied by treacherous
practices; the regular army of insignificant strength, dispersed
over an immense surface, and deprived of some of its best
officers by defection; the navy small and antiquated.  But that
was not all.  The threat of disunion had so often been resorted
to by the slave power in years gone by that most Northern people
had ceased to believe in its seriousness.  But, when disunion
actually appeared as a stern reality, something like a chill
swept through the whole Northern country.  A cry for union and
peace at any price rose on all sides.  Democratic partisanship
reiterated this cry with vociferous vehemence, and even many
Republicans grew afraid of the victory they had just achieved at
the ballot-box, and spoke of compromise.  The country fairly
resounded with the noise of "anticoercion meetings."  Expressions
of firm resolution from determined antislavery men were indeed
not wanting, but they were for a while almost drowned by a
bewildering confusion of discordant voices.  Even this was not
all.  Potent influences in Europe, with an ill-concealed desire
for the permanent disruption of the American Union, eagerly
espoused the cause of the Southern seceders, and the two
principal maritime powers of the Old World seemed only to be
waiting for a favorable opportunity to lend them a helping hand.

This was the state of things to be mastered by "honest Abe
Lincoln" when he took his seat in the Presidential chair,--
"honest Abe Lincoln," who was so good-natured that he could not
say "no"; the greatest achievement in whose life had been a
debate on the slavery question; who had never been in any
position of power; who was without the slightest experience of
high executive duties, and who had only a speaking acquaintance
with the men upon whose counsel and cooperation he was to depend.
Nor was his accession to power under such circumstances greeted
with general confidence even by the members of his party.  While
he had indeed won much popularity, many Republicans, especially
among those who had advocated Seward's nomination for the
Presidency, saw the simple "Illinois lawyer" take the reins of
government with a feeling little short of dismay.  The orators
and journals of the opposition were ridiculing and lampooning him
without measure.  Many people actually wondered how such a man
could dare to undertake a task which, as he himself had said to
his neighbors in his parting speech, was "more difficult than
that of Washington himself had been."

But Lincoln brought to that task, aside from other uncommon
qualities, the first requisite,--an intuitive comprehension of
its nature.  While he did not indulge in the delusion that the
Union could be maintained or restored without a conflict of arms,
he could indeed not foresee all the problems he would have to
solve.  He instinctively understood, however, by what means that
conflict would have to be conducted by the government of a
democracy.  He knew that the impending war, whether great or
small, would not be like a foreign war, exciting a united
national enthusiasm, but a civil war, likely to fan to uncommon
heat the animosities of party even in the localities controlled
by the government; that this war would have to be carried on not
by means of a ready-made machinery, ruled by an undisputed,
absolute will, but by means to be furnished by the voluntary
action of the people:--armies to be formed by voluntary
enlistments; large sums of money to be raised by the people,
through representatives, voluntarily taxing themselves; trust of
extraordinary power to be voluntarily granted; and war measures,
not seldom restricting the rights and liberties to which the
citizen was accustomed, to be voluntarily accepted and submitted
to by the people, or at least a large majority of them; and that
this would have to be kept up not merely during a short period of
enthusiastic excitement; but possibly through weary years of
alternating success and disaster, hope and despondency.  He knew
that in order to steer this government by public opinion
successfully through all the confusion created by the prejudices
and doubts and differences of sentiment distracting the popular
mind, and so to propitiate, inspire, mould, organize, unite, and
guide the popular will that it might give forth all the means
required for the performance of his great task, he would have to
take into account all the influences strongly affecting the
current of popular thought and feeling, and to direct while
appearing to obey.

This was the kind of leadership he intuitively conceived to be
needed when a free people were to be led forward en masse to
overcome a great common danger under circumstances of appalling
difficulty, the leadership which does not dash ahead with
brilliant daring, no matter who follows, but which is intent upon
rallying all the available forces, gathering in the stragglers,
closing up the column, so that the front may advance well
supported.  For this leadership Abraham Lincoln was admirably
fitted, better than any other American statesman of his day; for
he understood the plain people, with all their loves and hates,
their prejudices and their noble impulses, their weaknesses and
their strength, as he understood himself, and his sympathetic
nature was apt to draw their sympathy to him.

His inaugural address foreshadowed his official course in
characteristic manner.  Although yielding nothing in point of
principle, it was by no means a flaming antislavery manifesto,
such as would have pleased the more ardent Republicans.  It was
rather the entreaty of a sorrowing father speaking to his wayward
children.  In the kindliest language he pointed out to the
secessionists how ill advised their attempt at disunion was, and
why, for their own sakes, they should desist.  Almost
plaintively, he told them that, while it was not their duty to
destroy the Union, it was his sworn duty to preserve it; that the
least he could do, under the obligations of his oath, was to
possess and hold the property of the United States; that he hoped
to do this peaceably; that he abhorred war for any purpose, and
that they would have none unless they themselves were the
aggressors.  It was a masterpiece of persuasiveness, and while
Lincoln had accepted many valuable amendments suggested by
Seward, it was essentially his own.  Probably Lincoln himself did
not expect his inaugural address to have any effect upon the
secessionists, for he must have known them to be resolved upon
disunion at any cost.  But it was an appeal to the wavering minds
in the North, and upon them it made a profound impression.  Every
candid man, however timid and halting, had to admit that the
President was bound by his oath to do his duty; that under that
oath he could do no less than he said he would do; that if the
secessionists resisted such an appeal as the President had made,
they were bent upon mischief, and that the government must be
supported against them.  The partisan sympathy with the Southern
insurrection which still existed in the North did indeed not
disappear, but it diminished perceptibly under the influence of
such reasoning.  Those who still resisted it did so at the risk
of appearing unpatriotic.

It must not be supposed, however, that Lincoln at once succeeded
in pleasing everybody, even among his friends,--even among those
nearest to him.  In selecting his cabinet, which he did
substantially before he left Springfield for Washington, he
thought it wise to call to his assistance the strong men of his
party, especially those who had given evidence of the support
they commanded as his competitors in the Chicago convention.  In
them he found at the same time representatives of the different
shades of opinion within the party, and of the different
elements--former Whigs and former Democrats--from which the party
had recruited itself.  This was sound policy under the
circumstances.  It might indeed have been foreseen that among the
members of a cabinet so composed, troublesome disagreements and
rivalries would break out.  But it was better for the President
to have these strong and ambitious men near him as his co-
operators than to have them as his critics in Congress, where
their differences might have been composed in a common opposition
to him.  As members of his cabinet he could hope to control them,
and to keep them busily employed in the service of a common
purpose, if he had the strength to do so.  Whether he did possess
this strength was soon tested by a singularly rude trial.

There can be no doubt that the foremost members of his cabinet,
Seward and Chase, the most eminent Republican statesmen, had felt
themselves wronged by their party when in its national convention
it preferred to them for the Presidency a man whom, not
unnaturally, they thought greatly their inferior in ability and
experience as well as in service.  The soreness of that
disappointment was intensified when they saw this Western man in
the White House, with so much of rustic manner and speech as
still clung to him, meeting his fellow-citizens, high and low, on
a footing of equality, with the simplicity of his good nature
unburdened by any conventional dignity of deportment, and dealing
with the great business of state in an easy-going, unmethodical,
and apparently somewhat irreverent way.  They did not understand
such a man.  Especially Seward, who, as Secretary of State,
considered himself next to the Chief Executive, and who quickly
accustomed himself to giving orders and making arrangements upon
his own motion, thought it necessary that he should rescue the
direction of public affairs from hands so unskilled, and take
full charge of them himself.  At the end of the first month of
the administration he submitted a "memorandum" to President
Lincoln, which has been first brought to light by Nicolay and
Hay, and is one of their most valuable contributions to the
history of those days.  In that paper Seward actually told the
President that at the end of a month's administration the
government was still without a policy, either domestic or
foreign; that the slavery question should be eliminated from the
struggle about the Union; that the matter of the maintenance of
the forts and other possessions in the South should be decided
with that view; that explanations should be demanded
categorically from the governments of Spain and France, which
were then preparing, one for the annexation of San Domingo, and
both for the invasion of Mexico; that if no satisfactory
explanations were received war should be declared against Spain
and France by the United States; that explanations should also be
sought from Russia and Great Britain, and a vigorous continental
spirit of independence against European intervention be aroused
all over the American continent; that this policy should be
incessantly pursued and directed by somebody; that either the
President should devote himself entirely to it, or devolve the
direction on some member of his cabinet, whereupon all debate on
this policy must end.

This could be understood only as a formal demand that the
President should acknowledge his own incompetency to perform his
duties, content himself with the amusement of distributing post-
offices, and resign his power as to all important affairs into
the hands of his Secretary of State.  It seems to-day
incomprehensible how a statesman of Seward's calibre could at
that period conceive a plan of policy in which the slavery
question had no place; a policy which rested upon the utterly
delusive assumption that the secessionists, who had already
formed their Southern Confederacy and were with stern resolution
preparing to fight for its independence, could be hoodwinked back
into the Union by some sentimental demonstration against European
interference; a policy which, at that critical moment, would have
involved the Union in a foreign war, thus inviting foreign
intervention in favor of the Southern Confederacy, and increasing
tenfold its chances in the struggle for independence.  But it is
equally incomprehensible how Seward could fail to see that this
demand of an unconditional surrender was a mortal insult to the
head of the government, and that by putting his proposition on
paper he delivered himself into the hands of the very man he had
insulted; for, had Lincoln, as most Presidents would have done,
instantly dismissed Seward, and published the true reason for
that dismissal, it would inevitably have been the end of Seward's
career.  But Lincoln did what not many of the noblest and
greatest men in history would have been noble and great enough to
do.  He considered that Seward was still capable of rendering
great service to his country in the place in which he was, if
rightly controlled.  He ignored the insult, but firmly
established his superiority.  In his reply, which he forthwith
despatched, he told Seward that the administration had a domestic
policy as laid down in the inaugural address with Seward's
approval; that it had a foreign policy as traced in Seward's
despatches with the President's approval; that if any policy was
to be maintained or changed, he, the President, was to direct
that on his responsibility; and that in performing that duty the
President had a right to the advice of his secretaries.  Seward's
fantastic schemes of foreign war and continental policies Lincoln
brushed aside by passing them over in silence.  Nothing more was
said.  Seward must have felt that he was at the mercy of a
superior man; that his offensive proposition had been generously
pardoned as a temporary aberration of a great mind, and that he
could atone for it only by devoted personal loyalty.  This he
did.  He was thoroughly subdued, and thenceforth submitted to
Lincoln his despatches for revision and amendment without a
murmur.  The war with European nations was no longer thought of;
the slavery question found in due time its proper place in the
struggle for the Union; and when, at a later period, the
dismissal of Seward was demanded by dissatisfied senators, who
attributed to him the shortcomings of the administration, Lincoln
stood stoutly by his faithful Secretary of State.

Chase, the Secretary of the Treasury, a man of superb presence,
of eminent ability and ardent patriotism, of great natural
dignity and a certain outward coldness of manner, which made him
appear more difficult of approach than he really was, did not
permit his disappointment to burst out in such extravagant
demonstrations.  But Lincoln's ways were so essentially different
from his that they never became quite intelligible, and certainly
not congenial to him.  It might, perhaps, have been better had
there been, at the beginning of the administration, some decided
clash between Lincoln and Chase, as there was between Lincoln and
Seward, to bring on a full mutual explanation, and to make Chase
appreciate the real seriousness of Lincoln's nature.  But, as it
was, their relations always remained somewhat formal, and Chase
never felt quite at ease under a chief whom he could not
understand, and whose character and powers he never learned to
esteem at their true value.  At the same time, he devoted himself
zealously to the duties of his department, and did the country
arduous service under circumstances of extreme difficulty.
Nobody recognized this more heartily than Lincoln himself, and
they managed to work together until near the end of Lincoln's
first Presidential term, when Chase, after some disagreements
concerning appointments to office, resigned from the treasury;
and, after Taney's death, the President made him Chief Justice.

The rest of the cabinet consisted of men of less eminence, who
subordinated themselves more easily.  In January, 1862, Lincoln
found it necessary to bow Cameron out of the war office, and to
put in his place Edwin M. Stanton, a man of intensely practical
mind, vehement impulses, fierce positiveness, ruthless energy,
immense working power, lofty patriotism, and severest devotion to
duty.  He accepted the war office not as a partisan, for he had
never been a Republican, but only to do all he could in "helping
to save the country."  The manner in which Lincoln succeeded in
taming this lion to his will, by frankly recognizing his great
qualities, by giving him the most generous confidence, by aiding
him in his work to the full of his power, by kindly concession or
affectionate persuasiveness in cases of differing opinions, or,
when it was necessary, by firm assertions of superior authority,
bears the highest testimony to his skill in the management of
men.  Stanton, who had entered the service with rather a mean
opinion of Lincoln's character and capacity, became one of his
warmest, most devoted, and most admiring friends, and with none
of his secretaries was Lincoln's intercourse more intimate.  To
take advice with candid readiness, and to weigh it without any
pride of his own opinion, was one of Lincoln's preeminent
virtues; but he had not long presided over his cabinet council
when his was felt by all its members to be the ruling mind.

The cautious policy foreshadowed in his inaugural address, and
pursued during the first period of the civil war, was far from
satisfying all his party friends.  The ardent spirits among the
Union men thought that the whole North should at once be called
to arms, to crush the rebellion by one powerful blow.  The ardent
spirits among the antislavery men insisted that, slavery having
brought forth the rebellion, this powerful blow should at once be
aimed at slavery.  Both complained that the administration was
spiritless, undecided, and lamentably slow in its proceedings.
Lincoln reasoned otherwise.  The ways of thinking and feeling of
the masses, of the plain people, were constantly present to his
mind.  The masses, the plain people, had to furnish the men for
the fighting, if fighting was to be done.  He believed that the
plain people would be ready to fight when it clearly appeared
necessary, and that they would feel that necessity when they felt
themselves attacked.  He therefore waited until the enemies of
the Union struck the first blow.  As soon as, on the 12th of
April, 1861, the first gun was fired in Charleston harbor on the
Union flag upon Fort Sumter, the call was sounded, and the
Northern people rushed to arms.

Lincoln knew that the plain people were now indeed ready to fight
in defence of the Union, but not yet ready to fight for the
destruction of slavery.  He declared openly that he had a right
to summon the people to fight for the Union, but not to summon
them to fight for the abolition of slavery as a primary object;
and this declaration gave him numberless soldiers for the Union
who at that period would have hesitated to do battle against the
institution of slavery.  For a time he succeeded in rendering
harmless the cry of the partisan opposition that the Republican
administration were perverting the war for the Union into an
"abolition war."  But when he went so far as to countermand the
acts of some generals in the field, looking to the emancipation
of the slaves in the districts covered by their commands, loud
complaints arose from earnest antislavery men, who accused the
President of turning his back upon the antislavery cause.  Many
of these antislavery men will now, after a calm retrospect, be
willing to admit that it would have been a hazardous policy to
endanger, by precipitating a demonstrative fight against slavery,
the success of the struggle for the Union.

Lincoln's views and feelings concerning slavery had not changed.
Those who conversed with him intimately upon the subject at that
period know that he did not expect slavery long to survive the
triumph of the Union, even if it were not immediately destroyed
by the war.  In this he was right.  Had the Union armies achieved
a decisive victory in an early period of the conflict, and had
the seceded States been received back with slavery, the "slave
power" would then have been a defeated power, defeated in an
attempt to carry out its most effective threat.  It would have
lost its prestige.  Its menaces would have been hollow sound, and
ceased to make any one afraid.  It could no longer have hoped to
expand, to maintain an equilibrium in any branch of Congress, and
to control the government.  The victorious free States would have
largely overbalanced it.  It would no longer have been able to
withstand the onset of a hostile age.  It could no longer have
ruled,--and slavery had to rule in order to live.  It would have
lingered for a while, but it would surely have been "in the
course of ultimate extinction."  A prolonged war precipitated the
destruction of slavery; a short war might only have prolonged its
death struggle.  Lincoln saw this clearly; but he saw also that,
in a protracted death struggle, it might still have kept disloyal
sentiments alive, bred distracting commotions, and caused great
mischief to the country.  He therefore hoped that slavery would
not survive the war.

But the question how he could rightfully employ his power to
bring on its speedy destruction was to him not a question of mere
sentiment.  He himself set forth his reasoning upon it, at a
later period, in one of his inimitable letters.  "I am naturally
antislavery," said he.  "If slavery is not wrong, nothing is
wrong.  I cannot remember the time when I did not so think and
feel.  And yet I have never understood that the Presidency
conferred upon me an unrestricted right to act upon that judgment
and feeling.  It was in the oath I took that I would, to the best
of my ability, preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of
the United States.  I could not take the office without taking
the oath.  Nor was it my view that I might take an oath to get
power, and break the oath in using that power.  I understood,
too, that, in ordinary civil administration, this oath even
forbade me practically to indulge my private abstract judgment on
the moral question of slavery.  I did understand, however, also,
that my oath imposed upon me the duty of preserving, to the best
of my ability, by every indispensable means, that government,
that nation, of which the Constitution was the organic law.  I
could not feel that, to the best of my ability, I had even tied
to preserve the Constitution--if, to save slavery, or any minor
matter, I should permit the wreck of government, country, and
Constitution all together."  In other words, if the salvation of
the government, the Constitution, and the Union demanded the
destruction of slavery, he felt it to be not only his right, but
his sworn duty to destroy it.  Its destruction became a necessity
of the war for the Union.

As the war dragged on and disaster followed disaster, the sense
of that necessity steadily grew upon him.  Early in 1862, as some
of his friends well remember, he saw, what Seward seemed not to
see, that to give the war for the Union an antislavery character
was the surest means to prevent the recognition of the Southern
Confederacy as an independent nation by European powers; that,
slavery being abhorred by the moral sense of civilized mankind,
no European government would dare to offer so gross an insult to
the public opinion of its people as openly to favor the creation
of a state founded upon slavery to the prejudice of an existing
nation fighting against slavery.  He saw also that slavery
untouched was to the rebellion an element of power, and that in
order to overcome that power it was necessary to turn it into an
element of weakness.  Still, he felt no assurance that the plain
people were prepared for so radical a measure as the emancipation
of the slaves by act of the government, and he anxiously
considered that, if they were not, this great step might, by
exciting dissension at the North, injure the cause of the Union
in one quarter more than it would help it in another.  He
heartily welcomed an effort made in New York to mould and
stimulate public sentiment on the slavery question by public
meetings boldly pronouncing for emancipation.  At the same time
he himself cautiously advanced with a recommendation, expressed
in a special message to Congress, that the United States should
co-operate with any State which might adopt the gradual
abolishment of slavery, giving such State pecuniary aid to
compensate the former owners of emancipated slaves.  The
discussion was started, and spread rapidly.  Congress adopted the
resolution recommended, and soon went a step farther in passing a
bill to abolish slavery in the District of Columbia.  The plain
people began to look at emancipation on a larger scale as a thing
to be considered seriously by patriotic citizens; and soon
Lincoln thought that the time was ripe, and that the edict of
freedom could be ventured upon without danger of serious
confusion in the Union ranks.

The failure of McClellan's movement upon Richmond increased
immensely the prestige of the enemy.  The need of some great act
to stimulate the vitality of the Union cause seemed to grow daily
more pressing.  On July 21, 1862, Lincoln surprised his cabinet
with the draught of a proclamation declaring free the slaves in
all the States that should be still in rebellion against the
United States on the 1st of January,1863.  As to the matter
itself he announced that he had fully made up his mind; he
invited advice only concerning the form and the time of
publication.  Seward suggested that the proclamation, if then
brought out, amidst disaster and distress, would sound like the
last shriek of a perishing cause.  Lincoln accepted the
suggestion, and the proclamation was postponed.  Another defeat
followed, the second at Bull Run.  But when, after that battle,
the Confederate army, under Lee, crossed the Potomac and invaded
Maryland, Lincoln vowed in his heart that, if the Union army were
now blessed with success, the decree of freedom should surely be
issued.  The victory of Antietam was won on September 17, and the
preliminary Emancipation Proclamation came forth on the a 22d.
It was Lincoln's own resolution and act; but practically it bound
the nation, and permitted no step backward.  In spite of its
limitations, it was the actual abolition of slavery.  Thus he
wrote his name upon the books of history with the title dearest
to his heart, the liberator of the slave.

It is true, the great proclamation, which stamped the war as one
for "union and freedom," did not at once mark the turning of the
tide on the field of military operations.  There were more
disasters, Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville.  But with
Gettysburg and Vicksburg the whole aspect of the war changed.
Step by step, now more slowly, then more rapidly, but with
increasing steadiness, the flag of the Union advanced from field
to field toward the final consummation.  The decree of
emancipation was naturally followed by the enlistment of
emancipated negroes in the Union armies.  This measure had a
anther reaching effect than merely giving the Union armies an
increased supply of men.  The laboring force of the rebellion was
hopelessly disorganized.  The war became like a problem of
arithmetic.  As the Union armies pushed forward, the area from
which the Southern Confederacy could draw recruits and supplies
constantly grew smaller, while the area from which the Union
recruited its strength constantly grew larger; and everywhere,
even within the Southern lines, the Union had its allies.  The
fate of the rebellion was then virtually decided; but it still
required much bloody work to convince the brave warriors who
fought for it that they were really beaten.

Neither did the Emancipation Proclamation forthwith command
universal assent among the people who were loyal to the Union.
There were even signs of a reaction against the administration in
the fall elections of 1862, seemingly justifying the opinion,
entertained by many, that the President had really anticipated
the development of popular feeling.  The cry that the war for the
Union had been turned into an "abolition war" was raised again by
the opposition, and more loudly than ever.  But the good sense
and patriotic instincts of the plain people gradually marshalled
themselves on Lincoln's side, and he lost no opportunity to help
on this process by personal argument and admonition.  There never
has been a President in such constant and active contact with the
public opinion of the country, as there never has been a
President who, while at the head of the government, remained so
near to the people.  Beyond the circle of those who had long
known him the feeling steadily grew that the man in the White
House was "honest Abe Lincoln" still, and that every citizen
might approach him with complaint, expostulation, or advice,
without danger of meeting a rebuff from power-proud authority, or
humiliating condescension; and this privilege was used by so many
and with such unsparing freedom that only superhuman patience
could have endured it all.  There are men now living who would
to-day read with amazement, if not regret, what they ventured to
say or write to him.  But Lincoln repelled no one whom he
believed to speak to him in good faith and with patriotic
purpose.  No good advice would go unheeded.  No candid criticism
would offend him.  No honest opposition, while it might pain him,
would produce a lasting alienation of feeling between him and the
opponent.  It may truly be said that few men in power have ever
been exposed to more daring attempts to direct their course, to
severer censure of their acts, and to more cruel
misrepresentation of their motives: And all this he met with that
good-natured humor peculiarly his own, and with untiring effort
to see the right and to impress it upon those who differed from
him.  The conversations he had and the correspondence he carried
on upon matters of public interest, not only with men in official
position, but with private citizens, were almost unceasing, and
in a large number of public letters, written ostensibly to
meetings, or committees, or persons of importance, he addressed
himself directly to the popular mind.  Most of these letters
stand among the finest monuments of our political literature.
Thus he presented the singular spectacle of a President who, in
the midst of a great civil war, with unprecedented duties
weighing upon him, was constantly in person debating the great
features of his policy with the people.

While in this manner he exercised an ever-increasing influence
upon the popular understanding, his sympathetic nature endeared
him more and more to the popular heart.  In vain did journals and
speakers of the opposition represent him as a lightminded
trifler, who amused himself with frivolous story-telling and
coarse jokes, while the blood of the people was flowing in
streams.  The people knew that the man at the head of affairs, on
whose haggard face the twinkle of humor so frequently changed
into an expression of profoundest sadness, was more than any
other deeply distressed by the suffering he witnessed; that he
felt the pain of every wound that was inflicted on the
battlefield, and the anguish of every woman or child who had lost
husband or father; that whenever he could he was eager to
alleviate sorrow, and that his mercy was never implored in vain.
They looked to him as one who was with them and of them in all
their hopes and fears, their joys and sorrows, who laughed with
them and wept with them; and as his heart was theirs; so their
hearts turned to him.  His popularity was far different from that
of Washington, who was revered with awe, or that of Jackson, the
unconquerable hero, for whom party enthusiasm never grew weary of
shouting.  To Abraham Lincoln the people became bound by a
genuine sentimental attachment.  It was not a matter of respect,
or confidence, or party pride, for this feeling spread far beyond
the boundary lines of his party; it was an affair of the heart,
independent of mere reasoning.  When the soldiers in the field or
their folks at home spoke of "Father Abraham," there was no cant
in it.  They felt that their President was really caring for them
as a father would, and that they could go to him, every one of
them, as they would go to a father, and talk to him of what
troubled them, sure to find a willing ear and tender sympathy.
Thus, their President, and his cause, and his endeavors, and his
success gradually became to them almost matters of family
concern.  And this popularity carried him triumphantly through
the Presidential election of 1864, in spite of an opposition
within his own party which at first seemed very formidable.

Many of the radical antislavery men were never quite satisfied
with Lincoln's ways of meeting the problems of the time.  They
were very earnest and mostly very able men, who had positive
ideas as to "how this rebellion should be put down."  They would
not recognize the necessity of measuring the steps of the
government according to the progress of opinion among the plain
people.  They criticised Lincoln's cautious management as
irresolute, halting, lacking in definite purpose and in energy;
he should not have delayed emancipation so long; he should not
have confided important commands to men of doubtful views as to
slavery; he should have authorized military commanders to set the
slaves free as they went on; he dealt too leniently with
unsuccessful generals; he should have put down all factious
opposition with a strong hand instead of trying to pacify it; he
should have given the people accomplished facts instead of
arguing with them, and so on.  It is true, these criticisms were
not always entirely unfounded.  Lincoln's policy had, with the
virtues of democratic government, some of its weaknesses, which
in the presence of pressing exigencies were apt to deprive
governmental action of the necessary vigor; and his kindness of
heart, his disposition always to respect the feelings of others,
frequently made him recoil from anything like severity, even when
severity was urgently called for.  But many of his radical
critics have since then revised their judgment sufficiently to
admit that Lincoln's policy was, on the whole, the wisest and
safest; that a policy of heroic methods, while it has sometimes
accomplished great results, could in a democracy like ours be
maintained only by constant success; that it would have quickly
broken down under the weight of disaster; that it might have been
successful from the start, had the Union, at the beginning of the
conflict, had its Grants and Shermans and Sheridans, its
Farraguts and Porters, fully matured at the head of its forces;
but that, as the great commanders had to be evolved slowly from
the developments of the war, constant success could not be
counted upon, and it was best to follow a policy which was in
friendly contact with the popular force, and therefore more fit
to stand trial of misfortune on the battlefield.  But at that
period they thought differently, and their dissatisfaction with
Lincoln's doings was greatly increased by the steps he took
toward the reconstruction of rebel States then partially in
possession of the Union forces.

In December, 1863, Lincoln issued an amnesty proclamation,
offering pardon to all implicated in the rebellion, with certain
specified exceptions, on condition of their taking and
maintaining an oath to support the Constitution and obey the laws
of the United States and the proclamations of the President with
regard to slaves; and also promising that when, in any of the
rebel States, a number of citizens equal to one tenth of the
voters in 1860 should re-establish a state government in
conformity with the oath above mentioned, such should be
recognized by the Executive as the true government of the State.
The proclamation seemed at first to be received with general
favor.  But soon another scheme of reconstruction, much more
stringent in its provisions, was put forward in the House of
Representatives by Henry Winter Davis.  Benjamin Wade championed
it in the Senate.  It passed in the closing moments of the
session in July, 1864, and Lincoln, instead of making it a law by
his signature, embodied the text of it in a proclamation as a
plan of reconstruction worthy of being earnestly considered.  The
differences of opinion concerning this subject had only
intensified the feeling against Lincoln which had long been
nursed among the radicals, and some of them openly declared their
purpose of resisting his re-election to the Presidency.  Similar
sentiments were manifested by the advanced antislavery men of
Missouri, who, in their hot faction-fight with the
"conservatives" of that State, had not received from Lincoln the
active support they demanded.  Still another class of Union men,
mainly in the East, gravely shook their heads when considering
the question whether Lincoln should be re-elected.  They were
those who cherished in their minds an ideal of statesmanship and
of personal bearing in high office with which, in their opinion,
Lincoln's individuality was much out of accord.  They were
shocked when they heard him cap an argument upon grave affairs of
state with a story about "a man out in Sangamon County,"--a
story, to be sure, strikingly clinching his point, but sadly
lacking in dignity.  They could not understand the man who was
capable, in opening a cabinet meeting, of reading to his
secretaries a funny chapter from a recent book of Artemus Ward,
with which in an unoccupied moment he had relieved his care-
burdened mind, and who then solemnly informed the executive
council that he had vowed in his heart to issue a proclamation
emancipating the slaves as soon as God blessed the Union arms
with another victory.  They were alarmed at the weakness of a
President who would indeed resist the urgent remonstrances of
statesmen against his policy, but could not resist the prayer of
an old woman for the pardon of a soldier who was sentenced to be
shot for desertion.  Such men, mostly sincere and ardent
patriots, not only wished, but earnestly set to work, to prevent
Lincoln's renomination.  Not a few of them actually believed, in
1863, that, if the national convention of the Union party were
held then, Lincoln would not be supported by the delegation of a
single State.  But when the convention met at Baltimore, in June,
1864, the voice of the people was heard.  On the first ballot
Lincoln received the votes of the delegations from all the States
except Missouri; and even the Missourians turned over their votes
to him before the result of the ballot was declared.

But even after his renomination the opposition to Lincoln within
the ranks of the Union party did not subside.  A convention,
called by the dissatisfied radicals in Missouri, and favored by
men of a similar way of thinking in other States, had been held
already in May, and had nominated as its candidate for the
Presidency General Fremont.  He, indeed, did not attract a strong
following, but opposition movements from different quarters
appeared more formidable.  Henry Winter Davis and Benjamin Wade
assailed Lincoln in a flaming manifesto.  Other Union men, of
undoubted patriotism and high standing, persuaded themselves, and
sought to persuade the people, that Lincoln's renomination was
ill advised and dangerous to the Union cause.  As the Democrats
had put off their convention until the 29th of August, the Union
party had, during the larger part of the summer, no opposing
candidate and platform to attack, and the political campaign
languished.  Neither were the tidings from the theatre of war of
a cheering character.  The terrible losses suffered by Grant's
army in the battles of the Wilderness spread general gloom.
Sherman seemed for a while to be in a precarious position before
Atlanta.  The opposition to Lincoln within the Union party grew
louder in its complaints and discouraging predictions.  Earnest
demands were heard that his candidacy should be withdrawn.
Lincoln himself, not knowing how strongly the masses were
attached to him, was haunted by dark forebodings of defeat.  Then
the scene suddenly changed as if by magic.

The Democrats, in their national convention, declared the war a
failure, demanded, substantially, peace at any price, and
nominated on such a platform General McClellan as their
candidate.  Their convention had hardly adjourned when the
capture of Atlanta gave a new aspect to the military situation.
It was like a sun-ray bursting through a dark cloud.  The rank
and file of the Union party rose with rapidly growing enthusiasm.
The song "We are coming, Father Abraham, three hundred thousand
strong," resounded all over the land.  Long before the decisive
day arrived, the result was beyond doubt, and Lincoln was re-
elected President by overwhelming majorities.  The election over
even his severest critics found themselves forced to admit that
Lincoln was the only possible candidate for the Union party in
1864, and that neither political combinations nor campaign
speeches, nor even victories in the field, were needed to insure
his success.  The plain people had all the while been satisfied
with Abraham Lincoln: they confided in him; they loved him; they
felt themselves near to him; they saw personified in him the
cause of Union and freedom; and they went to the ballot-box for
him in their strength.

The hour of triumph called out the characteristic impulses of his
nature.  The opposition within the Union party had stung him to
the quick.  Now he had his opponents before him, baffled and
humiliated.  Not a moment did he lose to stretch out the hand of
friendship to all.  " Now that the election is over," he said, in
response to a serenade, "may not all, having a common interest,
reunite in a common effort to save our common country? For my own
part, I have striven, and will strive, to place no obstacle in
the way.  So long as I have been here I have not willingly
planted a thorn in any man's bosom.  While I am deeply sensible
to the high compliment of a re-election, it adds nothing to my
satisfaction that any other man may be pained or disappointed by
the result.  May I ask those who were with me to join with me in
the same spirit toward those who were against me?"  This was
Abraham Lincoln's character as tested in the furnace of
prosperity.

The war was virtually decided, but not yet ended.  Sherman was
irresistibly carrying the Union flag through the South.  Grant
had his iron hand upon the ramparts of Richmond.  The days of the
Confederacy were evidently numbered.  Only the last blow remained
to be struck.  Then Lincoln's second inauguration came, and with
it his second inaugural address.  Lincoln's famous "Gettysburg
speech " has been much and justly admired.  But far greater, as
well as far more characteristic, was that inaugural in which he
poured out the whole devotion and tenderness of his great soul.
It had all the solemnity of a father's last admonition and
blessing to his children before he lay down to die.  These were
its closing words: "Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that
this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away.  Yet if God
wills that it continue until all the wealth piled up by the
bondman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be
sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be
paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand
years ago, so still it must be said, `The judgments of the Lord
are true and righteous altogether.'  With malice toward none,
with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us
to see the right, let us strive to finish the work we are in; to
bind up the nation's wounds; to care for him who shall have borne
the battle, and for his widow and his orphan; to do all which may
achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and
with all nations."

This was like a sacred poem.  No American President had ever
spoken words like these to the American people.  America never
had a President who found such words in the depth of his heart.

Now followed the closing scenes of the war.  The Southern armies
fought bravely to the last, but all in vain.  Richmond fell.
Lincoln himself entered the city on foot, accompanied only by a
few officers and a squad of sailors who had rowed him ashore from
the flotilla in the James River, a negro picked up on the way
serving as a guide.  Never had the world seen a more modest
conqueror and a more characteristic triumphal procession, no army
with banners and drums, only a throng of those who had been
slaves, hastily run together, escorting the victorious chief into
the capital of the vanquished foe.  We are told that they pressed
around him, kissed his hands and his garments, and shouted and
danced for joy, while tears ran down the President's care-
furrowed cheeks.

A few days more brought the surrender of Lee's army, and peace
was assured.  The people of the North were wild with joy.
Everywhere festive guns were booming, bells pealing, the churches
ringing with thanksgivings, and jubilant multitudes thronging the
thoroughfares, when suddenly the news flashed over the land that
Abraham Lincoln had been murdered.  The people were stunned by
the blow.  Then a wail of sorrow went up such as America had
never heard before.  Thousands of Northern households grieved as
if they had lost their dearest member.  Many a Southern man cried
out in his heart that his people had been robbed of their best
friend in their humiliation and distress, when Abraham Lincoln
was struck down.  It was as if the tender affection which his
countrymen bore him had inspired all nations with a common
sentiment.  All civilized mankind stood mourning around the
coffin of the dead President.  Many of those, here and abroad,
who not long before had ridiculed and reviled him were among the
first to hasten on with their flowers of eulogy, and in that
universal chorus of lamentation and praise there was not a voice
that did not tremble with genuine emotion.  Never since
Washington's death had there been such unanimity of judgment as
to a man's virtues and greatness; and even Washington's death,
although his name was held in greater reverence, did not touch so
sympathetic a chord in the people's hearts.

Nor can it be said that this was owing to the tragic character of
Lincoln's end.  It is true, the death of this gentlest and most
merciful of rulers by the hand of a mad fanatic was well apt to
exalt him beyond his merits in the estimation of those who loved
him, and to make his renown the object of peculiarly tender
solicitude.  But it is also true that the verdict pronounced upon
him in those days has been affected little by time, and that
historical inquiry has served rather to increase than to lessen
the appreciation of his virtues, his abilities, his services.
Giving the fullest measure of credit to his great ministers,--to
Seward for his conduct of foreign affairs, to Chase for the
management of the finances under terrible difficulties, to
Stanton for the performance of his tremendous task as war
secretary,--and readily acknowledging that without the skill and
fortitude of the great commanders, and the heroism of the
soldiers and sailors under them, success could not have been
achieved, the historian still finds that Lincoln's judgment and
will were by no means governed by those around him; that the most
important steps were owing to his initiative; that his was the
deciding and directing mind; and that it was pre-eminently he
whose sagacity and whose character enlisted for the
administration in its struggles the countenance, the sympathy,
and the support of the people.  It is found, even, that his
judgment on military matters was astonishingly acute, and that
the advice and instructions he gave to the generals commanding in
the field would not seldom have done honor to the ablest of them.
History, therefore, without overlooking, or palliating, or
excusing any of his shortcomings or mistakes, continues to place
him foremost among the saviours of the Union and the liberators
of the slave.  More than that, it awards to him the merit of
having accomplished what but few political philosophers would
have recognized as possible,--of leading the republic through
four years of furious civil conflict without any serious
detriment to its free institutions.

He was, indeed, while President, violently denounced by the
opposition as a tyrant and a usurper, for having gone beyond his
constitutional powers in authorizing or permitting the temporary
suppression of newspapers, and in wantonly suspending the writ of
habeas corpus and resorting to arbitrary arrests.  Nobody should
be blamed who, when such things are done, in good faith and from
patriotic motives protests against them.  In a republic,
arbitrary stretches of power, even when demanded by necessity,
should never be permitted to pass without a protest on the one
hand, and without an apology on the other.  It is well they did
not so pass during our civil war.  That arbitrary measures were
resorted to is true.  That they were resorted to most sparingly,
and only when the government thought them absolutely required by
the safety of the republic, will now hardly be denied.  But
certain it is that the history of the world does not furnish a
single example of a government passing through so tremendous a
crisis as our civil war was with so small a record of arbitrary
acts, and so little interference with the ordinary course of law
outside the field of military operations.  No American President
ever wielded such power as that which was thrust into Lincoln's
hands.  It is to be hoped that no American President ever will
have to be entrusted with such power again.  But no man was ever
entrusted with it to whom its seductions were less dangerous than
they proved to be to Abraham Lincoln.  With scrupulous care he
endeavored, even under the most trying circumstances, to remain
strictly within the constitutional limitations of his authority;
and whenever the boundary became indistinct, or when the dangers
of the situation forced him to cross it, he was equally careful
to mark his acts as exceptional measures, justifiable only by the
imperative necessities of the civil war, so that they might not
pass into history as precedents for similar acts in time of
peace.  It is an unquestionable fact that during the
reconstruction period which followed the war, more things were
done capable of serving as dangerous precedents than during the
war itself.  Thus it may truly be said of him not only that under
his guidance the republic was saved from disruption and the
country was purified of the blot of slavery, but that, during the
stormiest and most perilous crisis in our history, he so
conducted the government and so wielded his almost dictatorial
power as to leave essentially intact our free institutions in all
things that concern the rights and liberties of the citizens.  He
understood well the nature of the problem.  In his first message
to Congress he defined it in admirably pointed language: "Must a
government be of necessity too strong for the liberties of its
own people, or too weak to maintain its own existence? Is there
in all republics this inherent weakness?" This question he
answered in the name of the great American republic, as no man
could have answered it better, with a triumphant  "No...."

It has been said that Abraham Lincoln died at the right moment
for his fame.  However that may be, he had, at the time of his
death, certainly not exhausted his usefulness to his country.  He
was probably the only man who could have guided the nation
through the perplexities of the reconstruction period in such a
manner as to prevent in the work of peace the revival of the
passions of the war.  He would indeed not have escaped serious
controversy as to details of policy; but he could have weathered
it far better than any other statesman of his time, for his
prestige with the active politicians had been immensely
strengthened by his triumphant re-election; and, what is more
important, he would have been supported by the confidence of the
victorious Northern people that he would do all to secure the
safety of the Union and the rights of the emancipated negro, and
at the same time by the confidence of the defeated Southern
people that nothing would be done by him from motives of
vindictiveness, or of unreasoning fanaticism, or of a selfish
party spirit.  "With malice toward none, with charity for all,"
the foremost of the victors would have personified in himself the
genius of reconciliation.

He might have rendered the country a great service in another
direction.  A few days after the fall of Richmond, he pointed out
to a friend the crowd of office-seekers besieging his door.
"Look at that," said he.  " Now we have conquered the rebellion,
but here you see something that may become more dangerous to this
republic than the rebellion itself."  It is true, Lincoln as
President did not profess what we now call civil service reform
principles.  He used the patronage of the government in many
cases avowedly to reward party work, in many others to form
combinations and to produce political effects advantageous to the
Union cause, and in still others simply to put the right man into
the right place.  But in his endeavors to strengthen the Union
cause, and in his search for able and useful men for public
duties, he frequently went beyond the limits of his party, and
gradually accustomed himself to the thought that, while party
service had its value, considerations of the public interest
were, as to appointments to office, of far greater consequence.
Moreover, there had been such a mingling of different political
elements in support of the Union during the civil war that
Lincoln, standing at the head of that temporarily united motley
mass, hardly felt himself, in the narrow sense of the term, a
party man.  And as he became strongly impressed with the dangers
brought upon the republic by the use of public offices as party
spoils, it is by no means improbable that, had he survived the
all-absorbing crisis and found time to turn to other objects, one
of the most important reforms of later days would have been
pioneered by his powerful authority.  This was not to be.  But
the measure of his achievements was full enough for immortality.

To the younger generation Abraham Lincoln has already become a
half-mythical figure, which, in the haze of historic distance,
grows to more and more heroic proportions, but also loses in
distinctness of outline and feature.  This is indeed the common
lot of popular heroes; but the Lincoln legend will be more than
ordinarily apt to become fanciful, as his individuality,
assembling seemingly incongruous qualities and forces in a
character at the same time grand and most lovable, was so unique,
and his career so abounding in startling contrasts.  As the state
of society in which Abraham Lincoln grew up passes away, the
world will read with increasing wonder of the man who, not only
of the humblest origin, but remaining the simplest and most
unpretending of citizens, was raised to a position of power
unprecedented in our history; who was the gentlest and most
peace-loving of mortals, unable to see any creature suffer
without a pang in his own breast, and suddenly found himself
called to conduct the greatest and bloodiest of our wars; who
wielded the power of government when stern resolution and
relentless force were the order of the day and then won and ruled
the popular mind and heart by the tender sympathies of his
nature; who was a cautious conservative by temperament and mental
habit, and led the most sudden and sweeping social revolution of
our time; who, preserving his homely speech and rustic manner
even in the most conspicuous position of that period, drew upon
himself the scoffs of polite society, and then thrilled the soul
of mankind with utterances of wonderful beauty and grandeur; who,
in his heart the best friend of the defeated South, was murdered
because a crazy fanatic took him for its most cruel enemy; who,
while in power, was beyond measure lampooned and maligned by
sectional passion and an excited party spirit, and around whose
bier friend and foe gathered to praise him which they have since
never ceased to do--as one of the greatest of Americans and the
best of men.






ABRAHAM LINCOLN

BY JOSEPH H. CHOATE


[This Address was delivered before the Edinburgh Philosophical
Institution, November 13, 1900.  It is included in this set with
the courteous permission of the author and of Messrs. Thomas Y.
Crowell & Company.]


ABRAHAM LINCOLN.

When you asked me to deliver the Inaugural Address on this
occasion, I recognized that I owed this compliment to the fact
that I was the official representative of America, and in
selecting a subject I ventured to think that I might interest you
for an hour in a brief study in popular government, as
illustrated by the life of the most American of all Americans.  I
therefore offer no apology for asking your attention to Abraham
Lincoln--to his unique character and the part he bore in two
important achievements of modern history: the preservation of the
integrity of the American Union and the emancipation of the
colored race.

During his brief term of power he was probably the object of more
abuse, vilification, and ridicule than any other man in the
world; but when he fell by the hand of an assassin, at the very
moment of his stupendous victory, all the nations of the earth
vied with one another in paying homage to his character, and the
thirty-five years that have since elapsed have established his
place in history as one of the great benefactors not of his own
country alone, but of the human race.

One of many noble utterances upon the occasion of his death was
that in which 'Punch' made its magnanimous recantation of the
spirit with which it had pursued him:


     "Beside this corpse that bears for winding sheet
     The stars and stripes he lived to rear anew,
     Between the mourners at his head and feet,
     Say, scurrile jester, is there room for you?

                    ...................

     "Yes, he had lived to shame me from my sneer,
     To lame my pencil, and confute my pen
     To make me own this hind--of princes peer,
     This rail-splitter--a true born king of men."


Fiction can furnish no match for the romance of his life, and
biography will be searched in vain for such startling
vicissitudes of fortune, so great power and glory won out of such
humble beginnings and adverse circumstances.

Doubtless you are all familiar with the salient points of his
extraordinary career.  In the zenith of his fame he was the wise,
patient, courageous, successful ruler of men; exercising more
power than any monarch of his time, not for himself, but for the
good of the people who had placed it in his hands; commander-in-
chief of a vast military power, which waged with ultimate success
the greatest war of the century; the triumphant champion of
popular government, the deliverer of four millions of his fellow-
men from bondage; honored by mankind as Statesman, President, and
Liberator.

Let us glance now at the first half of the brief life of which
this was the glorious and happy consummation.  Nothing could be
more squalid and miserable than the home in which Abraham Lincoln
was born--a one-roomed cabin without floor or window in what was
then the wilderness of Kentucky, in the heart of that frontier
life which swiftly moved westward from the Alleghanies to the
Mississippi, always in advance of schools and churches, of books
and money, of railroads and newspapers, of all things which are
generally regarded as the comforts and even necessaries of life.
His father, ignorant, needy, and thriftless, content if he could
keep soul and body together for himself and his family, was ever
seeking, without success, to better his unhappy condition by
moving on from one such scene of dreary desolation to another.
The rude society which surrounded them was not much better.  The
struggle for existence was hard, and absorbed all their energies.
They were fighting the forest, the wild beast, and the retreating
savage.  From the time when he could barely handle tools until he
attained his majority, Lincoln's life was that of a simple farm
laborer, poorly clad, housed, and fed, at work either on his
father's wretched farm or hired out to neighboring farmers.  But
in spite, or perhaps by means, of this rude environment, he grew
to be a stalwart giant, reaching six feet four at nineteen, and
fabulous stories are told of his feats of strength.  With the
growth of this mighty frame began that strange education which in
his ripening years was to qualify him for the great destiny that
awaited him, and the development of those mental faculties and
moral endowments which, by the time he reached middle life, were
to make him the sagacious, patient, and triumphant leader of a
great nation in the crisis of its fate.  His whole schooling,
obtained during such odd times as could be spared from grinding
labor, did not amount in all to as much as one year, and the
quality of the teaching was of the lowest possible grade,
including only the elements of reading, writing, and ciphering.
But out of these simple elements, when rightly used by the right
man, education is achieved, and Lincoln knew how to use them.  As
so often happens, he seemed to take warning from his father's
unfortunate example.  Untiring industry, an insatiable thirst for
knowledge, and an ever-growing desire to rise above his
surroundings, were early manifestations of his character.

Books were almost unknown in that community, but the Bible was in
every house, and somehow or other Pilgrim's Progress, AEsop's
Fables, a History of the United States, and a Life of Washington
fell into his hands.  He trudged on foot many miles through the
wilderness to borrow an English Grammar, and is said to have
devoured greedily the contents of the Statutes of Indiana that
fell in his way.  These few volumes he read and reread--and his
power of assimilation was great.  To be shut in with a few books
and to master them thoroughly sometimes does more for the
development of character than freedom to range at large, in a
cursory and indiscriminate way, through wide domains of
literature.  This youth's mind, at any rate, was thoroughly
saturated with Biblical knowledge and Biblical language, which,
in after life, he used with great readiness and effect.  But it
was the constant use of the little knowledge which he had that
developed and exercised his mental powers.  After the hard day's
work was done, while others slept, he toiled on, always reading
or writing.  From an early age he did his own thinking and made
up his own mind--invaluable traits in the future President.
Paper was such a scarce commodity that, by the evening firelight,
he would write and cipher on the back of a wooden shovel, and
then shave it off to make room for more.  By and by, as he
approached manhood, he began speaking in the rude gatherings of
the neighborhood, and so laid the foundation of that art of
persuading his fellow-men which was one rich result of his
education, and one great secret of his subsequent success.

Accustomed as we are in these days of steam and telegraphs to
have every intelligent boy survey the whole world each morning
before breakfast, and inform himself as to what is going on in
every nation, it is hardly possible to conceive how benighted and
isolated was the condition of the community at Pigeon Creek in
Indiana, of which the family of Lincoln's father formed a part,
or how eagerly an ambitious and high-spirited boy, such as he,
must have yearned to escape.  The first glimpse that he ever got
of any world beyond the narrow confines of his home was in 1828,
at the age of nineteen, when a neighbor employed him to accompany
his son down the river to New Orleans to dispose of a flatboat of
produce--a commission which he discharged with great success.

Shortly after his return from this his first excursion into the
outer world, his father, tired of failure in Indiana, packed his
family and all his worldly goods into a single wagon drawn by two
yoke of oxen, and after a fourteen days' tramp through the
wilderness, pitched his camp once more, in Illinois.  Here
Abraham, having come of age and being now his own master,
rendered the last service of his minority by ploughing the
fifteen-acre lot and splitting from the tall walnut trees of the
primeval forest enough rails to surround the little clearing with
a fence.  Such was the meagre outfit of this coming leader of
men, at the age when the future British Prime Minister or
statesman emerges from the university as a double first or senior
wrangler, with every advantage that high training and broad
culture and association with the wisest and the best of men and
women can give, and enters upon some form of public service on
the road to usefulness and honor, the University course being
only the first stage of the public training.  So Lincoln, at
twenty-one, had just begun his preparation for the public life to
which he soon began to aspire.  For some years yet he must
continue to earn his daily bread by the sweat of his brow, having
absolutely no means, no home, no friend to consult.  More farm
work as a hired hand, a clerkship in a village store, the running
of a mill, another trip to New Orleans on a flatboat of his own
contriving, a pilot's berth on the river--these were the means by
which he subsisted until, in the summer of 1832, when he was
twenty-three years of age, an event occurred which gave him
public recognition.

The Black Hawk war broke out, and, the Governor of Illinois
calling for volunteers to repel the band of savages whose leader
bore that name, Lincoln enlisted and was elected captain by his
comrades, among whom he had already established his supremacy by
signal feats of strength and more than one successful single
combat.  During the brief hostilities he was engaged in no battle
and won no military glory, but his local leadership was
established.  The same year he offered himself as a candidate for
the Legislature of Illinois, but failed at the polls.  Yet his
vast popularity with those who knew him was manifest.  The
district consisted of several counties, but the unanimous vote of
the people of his own county was for Lincoln.  Another
unsuccessful attempt at store-keeping was followed by better luck
at surveying, until his horse and instruments were levied upon
under execution for the debts of his business adventure.

I have been thus detailed in sketching his early years because
upon these strange foundations the structure of his great fame
and service was built.  In the place of a school and university
training fortune substituted these trials, hardships, and
struggles as a preparation for the great work which he had to do.
It turned out to be exactly what the emergency required.  Ten
years instead at the public school and the university certainly
never could have fitted this man for the unique work which was to
be thrown upon him.  Some other Moses would have had to lead us
to our Jordan, to the sight of our promised land of liberty.

At the age of twenty-five he became a member of the Legislature
of Illinois, and so continued for eight years, and, in the
meantime, qualified himself by reading such law books as he could
borrow at random--for he was too poor to buy any to be called to
the Bar.  For his second quarter of a century--during which a
single term in Congress introduced him into the arena of national
questions--he gave himself up to law and politics.  In spite of
his soaring ambition, his two years in Congress gave him no
premonition of the great destiny that awaited him,--and at its
close, in 1849, we find him an unsuccessful applicant to the
President for appointment as Commissioner of the General Land
Office--a purely administrative bureau; a fortunate escape for
himself and for his country.  Year by year his knowledge and
power, his experience and reputation extended, and his mental
faculties seemed to grow by what they fed on.  His power of
persuasion, which had always been marked, was developed to an
extraordinary degree, now that he became engaged in congenial
questions and subjects.  Little by little he rose to prominence
at the Bar, and became the most effective public speaker in the
West.  Not that he possessed any of the graces of the orator; but
his logic was invincible, and his clearness and force of
statement impressed upon his hearers the convictions of his
honest mind, while his broad sympathies and sparkling and genial
humor made him a universal favorite as far and as fast as his
acquaintance extended.

These twenty years that elapsed from the time of his
establishment as a lawyer and legislator in Springfield, the new
capital of Illinois, furnished a fitting theatre for the
development and display of his great faculties, and, with his new
and enlarged opportunities, he obviously grew in mental stature
in this second period of his career, as if to compensate for the
absolute lack of advantages under which he had suffered in youth.
As his powers enlarged, his reputation extended, for he was
always before the people, felt a warm sympathy with all that
concerned them, took a zealous part in the discussion of every
public question, and made his personal influence ever more widely
and deeply felt.

My, brethren of the legal profession will naturally ask me, how
could this rough backwoodsman, whose youth had been spent in the
forest or on the farm and the flatboat, without culture or
training, education or study, by the random reading, on the wing,
of a few miscellaneous law books, become a learned and
accomplished lawyer?  Well, he never did.  He never would have
earned his salt as a 'Writer' for the 'Signet', nor have won a
place as advocate in the Court of Session, where the technique of
the profession has reached its highest perfection, and centuries
of learning and precedent are involved in the equipment of a
lawyer.  Dr. Holmes, when asked by an anxious young mother, "When
should the education of a child begin?" replied, "Madam, at least
two centuries before it is born!" and so I am sure it is with the
Scots lawyer.

But not so in Illinois in 1840.  Between i83o and x88o its
population increased twenty-fold, and when Lincoln began
practising law in Springfield in 1837, life in Illinois was very
crude and simple, and so were the courts and the administration
of justice.  Books and libraries were scarce.  But the people
loved justice, upheld the law, and followed the courts, and soon
found their favorites among the advocates.  The fundamental
principles of the common law, as set forth by Blackstone and
Chitty, were not so difficult to acquire; and brains, common
sense, force of character, tenacity of purpose, ready wit and
power of speech did the rest, and supplied all the deficiencies
of learning.

The lawsuits of those days were extremely simple, and the
principles of natural justice were mainly relied on to dispose of
them at the Bar and on the Bench, without resort to technical
learning.  Railroads, corporations absorbing the chief business
of the community, combined and inherited wealth, with all the
subtle and intricate questions they breed, had not yet come in--
and so the professional agents and the equipment which they
require were not needed.  But there were many highly educated and
powerful men at the Bar of Illinois, even in those early days,
whom the spirit of enterprise had carried there in search of fame
and fortune.  It was by constant contact and conflict with these
that Lincoln acquired professional strength and skill.  Every
community and every age creates its own Bar, entirely adequate
for its present uses and necessities.  So in Illinois, as the
population and wealth of the State kept on doubling and
quadrupling, its Bar presented a growing abundance of learning
and science and technical skill.  The early practitioners grew
with its growth and mastered the requisite knowledge.  Chicago
soon grew to be one of the largest and richest and certainly the
most intensely active city on the continent, and if any of my
professional friends here had gone there in Lincoln's later
years, to try or argue a cause, or transact other business, with
any idea that Edinburgh or London had a monopoly of legal
learning, science, or subtlety, they would certainly have found
their mistake.

In those early days in the West, every lawyer, especially every
court lawyer, was necessarily a politician, constantly engaged in
the public discussion of the many questions evolved from the
rapid development of town, county, State, and Federal affairs.
Then and there, in this regard, public discussion supplied the
place which the universal activity of the press has since
monopolized, and the public speaker who, by clearness, force,
earnestness, and wit; could make himself felt on the questions of
the day would rapidly come to the front.  In the absence of that
immense variety of popular entertainments which now feed the
public taste and appetite, the people found their chief amusement
in frequenting the courts and public and political assemblies.
In either place, he who impressed, entertained, and amused them
most was the hero of the hour.  They did not discriminate very
carefully between the eloquence of the forum and the eloquence of
the hustings.  Human nature ruled in both alike, and he who was
the most effective speaker in a political harangue was often
retained as most likely to win in a cause to be tried or argued.
And I have no doubt in this way many retainers came to Lincoln.
Fees, money in any form, had no charms for him--in his eager
pursuit of fame he could not afford to make money.  He was
ambitious to distinguish himself by some great service to
mankind, and this ambition for fame and real public service left
no room for avarice in his composition. However much he earned,
he seems to have ended every year hardly richer than he began it,
and yet, as the years passed, fees came to him freely.  One of
L 1,000 is recorded--a very large professional fee at that time,
even in any part of America, the paradise of lawyers.  I lay
great stress on Lincoln's career as a lawyer--much more than his
biographers do because in America a state of things exists wholly
different from that which prevails in Great Britain.  The
profession of the law always has been and is to this day the
principal avenue to public life; and I am sure that his training
and experience in the courts had much to do with the development
of those forces of intellect and character which he soon
displayed on a broader arena.

It was in political controversy, of course, that he acquired his
wide reputation, and made his deep and lasting impression upon
the people of what had now become the powerful State of Illinois,
and upon the people of the Great West, to whom the political
power and control of the United States were already surely and
swiftly passing from the older Eastern States.  It was this
reputation and this impression, and the familiar knowledge of his
character which had come to them from his local leadership, that
happily inspired the people of the West to present him as their
candidate, and to press him upon the Republican convention of
1860 as the fit and necessary leader in the struggle for life
which was before the nation.

That struggle, as you all know, arose out of the terrible
question of slavery--and I must trust to your general knowledge
of the history of that question to make intelligible the attitude
and leadership of Lincoln as the champion of the hosts of freedom
in the final contest.  Negro slavery had been firmly established
in the Southern States from an early period of their history.  In
1619, the year before the Mayflower landed our Pilgrim Fathers
upon Plymouth Rock, a Dutch ship had discharged a cargo of
African slaves at Jamestown in Virginia: All through the colonial
period their importation had continued.  A few had found their
way into the Northern States, but none of them in sufficient
numbers to constitute danger or to afford a basis for political
power.  At the time of the adoption of the Federal Constitution,
there is no doubt that the principal members of the convention
not only condemned slavery as a moral, social, and political
evil, but believed that by the suppression of the slave trade it
was in the course of gradual extinction in the South, as it
certainly was in the North.  Washington, in his will, provided
for the emancipation of his own slaves, and said to Jefferson
that it "was among his first wishes to see some plan adopted by
which slavery in his country might be abolished."  Jefferson
said, referring to the institution: "I tremble for my country
when I think that God is just; that His justice cannot sleep
forever,"--and Franklin, Adams, Hamilton, and Patrick Henry were
all utterly opposed to it.  But it was made the subject of a
fatal compromise in the Federal Constitution, whereby its
existence was recognized in the States as a basis of
representation, the prohibition of the importation of slaves was
postponed for twenty years, and the return of fugitive slaves
provided for.  But no imminent danger was apprehended from it
till, by the invention of the cotton gin in 1792, cotton culture
by negro labor became at once and forever the leading industry of
the South, and gave a new impetus to the importation of slaves,
so that in 1808, when the constitutional prohibition took effect,
their numbers had vastly increased.  From that time forward
slavery became the basis of a great political power, and the
Southern States, under all circumstances and at every
opportunity, carried on a brave and unrelenting struggle for its
maintenance and extension.

The conscience of the North was slow to rise against it, though
bitter controversies from time to time took place.  The Southern
leaders threatened disunion if their demands were not complied
with.  To save the Union, compromise after compromise was made,
but each one in the end was broken.  The Missouri Compromise,
made in 1820 upon the occasion of the admission of Missouri into
the Union as a slave State, whereby, in consideration of such
admission, slavery was forever excluded from the Northwest
Territory, was ruthlessly repealed in 1854, by a Congress elected
in the interests of the slave power, the intent being to force
slavery into that vast territory which had so long been dedicated
to freedom.  This challenge at last aroused the slumbering
conscience and passion of the North, and led to the formation of
the Republican party for the avowed purpose of preventing, by
constitutional methods, the further extension of slavery.

In its first campaign, in 1856, though it failed to elect its
candidates; it received a surprising vote and carried many of the
States.  No one could any longer doubt that the North had made up
its mind that no threats of disunion should deter it from
pressing its cherished purpose and performing its long neglected
duty.  From the outset, Lincoln was one of the most active and
effective leaders and speakers of the new party, and the great
debates between Lincoln and Douglas in 1858, as the respective
champions of the restriction and extension of slavery, attracted
the attention of the whole country.  Lincoln's powerful arguments
carried conviction everywhere.  His moral nature was thoroughly
aroused his conscience was stirred to the quick.  Unless slavery
was wrong, nothing was wrong.  Was each man, of whatever color,
entitled to the fruits of his own labor, or could one man live in
idle luxury by the sweat of another's brow, whose skin was
darker?  He was an implicit believer in that principle of the
Declaration of Independence that all men are vested with certain
inalienable rights the equal rights to life, liberty, and the
pursuit of happiness.  On this doctrine he staked his case and
carried it.  We have time only for one or two sentences in which
he struck the keynote of the contest

"The real issue in this country is the eternal struggle between
these two principles--right and wrong--throughout the world.
They are the two principles that have stood face to face from the
beginning of time, and will ever continue to struggle.  The one
is the common right of humanity, and the other the divine right
of kings.  It is the same principle in whatever shape it develops
itself.  It is the same spirit that says, "You work and toil and
earn bread and I'll eat it."

He foresaw with unerring vision that the conflict was inevitable
and irrepressible--that one or the other, the right or the wrong,
freedom or slavery, must ultimately prevail and wholly prevail,
throughout the country; and this was the principle that carried
the war, once begun, to a finish.

One sentence of his is immortal:

"Under the operation of the policy of compromise, the slavery
agitation has not only not ceased, but has constantly augmented.
In my opinion it will not cease until a crisis shall have been
reached and passed.  'A house divided against itself cannot
stand.' I believe this government cannot endure permanently half
slave and half free.  I do not expect the Union to be dissolved.
I do not expect the house to fall, but I do expect it will cease
to be divided.  It will become all one thing or all the other;
either the opponents of slavery will arrest the further spread of
it, and place it where the public mind shall rest in the belief
that it is in the course of ultimate extinction, or its advocates
will push it forward till it shall become alike lawful in all the
States, old as well as new, North as well as South."

During the entire decade from 1850 to 1860 the agitation of the
slavery question was at the boiling point, and events which have
become historical continually indicated the near approach of the
overwhelming storm.  No sooner had the Compromise Acts of 1850
resulted in a temporary peace, which everybody said must be final
and perpetual, than new outbreaks came.  The forcible carrying
away of fugitive slaves by Federal troops from Boston agitated
that ancient stronghold of freedom to its foundations.  The
publication of Uncle Tom's Cabin, which truly exposed the
frightful possibilities of the slave system; the reckless
attempts by force and fraud to establish it in Kansas against the
will of the vast majority of the settlers; the beating of Summer
in the Senate Chamber for words spoken in debate; the Dred Scott
decision in the Supreme Court, which made the nation realize that
the slave power had at last reached the fountain of Federal
justice; and finally the execution of John Brown, for his wild
raid into Virginia, to invite the slaves to rally to the standard
of freedom which he unfurled:--all these events tend to
illustrate and confirm Lincoln's contention that the nation could
not permanently continue half slave and half free, but must
become all one thing or all the other.  When John Brown lay under
sentence of death he declared that now he was sure that slavery
must be wiped out in blood; but neither he nor his executioners
dreamt that within four years a million soldiers would be
marching across the country for its final extirpation, to the
music of the war-song of the great conflict:

     "John Brown's body lies a-mouldering in the grave,
     But his soul is marching on."

And now, at the age of fifty-one, this child of the wilderness,
this farm laborer, rail-sputter, flatboatman, this surveyor,
lawyer, orator, statesman, and patriot, found himself elected by
the great party which was pledged to prevent at all hazards the
further extension of slavery, as the chief magistrate of the
Republic, bound to carry out that purpose, to be the leader and
ruler of the nation in its most trying hour.

Those who believe that there is a living Providence that
overrules and conducts the affairs of nations, find in the
elevation of this plain man to this extraordinary fortune and to
this great duty, which he so fitly discharged, a signal
vindication of their faith.  Perhaps to this philosophical
institution the judgment of our philosopher Emerson will commend
itself as a just estimate of Lincoln's historical place

"His occupying the chair of state was a triumph of the good sense
of mankind and of the public conscience.  He grew according to
the need; his mind mastered the problem of the day: and as the
problem grew, so did his comprehension of it.  In the war there
was no place for holiday magistrate, nor fair-weather sailor.
The new pilot was hurried to the helm in a tornado.  In four
years--four years of battle days--his endurance, his fertility of
resource, his magnanimity, were sorely tried, and never found
wanting.  There, by his courage, his justice, his even temper,
his fertile counsel, his humanity, he stood a heroic figure in
the centre of a heroic epoch.  He is the true history of the
American people in his time, the true representative of this
continent--father of his country, the pulse of twenty millions
throbbing in his heart, the thought of their mind--articulated in
his tongue."

He was born great, as distinguished from those who achieve
greatness or have it thrust upon them, and his inherent capacity,
mental, moral, and physical, having been recognized by the
educated intelligence of a free people, they happily chose him
for their ruler in a day of deadly peril.

It is now forty years since I first saw and heard Abraham
Lincoln, but the impression which he left on my mind is
ineffaceable.  After his great successes in the West he came to
New York to make a political address.  He appeared in every sense
of the word like one of the plain people among whom he loved to
be counted.  At first sight there was nothing impressive or
imposing about him--except that his great stature singled him out
from the crowd: his clothes hung awkwardly on his giant frame;
his face was of a dark pallor, without the slightest tinge of
color; his seamed and rugged features bore the furrows of
hardship and struggle; his deep-set eyes looked sad and anxious;
his countenance in repose gave little evidence of that brain
power which had raised him from the lowest to the highest station
among his countrymen; as he talked to me before the meeting, he
seemed ill at ease, with that sort of apprehension which a young
man might feel before presenting himself to a new and strange
audience, whose critical disposition he dreaded.  It was a great
audience, including all the noted men--all the learned and
cultured of his party in New York editors, clergymen, statesmen,
lawyers, merchants, critics.  They were all very curious to hear
him.  His fame as a powerful speaker had preceded him, and
exaggerated rumor of his wit--the worst forerunner of an orator--
had reached the East.  When Mr. Bryant presented him, on the high
platform of the Cooper Institute, a vast sea of eager upturned
faces greeted him, full of intense curiosity to see what this
rude child of the people was like.  He was equal to the occasion.
When he spoke he was transformed; his eye kindled, his voice
rang, his face shone and seemed to light up the whole assembly.
For an hour and a half he held his audience in the hollow of his
hand.  His style of speech and manner of delivery were severely
simple.  What Lowell called "the grand simplicities of the
Bible," with which he was so familiar, were reflected in his
discourse.  With no attempt at ornament or rhetoric, without
parade or pretence, he spoke straight to the point.  If any came
expecting the turgid eloquence or the ribaldry of the frontier,
they must have been startled at the earnest and sincere purity of
his utterances.  It was marvellous to see how this untutored man,
by mere self-discipline and the chastening of his own spirit, had
outgrown all meretricious arts, and found his own way to the
grandeur and strength of absolute simplicity.

He spoke upon the theme which he had mastered so thoroughly.  He
demonstrated by copious historical proofs and masterly logic that
the fathers who created the Constitution in order to form a more
perfect union, to establish justice, and to secure the blessings
of liberty to themselves and their posterity, intended to empower
the Federal Government to exclude slavery from the Territories.
In the kindliest spirit he protested against the avowed threat of
the Southern States to destroy the Union if, in order to secure
freedom in those vast regions out of which future States were to
be carved, a Republican President were elected.  He closed with
an appeal to his audience, spoken with all the fire of his
aroused and kindling conscience, with a full outpouring of his
love of justice and liberty, to maintain their political purpose
on that lofty and unassailable issue of right and wrong which
alone could justify it, and not to be intimidated from their high
resolve and sacred duty by any threats of destruction to the
government or of ruin to themselves.  He concluded with this
telling sentence, which drove the whole argument home to all our
hearts: "Let us have faith that right makes might, and in that
faith let us to the end dare to do our duty as we understand it."
That night the great hall, and the next day the whole city, rang
with delighted applause and congratulations, and he who had come
as a stranger departed with the laurels of great triumph.

Alas! in five years from that exulting night I saw him again, for
the last time, in the same city, borne in his coffin through its
draped streets.  With tears and lamentations a heart-broken
people accompanied him from Washington, the scene of his
martyrdom, to his last resting-place in the young city of the
West where he had worked his way to fame.

Never was a new ruler in a more desperate plight than Lincoln
when he entered office on the fourth of March, 1861, four months
after his election, and took his oath to support the Constitution
and the Union.  The intervening time had been busily employed by
the Southern States in carrying out their threat of disunion in
the event of his election.  As soon as the fact was ascertained,
seven of them had seceded and had seized upon the forts,
arsenals, navy yards, and other public property of the United
States within their boundaries, and were making every preparation
for war.  In the meantime the retiring President, who had been
elected by the slave power, and who thought the seceding States
could not lawfully be coerced, had done absolutely nothing.
Lincoln found himself, by the Constitution, Commander-in-Chief of
the Army and Navy of the United States, but with only a remnant
of either at hand.  Each was to be created on a great scale out
of the unknown resources of a nation untried in war.

In his mild and conciliatory inaugural address, while appealing
to the seceding States to return to their allegiance, he avowed
his purpose to keep the solemn oath he had taken that day, to see
that the laws of the Union were faithfully executed, and to use
the troops to recover the forts, navy yards, and other property
belonging to the government.  It is probable, however, that
neither side actually realized that war was inevitable, and that
the other was determined to fight, until the assault on Fort
Sumter presented the South as the first aggressor and roused the
North to use every possible resource to maintain the government
and the imperilled Union, and to vindicate the supremacy of the
flag over every inch of the territory of the United States.  The
fact that Lincoln's first proclamation called for only 75,000
troops, to serve for three months, shows how inadequate was even
his idea of what the future had in store.  But from that moment
Lincoln and his loyal supporters never faltered in their purpose.
They knew they could win, that it was their duty to win, and that
for America the whole hope of the future depended upon their
winning; for now by the acts of the seceding States the issue of
the election to secure or prevent the extension of slavery--stood
transformed into a struggle to preserve or to destroy the Union.

We cannot follow this contest.  You know its gigantic
proportions; that it lasted four years instead of three months;
that in its progress, instead of 75,000 men, more than 2,000,000
were enrolled on the side of the government alone; that the
aggregate cost and loss to the nation approximated to
1,000,000,000 pounds sterling, and that not less than 300,000
brave and precious lives were sacrificed on each side.  History
has recorded how Lincoln bore himself during these four frightful
years; that he was the real President, the responsible and actual
head of the government, through it all; that he listened to all
advice, heard all parties, and then, always realizing his
responsibility to God and the nation, decided every great
executive question for himself.  His absolute honesty had become
proverbial long before he was President.  "Honest Abe Lincoln"
was the name by which he had been known for years.  His every act
attested it.

In all the grandeur of the vast power that he wielded, he never
ceased to be one of the plain people, as he always called them,
never lost or impaired his perfect sympathy with them, was always
in perfect touch with them and open to their appeals; and here
lay the very secret of his personality and of his power, for the
people in turn gave him their absolute confidence.  His courage,
his fortitude, his patience, his hopefulness, were sorely tried
but never exhausted.

He was true as steel to his generals, but had frequent occasion
to change them, as he found them inadequate.  This serious and
painful duty rested wholly upon him, and was perhaps his most
important function as Commander-in-Chief; but when, at last, he
recognized in General Grant the master of the situation, the man
who could and would bring the war to a triumphant end, he gave it
all over to him and upheld him with all his might.  Amid all the
pressure and distress that the burdens of office brought upon
him, his unfailing sense of humor saved him; probably it made it
possible for him to live under the burden.  He had always been
the great story-teller of the West, and he used and cultivated
this faculty to relieve the weight of the load he bore.

It enabled him to keep the wonderful record of never having lost
his temper, no matter what agony he had to bear.  A whole night
might be spent in recounting the stories of his wit, humor, and
harmless sarcasm.  But I will recall only two of his sayings,
both about General Grant, who always found plenty of enemies and
critics to urge the President to oust him from his command.  One,
I am sure, will interest all Scotchmen.  They repeated with
malicious intent the gossip that Grant drank.  "What does he
drink?" asked Lincoln.  "Whiskey," was, of course, the answer;
doubtless you can guess the brand.  "Well," said the President,
"just find out what particular kind he uses and I'll send a
barrel to each of my other generals."  The other must be as
pleasing to the British as to the American ear.  When pressed
again on other grounds to get rid of Grant, he declared, "I can't
spare that man, he fights!"

He was tender-hearted to a fault, and never could resist the
appeals of wives and mothers of soldiers who had got into trouble
and were under sentence of death for their offences.  His
Secretary of War and other officials complained that they never
could get deserters shot.  As surely as the women of the
culprit's family could get at him he always gave way.  Certainly
you will all appreciate his exquisite sympathy with the suffering
relatives of those who had fallen in battle.  His heart bled with
theirs.  Never was there a more gentle and tender utterance than
his letter to a mother who had given all her sons to her country,
written at a time when the angel of death had visited almost
every household in the land, and was already hovering over him.

"I have been shown," he says, "in the files of the War Department
a statement that you are the mother of five sons who have died
gloriously on the field of battle.  I feel how weak and fruitless
must be any words of mine which should attempt to beguile you
from your grief for a loss so overwhelming but I cannot refrain
from tendering to you the consolation which may be found in the
thanks of the Republic they died to save.  I pray that our
Heavenly Father may assuage the anguish of your bereavement and
leave you only the cherished memory of the loved and the lost,
and the solemn pride that must be yours to have laid so costly a
sacrifice upon the altar of freedom."

Hardly could your illustrious sovereign, from the depths of her
queenly and womanly heart, have spoken words more touching and
tender to soothe the stricken mothers of her own soldiers.

The Emancipation Proclamation, with which Mr. Lincoln delighted
the country and the world on the first of January, 1863, will
doubtless secure for him a foremost place in history among the
philanthropists and benefactors of the race, as it rescued, from
hopeless and degrading slavery, so many millions of his fellow-
beings described in the law and existing in fact as "chattels-
personal, in the hands of their owners and possessors, to all
intents, constructions, and purposes whatsoever."  Rarely does
the happy fortune come to one man to render such a service to his
kind--to proclaim liberty throughout the land unto all the
inhabitants thereof.

Ideas rule the world, and never was there a more signal instance
of this triumph of an idea than here.  William Lloyd Garrison,
who thirty years before had begun his crusade for the abolition
of slavery, and had lived to see this glorious and unexpected
consummation of the hopeless cause to which he had devoted his
life, well described the proclamation as a "great historic event,
sublime in its magnitude, momentous and beneficent in its far-
reaching consequences, and eminently just and right alike to the
oppressor and the oppressed."

Lincoln had always been heart and soul opposed to slavery.
Tradition says that on the trip on the flatboat to New Orleans he
formed his first and last opinion of slavery at the sight of
negroes chained and scourged, and that then and there the iron
entered into his soul.  No boy could grow to manhood in those
days as a poor white in Kentucky and Indiana, in close contact
with slavery or in its neighborhood, without a growing
consciousness of its blighting effects on free labor, as well as
of its frightful injustice and cruelty.  In the Legislature of
Illinois, where the public sentiment was all for upholding the
institution and violently against every movement for its
abolition or restriction, upon the passage of resolutions to that
effect he had the courage with one companion to put on record his
protest, "believing that the institution of slavery is founded
both in injustice and bad policy."  No great demonstration of
courage, you will say; but that was at a time when Garrison, for
his abolition utterances, had been dragged by an angry mob
through the streets of Boston with a rope around his body, and in
the very year that Lovejoy in the same State of Illinois was
slain by rioters while defending his press, from which he had
printed antislavery appeals.

In Congress he brought in a bill for gradual abolition in the
District of Columbia, with compensation to the owners, for until
they raised treasonable hands against the life of the nation he
always maintained that the property of the slaveholders, into
which they had come by two centuries of descent, without fault on
their part, ought not to be taken away from them without just
compensation.  He used to say that, one way or another, he had
voted forty-two times for the Wilmot Proviso, which Mr. Wilmot of
Pennsylvania moved as an addition to every bill which affected
United States territory, "that neither slavery nor involuntary
servitude shall ever exist in any part of the said territory,"
and it is evident that his condemnation of the system, on moral
grounds as a crime against the human race, and on political
grounds as a cancer that was sapping the vitals of the nation,
and must master its whole being or be itself extirpated, grew
steadily upon him until it culminated in his great speeches in
the Illinois debate.

By the mere election of Lincoln to the Presidency, the further
extension of slavery into the Territories was rendered forever
impossible--Vox populi, vox Dei.  Revolutions never go backward,
and when founded on a great moral sentiment stirring the heart of
an indignant people their edicts are irresistible and final.  Had
the slave power acquiesced in that election, had the Southern
States remained under the Constitution and within the Union, and
relied upon their constitutional and legal rights, their favorite
institution, immoral as it was, blighting and fatal as it was,
might have endured for another century.  The great party that had
elected him, unalterably determined against its extension, was
nevertheless pledged not to interfere with its continuance in the
States where it already existed.  Of course, when new regions
were forever closed against it, from its very nature it must have
begun to shrink and to dwindle; and probably gradual and
compensated emancipation, which appealed very strongly to the new
President's sense of justice and expediency, would, in the
progress of time, by a reversion to the ideas of the founders of
the Republic, have found a safe outlet for both masters and
slaves.  But whom the gods wish to destroy they first make mad,
and when seven States, afterwards increased to eleven, openly
seceded from the Union, when they declared and began the war upon
the nation, and challenged its mighty power to the desperate and
protracted struggle for its life, and for the maintenance of its
authority as a nation over its territory, they gave to Lincoln
and to freedom the sublime opportunity of history.

In his first inaugural address, when as yet not a drop of
precious blood had been shed, while he held out to them the olive
branch in one hand, in the other he presented the guarantees of
the Constitution, and after reciting the emphatic resolution of
the convention that nominated him, that the maintenance inviolate
of the "rights of the States, and especially the right of each
State to order and control its own domestic institutions
according to its own judgment exclusively, is essential to that
balance of power on which the perfection and endurance of our
political fabric depend," he reiterated this sentiment, and
declared, with no mental reservation, "that all the protection
which, consistently with the Constitution and the laws, can be
given, will be cheerfully given to all the States when lawfully
demanded for whatever cause as cheerfully to one section as to
another."

When, however, these magnanimous overtures for peace and reunion
were rejected; when the seceding States defied the Constitution
and every clause and principle of it; when they persisted in
staying out of the Union from which they had seceded, and
proceeded to carve out of its territory a new and hostile empire
based on slavery; when they flew at the throat of the nation and
plunged it into the bloodiest war of the nineteenth century the
tables were turned, and the belief gradually came to the mind of
the President that if the Rebellion was not soon subdued by force
of arms, if the war must be fought out to the bitter end, then to
reach that end the salvation of the nation itself might require
the destruction of slavery wherever it existed; that if the war
was to continue on one side for Disunion, for no other purpose
than to preserve slavery, it must continue on the other side for
the Union, to destroy slavery.

As he said, "Events control me; I cannot control events," and as
the dreadful war progressed and became more deadly and dangerous,
the unalterable conviction was forced upon him that, in order
that the frightful sacrifice of life and treasure on both sides
might not be all in vain, it had become his duty as Commander-in-
Chief of the Army, as a necessary war measure, to strike a blow
at the Rebellion which, all others failing, would inevitably lead
to its annihilation, by annihilating the very thing for which it
was contending.  His own words are the best:

"I understood that my oath to preserve the Constitution to the
best of my ability imposed upon me the duty of preserving by
every indispensable means that government--that nation--of which
that Constitution was the organic law.  Was it possible to lose
the nation and yet preserve the Constitution?  By general law,
life and limb must be protected, yet often a limb must be
amputated to save a life; but a life is never wisely given to
save a limb.  I felt that measures otherwise unconstitutional
might become lawful by becoming indispensable to the preservation
of the Constitution through the preservation of the nation.
Right or wrong, I assumed this ground and now avow it.  I could
not feel that to the best of my ability I had ever tried to
preserve the Constitution if to save slavery or any minor matter
I should permit the wreck of government, country, and
Constitution all together."

And so, at last, when in his judgment the indispensable necessity
had come, he struck the fatal blow, and signed the proclamation
which has made his name immortal.  By it, the President, as
Commander-in-Chief in time of actual armed rebellion, and as a
fit and necessary war measure for suppressing the rebellion,
proclaimed all persons held as slaves in the States and parts of
States then in rebellion to be thenceforward free, and declared
that the executive, with the army and navy, would recognize and
maintain their freedom.

In the other great steps of the government, which led to the
triumphant prosecution of the war, he necessarily shared the
responsibility and the credit with the great statesmen who stayed
up his hands in his cabinet, with Seward, Chase and Stanton, and
the rest,--and with his generals and admirals, his soldiers and
sailors, but this great act was absolutely his own.  The
conception and execution were exclusively his.  He laid it before
his cabinet as a measure on which his mind was made up and could
not be changed, asking them only for suggestions as to details.
He chose the time and the circumstances under which the
Emancipation should be proclaimed and when it should take effect.

It came not an hour too soon; but public opinion in the North
would not have sustained it earlier.  In the first eighteen
months of the war its ravages had extended from the Atlantic to
beyond the Mississippi.  Many victories in the West had been
balanced and paralyzed by inaction and disasters in Virginia,
only partially redeemed by the bloody and indecisive battle of
Antietam; a reaction had set in from the general enthusiasm which
had swept the Northern States after the assault upon Sumter.  It
could not truly be said that they had lost heart, but faction was
raising its head.  Heard through the land like the blast of a
bugle, the proclamation rallied the patriotism of the country to
fresh sacrifices and renewed ardor.  It was a step that could not
be revoked.  It relieved the conscience of the nation from an
incubus that had oppressed it from its birth.  The United States
were rescued from the false predicament in which they had been
from the beginning, and the great popular heart leaped with new
enthusiasm for "Liberty and Union, henceforth and forever, one
and inseparable."  It brought not only moral but material support
to the cause of the government, for within two years 120,000
colored troops were enlisted in the military service and
following the national flag, supported by all the loyalty of the
North, and led by its choicest spirits.  One mother said, when
her son was offered the command of the first colored regiment,
"If he accepts it I shall be as proud as if I had heard that he
was shot."  He was shot heading a gallant charge of his
regiment....  The Confederates replied to a request of his
friends for his body that they had "buried him under a layer of
his niggers....;" but that mother has lived to enjoy thirty-six
years of his glory, and Boston has erected its noblest monument
to his memory.

The effect of the proclamation upon the actual progress of the
war was not immediate, but wherever the Federal armies advanced
they carried freedom with them, and when the summer came round
the new spirit and force which had animated the heart of the
government and people were manifest.  In the first week of July
the decisive battle of Gettysburg turned the tide of war, and the
fall of Vicksburg made the great river free from its source to
the Gulf.

On foreign nations the influence of the proclamation and of these
new victories was of great importance.  In those days, when there
was no cable, it was not easy for foreign observers to appreciate
what was really going on; they could not see clearly the true
state of affairs, as in the last year of the nineteenth century
we have been able, by our new electric vision, to watch every
event at the antipodes and observe its effect.  The Rebel
emissaries, sent over to solicit intervention, spared no pains to
impress upon the minds of public and private men and upon the
press their own views of the character of the contest.  The
prospects of the Confederacy were always better abroad than at
home.  The stock markets of the world gambled upon its chances,
and its bonds at one time were high in favor.

Such ideas as these were seriously held: that the North was
fighting for empire and the South for independence; that the
Southern States, instead of being the grossest oligarchies,
essentially despotisms, founded on the right of one man to
appropriate the fruit of other men's toil and to exclude them
from equal rights, were real republics, feebler to be sure than
their Northern rivals, but representing the same idea of freedom,
and that the mighty strength of the nation was being put forth to
crush them; that Jefferson Davis and the Southern leaders had
created a nation; that the republican experiment had failed and
the Union had ceased to exist.  But the crowning argument to
foreign minds was that it was an utter impossibility for the
government to win in the contest; that the success of the
Southern States, so far as separation was concerned, was as
certain as any event yet future and contingent could be; that the
subjugation of the South by the North, even if it could be
accomplished, would prove a calamity to the United States and the
world, and especially calamitous to the negro race; and that such
a victory would necessarily leave the people of the South for
many generations cherishing deadly hostility against the
government and the North, and plotting always to recover their
independence.

When Lincoln issued his proclamation he knew that all these ideas
were founded in error; that the national resources were
inexhaustible; that the government could and would win, and that
if slavery were once finally disposed of, the only cause of
difference being out of the way, the North and South would come
together again, and by and by be as good friends as ever.  In
many quarters abroad the proclamation was welcomed with
enthusiasm by the friends of America; but I think the
demonstrations in its favor that brought more gladness to
Lincoln's heart than any other were the meetings held in the
manufacturing centres, by the very operatives upon whom the war
bore the hardest, expressing the most enthusiastic sympathy with
the proclamation, while they bore with heroic fortitude the
grievous privations which the war entailed upon them.  Mr.
Lincoln's expectation when he announced to the world that all
slaves in all States then in rebellion were set free must have
been that the avowed position of his government, that the
continuance of the war now meant the annihilation of slavery,
would make intervention impossible for any foreign nation whose
people were lovers of liberty--and so the result proved.

The growth and development of Lincoln's mental power and moral
force, of his intense and magnetic personality, after the vast
responsibilities of government were thrown upon him at the age of
fifty-two, furnish a rare and striking illustration of the
marvellous capacity and adaptability of the human intellect--of
the sound mind in the sound body.  He came to the discharge of
the great duties of the Presidency with absolutely no experience
in the administration of government, or of the vastly varied and
complicated questions of foreign and domestic policy which
immediately arose, and continued to press upon him during the
rest of his life; but he mastered each as it came, apparently
with the facility of a trained and experienced ruler.  As
Clarendon said of Cromwell, "His parts seemed to be raised by the
demands of great station."  His life through it all was one of
intense labor, anxiety, and distress, without one hour of
peaceful repose from first to last.  But he rose to every
occasion.  He led public opinion, but did not march so far in
advance of it as to fail of its effective support in every great
emergency.  He knew the heart and thought of the people, as no
man not in constant and absolute sympathy with them could have
known it, and so holding their confidence, he triumphed through
and with them.  Not only was there this steady growth of
intellect, but the infinite delicacy of his nature and its
capacity for refinement developed also, as exhibited in the
purity and perfection of his language and style of speech.  The
rough backwoodsman, who had never seen the inside of a
university, became in the end, by self-training and the exercise
of his own powers of mind, heart, and soul, a master of style,
and some of his utterances will rank with the best, the most
perfectly adapted to the occasion which produced them.

Have you time to listen to his two-minutes speech at Gettysburg,
at the dedication of the Soldiers' Cemetery?  His whole soul was
in it:

"Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this
continent 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.  We are met on a
great battlefield of that war.  We have come to dedicate a
portion of that field as a final resting-place for those who here
gave their lives that that nation might live.  It is altogether
fitting and proper that we should do this.  But in a larger sense
we cannot dedicate--we cannot consecrate--we cannot hallow this
ground.  The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here have
consecrated it far above our poor power to add or detract.  The
world will little note, nor long remember, what we say here but
it can never forget what they did here.  It is for us, the
living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which
they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced.  It is
rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining
before us that from these honored dead we take increased devotion
to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of
devotion--that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not
have died in vain--that this nation under God shall have a new
birth of freedom--and that government of the people, by the
people, and for the people shall not perish from the earth."

He lived to see his work indorsed by an overwhelming majority of
his countrymen.  In his second inaugural address, pronounced just
forty days before his death, there is a single passage which well
displays his indomitable will and at the same time his deep
religious feeling, his sublime charity to the enemies of his
country, and his broad and catholic humanity:

"If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those
offences which in the Providence of God must needs come, but
which, having continued through the appointed time, He now wills
to remove, and that He gives to both North and South this
terrible war, as the woe due to those by whom the offence came,
shall we discern therein any departure from those divine
attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to
Him?  Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty
scourge of war may speedily pass away.  Yet, if God wills that it
continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsmen's two hundred
and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every
drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid with another
drawn by the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so
still it must be said, 'the judgments of the Lord are true and
righteous altogether.'

"With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in
the right as God gives us to see the right let us strive on to
finish the work we are in to bind up the nation's wounds; to care
for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his
orphan to do all which may achieve, and cherish a just and
lasting peace among ourselves, and with all nations."

His prayer was answered.  The forty days of life that remained to
him were crowned with great historic events.  He lived to see his
Proclamation of Emancipation embodied in an amendment of the
Constitution, adopted by Congress, and submitted to the States
for ratification.  The mighty scourge of war did speedily pass
away, for it was given him to witness the surrender of the Rebel
army and the fall of their capital, and the starry flag that he
loved waving in triumph over the national soil.  When he died by
the madman's hand in the supreme hour of victory, the vanquished
lost their best friend, and the human race one of its noblest
examples; and all the friends of freedom and justice, in whose
cause he lived and died, joined hands as mourners at his grave.






THE WRITINGS OF ABRAHAM LINCOLN

1832-1843




1832


ADDRESS TO THE PEOPLE OF SANGAMON COUNTY.

March 9, 1832.

FELLOW CITIZENS:--Having become a candidate for the honorable
office of one of your Representatives in the next General
Assembly of this State, in according with an established custom
and the principles of true Republicanism it becomes my duty to
make known to you, the people whom I propose to represent, my
sentiments with regard to local affairs.

Time and experience have verified to a demonstration the public
utility of internal improvements.  That the poorest and most
thinly populated countries would be greatly benefited by the
opening of good roads, and in the clearing of navigable streams
within their limits, is what no person will deny.  Yet it is
folly to undertake works of this or any other without first
knowing that we are able to finish them--as half-finished work
generally proves to be labor lost.  There cannot justly be any
objection to having railroads and canals, any more than to other
good things, provided they cost nothing.  The only objection is
to paying for them; and the objection arises from the want of
ability to pay.

With respect to the County of Sangamon, some....

Yet, however desirable an object the construction of a railroad
through our country may be, however high our imaginations may be
heated at thoughts of it,--there is always a heart-appalling
shock accompanying the amount of its cost, which forces us to
shrink from our pleasing anticipations.  The probable cost of
this contemplated railroad is estimated at $290,000; the bare
statement of which, in my opinion, is sufficient to justify the
belief that the improvement of the Sangamon River is an object
much better suited to our infant resources.......

What the cost of this work would be, I am unable to say.  It is
probable, however, that it would not be greater than is common to
streams of the same length.  Finally, I believe the improvement
of the Sangamon River to be vastly important and highly desirable
to the people of the county; and, if elected, any measure in the
Legislature having this for its object, which may appear
judicious, will meet my approbation and receive my support.

It appears that the practice of loaning money at exorbitant rates
of interest has already been opened as a field for discussion; so
I suppose I may enter upon it without claiming the honor or
risking the danger which may await its first explorer.  It seems
as though we are never to have an end to this baneful and
corroding system, acting almost as prejudicially to the general
interests of the community as a direct tax of several thousand
dollars annually laid on each county for the benefit of a few
individuals only, unless there be a law made fixing the limits of
usury.  A law for this purpose, I am of opinion, may be made
without materially injuring any class of people.  In cases of
extreme necessity, there could always be means found to cheat the
law; while in all other cases it would have its intended effect.
I would favor the passage of a law on this subject which might
not be very easily evaded.  Let it be such that the labor and
difficulty of evading it could only be justified in cases of
greatest necessity.

Upon the subject of education, not presuming to dictate any plan
or system respecting it, I can only say that I view it as the
most important subject which we as a people can be engaged in.
That every man may receive at least a moderate education, and
thereby be enabled to read the histories of his own and other
countries, by which he may duly appreciate the value of our free
institutions, appears to be an object
of vital importance, even on this account alone, to say nothing
of the advantages and satisfaction to be derived from all being
able to read the Scriptures, and other works both of a religious
and moral nature, for themselves.

For my part, I desire to see the time when education--and by its
means, morality, sobriety, enterprise, and industry--shall become
much more general than at present, and should be gratified to
have it in my power to contribute something to the advancement of
any measure which might have a tendency to accelerate that happy
period.

With regard to existing laws, some alterations are thought to be
necessary.  Many respectable men have suggested that our estray
laws, the law respecting the issuing of executions, the road law,
and some others, are deficient in their present form, and require
alterations.  But, considering the great probability that the
framers of those laws were wiser than myself, I should prefer not
meddling with them, unless they were first attacked by others; in
which case I should feel it both a privilege and a duty to take
that stand which, in my view, might tend most to the advancement
of justice.

But, fellow-citizens, I shall conclude.  Considering the great
degree of modesty which should always attend youth, it is
probable I have already been more presuming than becomes me.
However, upon the subjects of which I have treated, I have spoken
as I have thought.  I may be wrong in regard to any or all of
them; but, holding it a sound maxim that it is better only
sometimes to be right than at all times to be wrong, so soon as I
discover my opinions to be erroneous, I shall be ready to
renounce them.

Every man is said to have his peculiar ambition.  Whether it be
true or not, I can say, for one, that I have no other so great as
that of being truly esteemed of my fellow-men, by rendering
myself worthy of their esteem.  How far I shall succeed in
gratifying this ambition is yet to be developed.  I am young, and
unknown to many of you.  I was born, and have ever remained, in
the most humble walks of life.  I have no wealthy or popular
relations or friends to recommend me.  My case is thrown
exclusively upon the independent voters of the county; and, if
elected, they will have conferred a favor upon me for which I
shall be unremitting in my labors to compensate.  But, if the
good people in their wisdom shall see fit to keep me in the
background, I have been too familiar with disappointments to be
very much chagrined.

Your friend and fellow-citizen,
A. LINCOLN.

New Salem, March 9, 1832.




1833


TO E. C. BLANKENSHIP.

NEW SALEM,
Aug. 10, 1833

E. C. BLANKENSHIP.

Dear Sir:--In regard to the time David Rankin served the enclosed
discharge shows correctly--as well as I can recollect--having no
writing to refer.  The transfer of Rankin from my company
occurred as follows: Rankin having lost his horse at Dixon's
ferry and having acquaintance in one of the foot companies who
were going down the river was desirous to go with them, and one
Galishen being an acquaintance of mine and belonging to the
company in which Rankin wished to go wished to leave it and join
mine, this being the case it was agreed that they should exchange
places and answer to each other's names--as it was expected we
all would be discharged in very few days.  As to a blanket--I
have no knowledge of Rankin ever getting any.  The above embraces
all the facts now in my recollection which are pertinent to the
case.

I shall take pleasure in giving any further information in my
power should you call on me.

Your friend,
A. LINCOLN.




RESPONSE TO REQUEST FOR POSTAGE RECEIPT

TO Mr. SPEARS.

Mr. SPEARS:

At your request I send you a receipt for the postage on your
paper.  I am somewhat surprised at your request.  I will,
however, comply with it.  The law requires newspaper postage to
be paid in advance, and now that I have waited a full year you
choose to wound my feelings by insinuating that unless you get a
receipt I will probably make you pay it again.

Respectfully,
A. LINCOLN.




1836


ANNOUNCEMENT OF POLITICAL VIEWS.

New Salem, June 13, 1836.

TO THE EDITOR OF THE "JOURNAL"--In your paper of last Saturday I
see a communication, over the signature of "Many Voters," in
which the candidates who are announced in the Journal are called
upon to "show their hands." Agreed.  Here's mine.

I go for all sharing the privileges of the government who assist
in bearing its burdens.  Consequently, I go for admitting all
whites to the right of suffrage who pay taxes or bear arms (by no
means excluding females).

If elected, I shall consider the whole people of Sangamon my
constituents, as well those that oppose as those that support me.

While acting as their representative, I shall be governed by
their will on all subjects upon which I have the means of knowing
what their will is; and upon all others I shall do what my own
judgment teaches me will best advance their interests.  Whether
elected or not, I go for distributing the proceeds of the sales
of the public lands to the several States, to enable our State,
in common with others, to dig canals and construct railroads
without borrowing money and paying the interest on it.  If alive
on the first Monday in November, I shall vote for Hugh L.  White
for President.

Very respectfully,
A. LINCOLN.




RESPONSE TO POLITICAL SMEAR

TO ROBERT ALLEN

New Salem,
June 21, 1836

DEAR COLONEL:--I am told that during my absence last week you
passed through this place, and stated publicly that you were in
possession of a fact or facts which, if known to the public,
would entirely destroy the prospects of N.  W.  Edwards and
myself at the ensuing election; but that, through favor to us,
you should forbear to divulge them.  No one has needed favors
more than I, and, generally, few have been less unwilling to
accept them; but in this case favor to me would be injustice to
the public, and therefore I must beg your pardon for declining
it.  That I once had the confidence of the people of Sangamon, is
sufficiently evident; and if I have since done anything, either
by design or misadventure, which if known would subject me to a
forfeiture of that confidence, he that knows of that thing, and
conceals it, is a traitor to his country's interest.

I find myself wholly unable to form any conjecture of what fact
or facts, real or supposed, you spoke; but my opinion of your
veracity will not permit me for a moment to doubt that you at
least believed what you said.  I am flattered with the personal
regard you manifested for me; but I do hope that, on more mature
reflection, you will view the public interest as a paramount
consideration, and therefore determine to let the worst come.  I
here assure you that the candid statement of facts on your part,
however low it may sink me, shall never break the tie of personal
friendship between us.  I wish an answer to this, and you are at
liberty to publish both, if you choose.

Very respectfully,
A. LINCOLN.




TO MISS MARY OWENS.

VANDALIA,
December 13, 1836.

MARY:--I have been sick ever since my arrival, or I should have
written sooner.  It is but little difference, however, as I have
very little even yet to write.  And more, the longer I can avoid
the mortification of looking in the post-office for your letter
and not finding it, the better.  You see I am mad about that old
letter yet.  I don't like very well to risk you again.  I'll try
you once more, anyhow.

The new State House is not yet finished, and consequently the
Legislature is doing little or nothing.  The governor delivered
an inflammatory political message, and it is expected there will
be some sparring between the parties about it as soon as the two
Houses get to business.  Taylor delivered up his petition for the
new county to one of our members this morning.  I am told he
despairs of its success, on account of all the members from
Morgan County opposing it.  There are names enough on the
petition, I think, to justify the members from our county in
going for it; but if the members from Morgan oppose it, which
they say they will, the chance will be bad.

Our chance to take the seat of government to Springfield is
better than I expected.  An internal-improvement convention was
held there since we met, which recommended a loan of several
millions of dollars, on the faith of the State, to construct
railroads.  Some of the Legislature are for it, and some against
it; which has the majority I cannot tell.  There is great strife
and struggling for the office of the United States Senator here
at this time.  It is probable we shall ease their pains in a few
days.  The opposition men have no candidate of their own, and
consequently they will smile as complacently at the angry snarl
of the contending Van Buren candidates and their respective
friends as the Christian does at Satan's rage.  You recollect
that I mentioned at the outset of this letter that I had been
unwell.  That is the fact, though I believe I am about well now;
but that, with other things I cannot account for, have conspired,
and have gotten my spirits so low that I feel that I would rather
be any place in the world than here.  I really cannot endure the
thought of staying here ten weeks.  Write back as soon as you get
this, and, if possible, say something that will please me, for
really I have not been pleased since I left you.  This letter is
so dry and stupid that I am ashamed to send it, but with my
present feelings I cannot do any better.

Give my best respects to Mr. and Mrs. Able and family.

Your friend,
LINCOLN




1837


SPEECH IN ILLINOIS LEGISLATURE.

January [?], 1837

Mr. CHAIRMAN:--Lest I should fall into the too common error of
being mistaken in regard to which side I design to be upon, I
shall make it my first care to remove all doubt on that point, by
declaring that I am opposed to the resolution under
consideration, in toto.  Before I proceed to the body of the
subject, I will further remark, that it is not without a
considerable degree of apprehension that I venture to cross the
track of the gentleman from Coles [Mr. Linder].  Indeed, I do not
believe I could muster a sufficiency of courage to come in
contact with that gentleman, were it not for the fact that he,
some days since, most graciously condescended to assure us that
he would never be found wasting ammunition on small game.  On the
same fortunate occasion, he further gave us to understand, that
he regarded himself as being decidedly the superior of our common
friend from Randolph [Mr. Shields]; and feeling, as I really do,
that I, to say the most of myself, am nothing more than the peer
of our friend from Randolph, I shall regard the gentleman from
Coles as decidedly my superior also, and consequently, in the
course of what I shall have to say, whenever I shall have
occasion to allude to that gentleman, I shall endeavor to adopt
that kind of court language which I understand to be due to
decided superiority.  In one faculty, at least, there can be no
dispute of the gentleman's superiority over me and most other
men, and that is, the faculty of entangling a subject, so that
neither himself, or any other man, can find head or tail to it.
Here he has introduced a resolution embracing ninety-nine printed
lines across common writing paper, and yet more than one half of
his opening speech has been made upon subjects about which there
is not one word said in his resolution.

Though his resolution embraces nothing in regard to the
constitutionality of the Bank, much of what he has said has been
with a view to make the impression that it was unconstitutional
in its inception.  Now, although I am satisfied that an ample
field may be found within the pale of the resolution, at least
for small game, yet, as the gentleman has traveled out of it, I
feel that I may, with all due humility, venture to follow him.
The gentleman has discovered that some gentleman at Washington
city has been upon the very eve of deciding our Bank
unconstitutional, and that he would probably have completed his
very authentic decision, had not some one of the Bank officers
placed his hand upon his mouth, and begged him to withhold it.
The fact that the individuals composing our Supreme Court have,
in an official capacity, decided in favor of the
constitutionality of the Bank, would, in my mind, seem a
sufficient answer to this.  It is a fact known to all, that the
members of the Supreme Court, together with the Governor, form a
Council of Revision, and that this Council approved this Bank
charter.  I ask, then, if the extra-judicial decision not quite
but almost made by the gentleman at Washington, before whom, by
the way, the question of the constitutionality of our Bank never
has, nor never can come--is to be taken as paramount to a
decision officially made by that tribunal, by which, and which
alone, the constitutionality of the Bank can ever be settled?
But, aside from this view of the subject, I would ask, if the
committee which this resolution proposes to appoint are to
examine into the Constitutionality of the Bank? Are they to be
clothed with power to send for persons and papers, for this
object? And after they have found the bank to be
unconstitutional, and decided it so, how are they to enforce
their decision? What will their decision amount to? They cannot
compel the Bank to cease operations, or to change the course of
its operations.  What good, then, can their labors result in?
Certainly none.

The gentleman asks, if we, without an examination, shall, by
giving the State deposits to the Bank, and by taking the stock
reserved for the State, legalize its former misconduct.  Now I do
not pretend to possess sufficient legal knowledge to decide
whether a legislative enactment proposing to, and accepting from,
the Bank, certain terms, would have the effect to legalize or
wipe out its former errors, or not; but I can assure the
gentleman, if such should be the effect, he has already got
behind the settlement of accounts; for it is well known to all,
that the Legislature, at its last session, passed a supplemental
Bank charter, which the Bank has since accepted, and which,
according to his doctrine, has legalized all the alleged
violations of its original charter in the distribution of its
stock.

I now proceed to the resolution.  By examination it will be found
that the first thirty-three lines, being precisely one third of
the whole, relate exclusively to the distribution of the stock by
the commissioners appointed by the State.  Now, Sir, it is clear
that no question can arise on this portion of the resolution,
except a question between capitalists in regard to the ownership
of stock.  Some gentlemen have their stock in their hands, while
others, who have more money than they know what to do with, want
it; and this, and this alone, is the question, to settle which we
are called on to squander thousands of the people's money.  What
interest, let me ask, have the people in the settlement of this
question? What difference is it to them whether the stock is
owned by Judge Smith or Sam Wiggins? If any gentleman be entitled
to stock in the Bank, which he is kept out of possession of by
others, let him assert his right in the Supreme Court, and let
him or his antagonist, whichever may be found in the wrong, pay
the costs of suit.  It is an old maxim, and a very sound one,
that he that dances should always pay the fiddler.  Now, Sir, in
the present case, if any gentlemen, whose money is a burden to
them, choose to lead off a dance, I am decidedly opposed to the
people's money being used to pay the fiddler.  No one can doubt
that the examination proposed by this resolution must cost the
State some ten or twelve thousand dollars; and all this to settle
a question in which the people have no interest, and about which
they care nothing.  These capitalists generally act harmoniously
and in concert, to fleece the people, and now that they have got
into a quarrel with themselves we are called upon to appropriate
the people's money to settle the quarrel.

I leave this part of the resolution and proceed to the remainder.
It will be found that no charge in the remaining part of the
resolution, if true, amounts to the violation of the Bank
charter, except one, which I will notice in due time.  It might
seem quite sufficient to say no more upon any of these charges or
insinuations than enough to show they are not violations of the
charter; yet, as they are ingeniously framed and handled, with a
view to deceive and mislead, I will notice in their order all the
most prominent of them.  The first of these is in relation to a
connection between our Bank and several banking institutions in
other States.  Admitting this connection to exist, I should like
to see the gentleman from Coles, or any other gentleman,
undertake to show that there is any harm in it.  What can there
be in such a connection, that the people of Illinois are willing
to pay their money to get a peep into? By a reference to the
tenth section of the Bank charter, any gentleman can see that the
framers of the act contemplated the holding of stock in the
institutions of other corporations.  Why, then, is it, when
neither law nor justice forbids it, that we are asked to spend
our time and money in inquiring into its truth?

The next charge, in the order of time, is, that some officer,
director, clerk or servant of the Bank, has been required to take
an oath of secrecy in relation to the affairs of said Bank.  Now,
I do not know whether this be true or fa1se--neither do I believe
any honest man cares.  I know that the seventh section of the
charter expressly guarantees to the Bank the right of making,
under certain restrictions, such by-laws as it may think fit; and
I further know that the requiring an oath of secrecy would not
transcend those restrictions.  What, then, if the Bank has chosen
to exercise this right? Whom can it injure? Does not every
merchant have his secret mark? and who is ever silly enough to
complain of it? I presume if the Bank does require any such oath
of secrecy, it is done through a motive of delicacy to those
individuals who deal with it.  Why, Sir, not many days since, one
gentleman upon this floor, who, by the way, I have no doubt is
now ready to join this hue and cry against the Bank, indulged in
a philippic against one of the Bank officials, because, as he
said, he had divulged a secret.

Immediately following this last charge, there are several
insinuations in the resolution, which are too silly to require
any sort of notice, were it not for the fact that they conclude
by saying, "to the great injury of the people at large." In
answer to this I would say that it is strange enough, that the
people are suffering these "great injuries," and yet are not
sensible of it! Singular indeed that the people should be
writhing under oppression and injury, and yet not one among them
to be found to raise the voice of complaint.  If the Bank be
inflicting injury upon the people, why is it that not a single
petition is presented to this body on the subject? If the Bank
really be a grievance, why is it that no one of the real people
is found to ask redress of it? The truth is, no such oppression
exists.  If it did, our people would groan with memorials and
petitions, and we would not be permitted to rest day or night,
till we had put it down.  The people know their rights, and they
are never slow to assert and maintain them, when they are
invaded.  Let them call for an investigation, and I shall ever
stand ready to respond to the call.  But they have made no such
call.  I make the assertion boldly, and without fear of
contradiction, that no man, who does not hold an office, or does
not aspire to one, has ever found any fault of the Bank.  It has
doubled the prices of the products of their farms, and filled
their pockets with a sound circulating medium, and they are all
well pleased with its operations.  No, Sir, it is the politician
who is the first to sound the alarm (which, by the way, is a
false one.)  It is he, who, by these unholy means, is endeavoring
to blow up a storm that he may ride upon and direct.  It is he,
and he alone, that here proposes to spend thousands of the
people's public treasure, for no other advantage to them than to
make valueless in their pockets the reward of their industry.
Mr. Chairman, this work is exclusively the work of politicians; a
set of men who have interests aside from the interests of the
people, and who, to say the most of them, are, taken as a mass,
at least one long step removed from honest men.  I say this with
the greater freedom, because, being a politician myself, none can
regard it as personal.

Again, it is charged, or rather insinuated, that officers of the
Bank have loaned money at usurious rates of interest.  Suppose
this to be true, are we to send a committee of this House to
inquire into it? Suppose the committee should find it true, can
they redress the injured individuals? Assuredly not.  If any
individual had been injured in this way, is there not an ample
remedy to be found in the laws of the land? Does the gentleman
from Coles know that there is a statute standing in full force
making it highly penal for an individual to loan money at a
higher rate of interest than twelve per cent? If he does not he
is too ignorant to be placed at the head of the committee which
his resolution purposes and if he does, his neglect to mention it
shows him to be too uncandid to merit the respect or confidence
of any one.

But besides all this, if the Bank were struck from existence,
could not the owners of the capital still loan it usuriously, as
well as now? whatever the Bank, or its officers, may have done, I
know that usurious transactions were much more frequent and
enormous before the commencement of its operations than they have
ever been since.

The next insinuation is, that the Bank has refused specie
payments.  This, if true is a violation of the charter.  But
there is not the least probability of its truth; because, if such
had been the fact, the individual to whom payment was refused
would have had an interest in making it public, by suing for the
damages to which the charter entitles him.  Yet no such thing has
been done; and the strong presumption is, that the insinuation is
false and groundless.

>From this to the end of the resolution, there is nothing that
merits attention--I therefore drop the particular examination of
it.

By a general view of the resolution, it will be seen that a
principal object of the committee is to examine into, and ferret
out, a mass of corruption supposed to have been committed by the
commissioners who apportioned the stock of the Bank.  I believe
it is universally understood and acknowledged that all men will
ever act correctly unless they have a motive to do otherwise.  If
this be true, we can only suppose that the commissioners acted
corruptly by also supposing that they were bribed to do so.
Taking this view of the subject, I would ask if the Bank is
likely to find it more difficult to bribe the committee of seven,
which, we are about to appoint, than it may have found it to
bribe the commissioners?

(Here Mr. Linder called to order.  The Chair decided that Mr.
Lincoln was not out of order.  Mr. Linder appealed to the House,
but, before the question was put, withdrew his appeal, saying he
preferred to let the gentleman go on; he thought he would break
his own neck.  Mr. Lincoln proceeded:)

Another gracious condescension! I acknowledge it with gratitude.
I know I was not out of order; and I know every sensible man in
the House knows it.  I was not saying that the gentleman from
Coles could be bribed, nor, on the other hand, will I say he
could not.  In that particular I leave him where I found him.  I
was only endeavoring to show that there was at least as great a
probability of any seven members that could be selected from this
House being bribed to act corruptly, as there was that the
twenty-four commissioners had been so bribed.  By a reference to
the ninth section of the Bank charter, it will be seen that those
commissioners were John Tilson, Robert K.  McLaughlin, Daniel
Warm, A.G.  S.  Wight, John C.  Riley, W.  H.  Davidson, Edward
M.  Wilson, Edward L.  Pierson, Robert R.  Green, Ezra Baker,
Aquilla Wren, John Taylor, Samuel C.  Christy, Edmund Roberts,
Benjamin Godfrey, Thomas Mather, A.  M.  Jenkins, W.  Linn, W.
S.  Gilman, Charles Prentice, Richard I.  Hamilton, A.H.
Buckner, W.  F.  Thornton, and Edmund D.  Taylor.

These are twenty-four of the most respectable men in the State.
Probably no twenty-four men could be selected in the State with
whom the people are better acquainted, or in whose honor and
integrity they would more readily place confidence.  And I now
repeat, that there is less probability that those men have been
bribed and corrupted, than that any seven men, or rather any six
men, that could be selected from the members of this House, might
be so bribed and corrupted, even though they were headed and led
on by "decided superiority" himself.

In all seriousness, I ask every reasonable man, if an issue be
joined by these twenty-four commissioners, on the one part, and
any other seven men, on the other part, and the whole depend upon
the honor and integrity of the contending parties, to which party
would the greatest degree of credit be due? Again: Another
consideration is, that we have no right to make the examination.
What I shall say upon this head I design exclusively for the law-
loving and law-abiding part of the House.  To those who claim
omnipotence for the Legislature, and who in the plenitude of
their assumed powers are disposed to disregard the Constitution,
law, good faith, moral right, and everything else, I have not a
word to say.  But to the law-abiding part I say, examine the Bank
charter, go examine the Constitution, go examine the acts that
the General Assembly of this State has passed, and you will find
just as much authority given in each and every of them to compel
the Bank to bring its coffers to this hall and to pour their
contents upon this floor, as to compel it to submit to this
examination which this resolution proposes.  Why, Sir, the
gentleman from Co1es, the mover of this resolution, very lately
denied on this floor that the Legislature had any right to repeal
or otherwise meddle with its own acts, when those acts were made
in the nature of contracts, and had been accepted and acted on by
other parties.  Now I ask if this resolution does not propose,
for this House alone, to do what he, but the other day, denied
the right of the whole Legislature to do? He must either abandon
the position he then took, or he must now vote against his own
resolution.  It is no difference to me, and I presume but little
to any one else, which he does.

I am by no means the special advocate of the Bank.  I have long
thought that it would be well for it to report its condition to
the General Assembly, and that cases might occur, when it might
be proper to make an examination of its affairs by a committee.
Accordingly, during the last session, while a bill supplemental
to the Bank charter was pending before the House, I offered an
amendment to the same, in these words: "The said corporation
shall, at the next session of the General Assembly, and at each
subsequent General Session, during the existence of its charter,
report to the same the amount of debts due from said corporation;
the amount of debts due to the same; the amount of specie in its
vaults, and an account of all lands then owned by the same, and
the amount for which such lands have been taken; and moreover, if
said corporation shall at any time neglect or refuse to submit
its books, papers, and all and everything necessary for a full
and fair examination of its affairs, to any person or persons
appointed by the General Assembly, for the purpose of making such
examination, the said corporation shall forfeit its charter."

This amendment was negatived by a vote of 34 to 15.  Eleven of
the 34 who voted against it are now members of this House; and
though it would be out of order to call their names, I hope they
will all recollect themselves, and not vote for this examination
to be made without authority, inasmuch as they refused to receive
the authority when it was in their power to do so.

I have said that cases might occur, when an examination might be
proper; but I do not believe any such case has now occurred; and
if it has, I should still be opposed to making an examination
without legal authority.  I am opposed to encouraging that
lawless and mobocratic spirit, whether in relation to the Bank or
anything else, which is already abroad in the land and is
spreading with rapid and fearful impetuosity, to the ultimate
overthrow of every institution, of every moral principle, in
which persons and property have hitherto found security.

But supposing we had the authority, I would ask what good can
result from the examination? Can we declare the Bank
unconstitutional, and compel it to desist from the abuses of its
power, provided we find such abuses to exist? Can we repair the
injuries which it may have done to individuals? Most certainly we
can do none of these things.  Why then
shall we spend the public money in such employment? Oh, say the
examiners, we can injure the credit of the Bank, if nothing else,
Please tell me, gentlemen, who will suffer most by that? You
cannot injure, to any extent, the stockholders.  They are men of
wealth--of large capital; and consequently, beyond the power of
malice.  But by injuring the credit of the Bank, you will
depreciate the value of its paper in the hands of the honest and
unsuspecting farmer and mechanic, and that is all you can do.
But suppose you could effect your whole purpose; suppose you
could wipe the Bank from existence, which is the grand ultimatum
of the project, what would be the consequence? why, Sir, we
should spend several thousand dollars of the public treasure in
the operation, annihilate the currency of the State, render
valueless in the hands of our people that reward of their former
labors, and finally be once more under the comfortable obligation
of paying the Wiggins loan, principal and interest.




OPPOSITION TO MOB-RULE

ADDRESS BEFORE THE YOUNG MEN' S LYCEUM OF SPRINGFIELD, ILLINOIS.

January 27, 1837.

As a subject for the remarks of the evening, "The Perpetuation of
our Political Institutions "is selected.

In the great journal of things happening under the sun, we, the
American people, find our account running under date of the
nineteenth century of the Christian era.  We find ourselves in
the peaceful possession of the fairest portion of the earth as
regards extent of territory, fertility of soil, and salubrity of
climate.  We find ourselves under the government of a system of
political institutions conducing more essentially to the ends of
civil and religious liberty than any of which the history of
former times tells us.  We, when mounting the stage of existence,
found ourselves the legal inheritors of these fundamental
blessings.  We toiled not in the acquirement or establishment of
them; they are a legacy bequeathed us by a once hardy, brave, and
patriotic, but now lamented and departed, race of ancestors.
Theirs was the task (and nobly they performed it) to possess
themselves, and through themselves us, of this goodly land, and
to uprear upon its hills and its valleys a political edifice of
liberty and equal rights; it is ours only to transmit these--the
former unprofaned by the foot of an invader, the latter undecayed
by the lapse of time and untorn by usurpation--to the latest
generation that fate shall permit the world to know.  This task
gratitude to our fathers, justice to ourselves, duty to
posterity, and love for our species in general, all imperatively
require us faithfully to perform.

How then shall we perform it? At what point shall we expect the
approach of danger? By what means shall we fortify against it?
Shall we expect some transatlantic military giant to step the
ocean and crush us at a blow? Never!  All the armies of Europe,
Asia, and Africa combined, with all the treasure of the earth
(our own excepted) in their military chest, with a Bonaparte for
a commander, could not by force take a drink from the Ohio or
make a track on the Blue Ridge in a trial of a thousand years.

At what point then is the approach of danger to be expected? I
answer: If it ever reach us it must spring up amongst us; it
cannot come from abroad.  If destruction be our lot we must
ourselves be its author and finisher.  As a nation of freemen we
must live through all time, or die by suicide.

I hope I am over-wary; but if I am not, there is even now
something of ill omen amongst us.  I mean the increasing
disregard for law which pervades the country--the growing
disposition to substitute the wild and furious passions in lieu
of the sober judgment of courts, and the worse than savage mobs
for the executive ministers of justice.  This disposition is
awfully fearful in any community; and that it now exists in ours,
though grating to our feelings to admit, it would be a violation
of truth and an insult to our intelligence to deny.  Accounts of
outrages committed by mobs form the everyday news of the times.
They have pervaded the country from New England to Louisiana;
they are neither peculiar to the eternal snows of the former nor
the burning suns of the latter; they are not the creature of
climate, neither are they confined to the slave holding or the
non-slave holding States.  Alike they spring up among the
pleasure-hunting masters of Southern slaves, and the order-loving
citizens of the land of steady habits.  Whatever then their cause
may be, it is common to the whole country.

It would be tedious as well as useless to recount the horrors of
all of them.  Those happening in the State of Mississippi and at
St.  Louis are perhaps the most dangerous in example and
revolting to humanity.  In the Mississippi case they first
commenced by hanging the regular gamblers--a set of men certainly
not following for a livelihood a very useful or very honest
occupation, but one which, so far from being forbidden by the
laws, was actually licensed by an act of the Legislature passed
but a single year before.  Next, negroes suspected of conspiring
to raise an insurrection were caught up and hanged in all parts
of the State; then, white men supposed to be leagued with the
negroes; and finally, strangers from neighboring States, going
thither on business, were in many instances subjected to the same
fate.  Thus went on this process of hanging, from gamblers to
negroes, from negroes to white citizens, and from these to
strangers, till dead men were seen literally dangling from the
boughs of trees upon every roadside, and in numbers almost
sufficient to rival the native Spanish moss of the country as a
drapery of the forest.

Turn then to that horror-striking scene at St.  Louis.  A single
victim only was sacrificed there.  This story is very short, and
is perhaps the most highly tragic of anything of its length that
has ever been witnessed in real life.  A mulatto man by the name
of McIntosh was seized in the street, dragged to the suburbs of
the city, chained to a tree, and actually burned to death; and
all within a single hour from the time he had been a freeman
attending to his own business and at peace with the world.

Such are the effects of mob law, and such are the scenes becoming
more and more frequent in this land so lately famed for love of
law and order, and the stories of which have even now grown too
familiar to attract anything more than an idle remark.

But you are perhaps ready to ask, "What has this to do with the
perpetuation of our political institutions?" I answer, It has
much to do with it.  Its direct consequences are, comparatively
speaking, but a small evil, and much of its danger consists in
the proneness of our minds to regard its direct as its only
consequences.  Abstractly considered, the hanging of the gamblers
at Vicksburg was of but little consequence.  They constitute a
portion of population that is worse than useless in any
community; and their death, if no pernicious example be set by
it, is never matter of reasonable regret with any one.  If they
were annually swept from the stage of existence by the plague or
smallpox, honest men would perhaps be much profited by the
operation.  Similar too is the correct reasoning in regard to the
burning of the negro at St.  Louis.  He had forfeited his life by
the perpetration of an outrageous murder upon one of the most
worthy and respectable citizens of the city, and had he not died
as he did, he must have died by the sentence of the law in a very
short time afterwards.  As to him alone, it was as well the way
it was as it could otherwise have been.  But the example in
either case was fearful.  When men take it in their heads to-day
to hang gamblers or burn murderers, they should recollect that in
the confusion usually attending such transactions they will be as
likely to hang or burn some one who is neither a gambler nor a
murderer as one who is, and that, acting upon the example they
set, the mob of to-morrow may, and probably will, hang or burn
some of them by the very same mistake.  And not only so: the
innocent, those who have ever set their faces against violations
of law in every shape, alike with the guilty fall victims to the
ravages of mob law; and thus it goes on, step by step, till all
the walls erected for the defense of the persons and property of
individuals are trodden down and disregarded.  But all this,
even, is not the full extent of the evil.  By such examples, by
instances of the perpetrators of such acts going unpunished, the
lawless in spirit are encouraged to become lawless in practice;
and having been used to no restraint but dread of punishment,
they thus become absolutely unrestrained.  Having ever regarded
government as their deadliest bane, they make a jubilee of the
suspension of its operations, and pray for nothing so much as its
total annihilation.  While, on the other hand, good men, men who
love tranquillity, who desire to abide by the laws and enjoy
their benefits, who would gladly spill their blood in the defense
of their country, seeing their property destroyed, their families
insulted, and their lives endangered, their persons injured, and
seeing nothing in prospect that forebodes a change for the
better, become tired of and disgusted with a government that
offers them no protection, and are not much averse to a change in
which they imagine they have nothing to lose.  Thus, then, by the
operation of this mobocratic spirit which all must admit is now
abroad in the land, the strongest bulwark of any government, and
particularly of those constituted like ours, may effectually be
broken down and destroyed--I mean the attachment of the people.
Whenever this effect shall be produced among us; whenever the
vicious portion of population shall be permitted to gather in
bands of hundreds and thousands, and burn churches, ravage and
rob provision-stores, throw printing presses into rivers, shoot
editors, and hang and burn obnoxious persons at pleasure and with
impunity, depend on it, this government cannot last.  By such
things the feelings of the best citizens will become more or less
alienated from it, and thus it will be left without friends, or
with too few, and those few too weak to make their friendship
effectual.  At such a time, and under such circumstances, men of
sufficient talent and ambition will not be wanting to seize the
opportunity, strike the blow, and overturn that fair fabric which
for the last half century has been the fondest hope of the lovers
of freedom throughout the world.

I know the American people are much attached to their government;
I know they would suffer much for its sake; I know they would
endure evils long and patiently before they would ever think of
exchanging it for another,--yet, notwithstanding all this, if the
laws be continually despised and disregarded, if their rights to
be secure in their persons and property are held by no better
tenure than the caprice of a mob, the alienation of their
affections from the government is the natural consequence; and to
that, sooner or later, it must come.

Here, then, is one point at which danger may be expected.

The question recurs, How shall we fortify against it? The answer
is simple.  Let every American, every lover of liberty, every
well-wisher to his posterity swear by the blood of the Revolution
never to violate in the least particular the laws of the country,
and never to tolerate their violation by others.  As the patriots
of seventy-six did to the support of the Declaration of
Independence, so to the support of the Constitution and laws let
every American pledge his life, his property, and his sacred
honor.  Let every man remember that to violate the law is to
trample on the blood of his father, and to tear the charter of
his own and his children's liberty.  Let reverence for the laws
be breathed by every American mother to the lisping babe that
prattles on her lap; let it be taught in schools, in seminaries,
and in colleges; let it be written in primers, spelling books,
and in almanacs; let it be preached from the pulpit, proclaimed
in legislative halls, and enforced in courts of justice.  And, in
short, let it become the political religion of the nation; and
let the old and the young, the rich and the poor, the grave and
the gay of all sexes and tongues and colors and conditions,
sacrifice unceasingly upon its altars.

While ever a state of feeling such as this shall universally or
even very generally prevail throughout the nation, vain will be
every effort, and fruitless every attempt, to subvert our
national freedom.

When, I so pressingly urge a strict observance of all the laws,
let me not be understood as saying there are no bad laws, or that
grievances may not arise for the redress of which no legal
provisions have been made.  I mean to say no such thing.  But I
do mean to say that although bad laws, if they exist, should be
repealed as soon as possible, still, while they continue in
force, for the sake of example they should be religiously
observed.  So also in unprovided cases.  If such arise, let
proper legal provisions be made for them with the least possible
delay, but till then let them, if not too intolerable, be borne
with.

There is no grievance that is a fit object of redress by mob law.
In any case that may arise, as, for instance, the promulgation of
abolitionism, one of two positions is necessarily true--that is,
the thing is right within itself, and therefore deserves the
protection of all law and all good citizens, or it is wrong, and
therefore proper to be prohibited by legal enactments; and in
neither case is the interposition of mob law either necessary,
justifiable, or excusable.

But it may be asked, Why suppose danger to our political
institutions? Have we not preserved them for more than fifty
years? And why may we not for fifty times as long?

We hope there is no sufficient reason.  We hope all danger may be
overcome; but to conclude that no danger may ever arise would
itself be extremely dangerous.  There are now, and will hereafter
be, many causes, dangerous in their tendency, which have not
existed heretofore, and which are not too insignificant to merit
attention.  That our government should have been maintained in
its original form, from its establishment until now, is not much
to be wondered at.  It had many props to support it through that
period, which now are decayed and crumbled away.  Through that
period it was felt by all to be an undecided experiment; now it
is understood to be a successful one.  Then, all that sought
celebrity and fame and distinction expected to find them in the
success of that experiment.  Their all was staked upon it; their
destiny was inseparably linked with it.  Their ambition aspired
to display before an admiring world a practical demonstration of
the truth of a proposition which had hitherto been considered at
best no better than problematical--namely, the capability of a
people to govern themselves.  If they succeeded they were to be
immortalized; their names were to be transferred to counties, and
cities, and rivers, and mountains; and to be revered and sung,
toasted through all time.  If they failed, they were to be called
knaves) and fools, and fanatics for a fleeting hour; then to sink
and be forgotten.  They succeeded.  The experiment is successful,
and thousands have won their deathless names in making it so.
But the game is caught; and I believe it is true that with the
catching end the pleasures of the chase.  This field of glory is
harvested, and the crop is already appropriated.  But new reapers
will arise, and they too will seek a field.  It is to deny what
the history of the world tells us is true, to suppose that men of
ambition and talents will not continue to spring up amongst us.
And when they do, they will as naturally seek the gratification
of their ruling passion as others have done before them.  The
question then is, Can that gratification be found in supporting
and in maintaining an edifice that has been erected by others?
Most certainly it cannot.  Many great and good men, sufficiently
qualified for any task they should undertake, may ever be found
whose ambition would aspire to nothing beyond a seat in Congress,
a Gubernatorial or a Presidential chair; but such belong not to
the family of the lion, or the tribe of the eagle.  What! think
you these places would satisfy an Alexander, a Caesar, or a
Napoleon? Never! Towering genius disdains a beaten path.  It
seeks regions hitherto unexplored.  It sees no distinction in
adding story to story upon the monuments of fame erected to the
memory of others.  It denies that it is glory enough to serve
under any chief.  It scorns to tread in the footsteps of any
predecessor, however illustrious.  It thirsts and burns for
distinction; and if possible, it will have it, whether at the
expense of emancipating slaves or enslaving freemen.  Is it
unreasonable, then, to expect that some man possessed of the
loftiest genius, coupled with ambition sufficient to push it to
its utmost stretch, will at some time spring up among us? And
when such an one does it will require the people to be united
with each other, attached to the government and laws, and
generally intelligent, to successfully frustrate his designs.

Distinction will be his paramount object, and although he would
as willingly, perhaps more so, acquire it by doing good as harm,
yet, that opportunity being past, and nothing left to be done in
the way of building up, he would set boldly to the task of
pulling down.

Here then is a probable case, highly dangerous, and such an one
as could not have well existed heretofore.

Another reason which once was, but which, to the same extent, is
now no more, has done much in maintaining our institutions thus
far.  I mean the powerful influence which the interesting scenes
of the Revolution had upon the passions of the people as
distinguished from their judgment.  By this influence, the
jealousy, envy, and avarice incident to our nature, and so common
to a state of peace, prosperity, and conscious strength, were for
the time in a great measure smothered and rendered inactive,
while the deep-rooted principles of hate, and the powerful motive
of revenge, instead of being turned against each other, were
directed exclusively against the British nation.  And thus, from
the force of circumstances, the basest principles of our nature
were either made to lie dormant, or to become the active agents
in the advancement of the noblest of causes--that of establishing
and maintaining civil and religious liberty.

But this state of feeling must fade, is fading, has faded, with
the circumstances that produced it.

I do not mean to say that the scenes of the Revolution are now or
ever will be entirely forgotten, but that, like everything else,
they must fade upon the memory of the world, and grow more and
more dim by the lapse of time.  In history, we hope, they will be
read of, and recounted, so long as the Bible shall be read; but
even granting that they will, their influence cannot be what it
heretofore has been.  Even then they cannot be so universally
known nor so vividly felt as they were by the generation just
gone to rest.  At the close of that struggle, nearly every adult
male had been a participator in some of its scenes.  The
consequence was that of those scenes, in the form of a husband, a
father, a son, or a brother, a living history was to be found in
every family--a history bearing the indubitable testimonies of
its own authenticity, in the limbs mangled, in the scars of
wounds received, in the midst of the very scenes related--a
history, too, that could be read and understood alike by all, the
wise and the ignorant, the learned and the unlearned.  But those
histories are gone.  They can be read no more forever.  They were
a fortress of strength; but what invading foeman could never do
the silent artillery of time has done--the leveling of its walls.
They are gone.  They were a forest of giant oaks; but the all-
restless hurricane has swept over them, and left only here and
there a lonely trunk, despoiled of its verdure, shorn of its
foliage, unshading and unshaded, to murmur in a few more gentle
breezes, and to combat with its mutilated limbs a few more ruder
storms, then to sink and be no more.

They were pillars of the temple of liberty; and now that they
have crumbled away that temple must fall unless we, their
descendants, supply their places with other pillars, hewn from
the solid quarry of sober reason.  Passion has helped us, but can
do so no more.  It will in future be our enemy.  Reason cold,
calculating, unimpassioned reason--must furnish all the materials
for our future support and defense.  Let those materials be
moulded into general intelligence, sound morality, and in
particular, a reverence for the Constitution and laws; and that
we improved to the last, that we remained free to the last, that
we revered his name to the last, that during his long sleep we
permitted no hostile foot to pass over or desecrate his resting
place, shall be that which to learn the last trump shall awaken
our Washington.

Upon these let the proud fabric of freedom rest, as the rock of
its basis; and as truly as has been said of the only greater
institution, "the gates of hell shall not prevail against it."




PROTEST IN THE ILLINOIS LEGISLATURE ON THE
SUBJECT OF SLAVERY.

March 3, 1837.

The following protest was presented to the House, which was read
and ordered to be spread in the journals, to wit:

"Resolutions upon the subject of domestic slavery having passed
both branches of the General Assembly at its present session, the
undersigned hereby protest against the passage of the same.

"They believe that the institution of slavery is founded on both
injustice and bad policy, but that the promulgation of abolition
doctrines tends rather to increase than abate its evils.

"They believe that the Congress of the United States has no power
under the Constitution to interfere with the institution of
slavery in the different States.

"They believe that the Congress of the United States has the
power, under the Constitution, to abolish slavery in the District
of Columbia, but that the power ought not to be exercised, unless
at the request of the people of the District.

"The difference between these opinions and those contained in the
said resolutions is their reason for entering this protest.

"DAN STONE,
"A. LINCOLN,
"Representatives from the County of Sangamon."




TO MISS MARY OWENS.

SPRINGFIELD, May 7, 1837.

MISS MARY S. OWENS.

FRIEND MARY:--I have commenced two letters to send you before
this, both of which displeased me before I got half done, and so
I tore them up.  The first I thought was not serious enough, and
the second was on the other extreme.  I shall send this, turn out
as it may.

This thing of living in Springfield is rather a dull business,
after all; at least it is so to me.  I am quite as lonesome here
as I ever was anywhere in my life.  I have been spoken to by but
one woman since I have been here, and should not have been by her
if she could have avoided it.  I 've never been to church yet,
and probably shall not be soon.  I stay away because I am
conscious I should not know how to behave myself.

I am often thinking of what we said about your coming to live at
Springfield.  I am afraid you would not be satisfied.  There is a
great deal of flourishing about in carriages here, which it would
be your doom to see without sharing it.  You would have to be
poor, without the means of hiding your poverty.  Do you believe
you could bear that patiently? Whatever woman may cast her lot
with mine, should any ever do so, it is my intention to do all in
my power to make her happy and contented; and there is nothing I
can imagine that would make me more unhappy than to fail in the
effort.  I know I should be much happier with you than the way I
am, provided I saw no signs of discontent in you.  What you have
said to me may have been in the way of jest, or I may have
misunderstood you.  If so, then let it be forgotten; if
otherwise, I much wish you would think seriously before you
decide.  What I have said I will most positively abide by,
provided you wish it.  My opinion is that you had better not do
it.  You have not been accustomed to hardship, and it may be more
severe than you now imagine.  I know you are capable of thinking
correctly on any subject, and if you deliberate maturely upon
this subject before you decide, then I am willing to abide your
decision.

You must write me a good long letter after you get this.  You
have nothing else to do, and though it might not seem interesting
to you after you had written it, it would be a good deal of
company to me in this "busy wilderness." Tell your sister I don't
want to hear any more about selling out and moving.  That gives
me the "hypo" whenever I think of it.  Yours, etc.,

LINCOLN




TO JOHN BENNETT.

SPRINGFIELD, ILL., Aug. 5, 1837.

JOHN BENNETT, ESQ.

DEAR SIR:-Mr. Edwards tells me you wish to know whether the act
to which your own incorporation provision was attached passed
into a law.  It did. You can organize under the general
incorporation law as soon as you choose.

I also tacked a provision onto a fellow's bill to authorize the
relocation of the road from Salem down to your town, but I am not
certain whether or not the bill passed, neither do I suppose I
can ascertain before the law will be published, if it is a law.
Bowling Greene, Bennette Abe? and yourself are appointed to make
the change.  No news. No excitement except a little about the
election of Monday next.

I suppose, of course, our friend Dr. Heney stands no chance in
your diggings.

Your friend and humble servant,

A. LINCOLN.




TO MARY OWENS.

SPRINGFIELD,
Aug. 16, 1837

FRIEND MARY:
You will no doubt think it rather strange that I should write you
a letter on the same day on which we parted, and I can only
account for it by supposing that seeing you lately makes me think
of you more than usual; while at our late meeting we had but few
expressions of thoughts.  You must know that I cannot see you, or
think of you, with entire indifference; and yet it may be that
you are mistaken in regard to what my real feelings toward you
are.

If I knew you were not, I should not have troubled you with this
letter.  Perhaps any other man would know enough without
information; but I consider it my peculiar right to plead
ignorance, and your bounden duty to allow the plea.

I want in all cases to do right; and most particularly so in all
cases with women.

I want, at this particular time, more than any thing else to do
right with you; and if I knew it would be doing right, as I
rather suspect it would, to let you alone I would do it.  And,
for the purpose of making the matter as plain as possible, I now
say that you can drop the subject, dismiss your thoughts (if you
ever had any) from me for ever and leave this letter unanswered
without calling forth one accusing murmur from me.  And I will
even go further and say that, if it will add anything to your
comfort or peace of mind to do so, it is my sincere wish that you
should.  Do not understand by this that I wish to cut your
acquaintance.  I mean no such thing.  What I do wish is that our
further acquaintance shall depend upon yourself.  If such further
acquaintance would contribute nothing to your happiness, I am
sure it would not to mine.  If you feel yourself in any degree
bound to me, I am now willing to release you, provided you wish
it; while on the other hand I am willing and even anxious to bind
you faster if I can be convinced that it will, in any
considerable degree, add to your happiness.  This, indeed, is the
whole question with me.  Nothing would make me more miserable
than to believe you miserable, nothing more happy than to know
you were so.

In what I have now said, I think I cannot be misunderstood; and
to make myself understood is the only object of this letter.

If it suits you best not to answer this, farewell.  A long life
and a merry one attend you.  But, if you conclude to write back,
speak as plainly as I do.  There can neither be harm nor danger
in saying to me anything you think, just in the manner you think
it.  My respects to your sister.

Your friend,

LINCOLN




LEGAL SUIT OF WIDOW v.s. Gen. ADAMS

TO THE PEOPLE.

"SANGAMON JOURNAL," SPRINGFIELD, ILL.,
Aug. 19, 1837.

In accordance with our determination, as expressed last week, we
present to the reader the articles which were published in hand-
bill form, in reference to the case of the heirs of Joseph
Anderson vs.  James Adams.  These articles can now be read
uninfluenced by personal or party feeling, and with the sole
motive of learning the truth.  When that is done, the reader can
pass his own judgment on the matters at issue.

We only regret in this case, that the publications were not made
some weeks before the election.  Such a course might have
prevented the expressions of regret, which have often been heard
since, from different individuals, on account of the disposition
they made of their votes.



To the Public:

It is well known to most of you, that there is existing at this
time considerable excitement in regard to Gen. Adams's titles to
certain tracts of land, and the manner in which he acquired them.
As I understand, the Gen. charges that the whole has been gotten
up by a knot of lawyers to injure his election; and as I am one
of the knot to which he refers, and as I happen to be in
possession of facts connected with the matter, I will, in as
brief a manner as possible, make a statement of them, together
with the means by which I arrived at the know1edge of them.

Sometime in May or June last, a widow woman, by the name of
Anderson, and her son, who resides in Fulton county, came to
Springfield, for the purpose as they said of selling a ten acre
lot of ground lying near town, which they claimed as the property
of the deceased husband and father.

When they reached town they found the land was c1aimed by Gen.
Adams.  John T.  Stuart and myself were employed to look into the
matter, and if it was thought we could do so with any prospect of
success, to commence a suit for the land.  I went immediately to
the recorder's office to examine Adams's title, and found that
the land had been entered by one Dixon, deeded by Dixon to
Thomas, by Thomas to one Miller, and by Miller to Gen. Adams.
The oldest of these three deeds was about ten or eleven years
old, and the latest more than five, all recorded at the same
time, and that within less than one year.  This I thought a
suspicious circumstance, and I was thereby induced to examine the
deeds very closely, with a view to the discovery of some defect
by which to overturn the title, being almost convinced then it
was founded in fraud.  I discovered that in the deed from Thomas
to Miller, although Miller's name stood in a sort of marginal
note on the record book, it was nowhere in the deed itself.  I
told the fact to Talbott, the recorder, and proposed to him that
he should go to Gen. Adams's and get the original deed, and
compare it with the record, and thereby ascertain whether the
defect was in the original or there was merely an error in the
recording.  As Talbott afterwards told me, he went to the
General's, but not finding him at home, got the deed from his
son, which, when compared with the record, proved what we had
discovered was merely an error of the recorder.  After Mr.
Talbott corrected the record, be brought the original to our
office, as I then thought and think yet, to show us that it was
right.  When he came into the room he handed the deed to me,
remarking that the fault was all his own.  On opening it, another
paper fell out of it, which on examination proved to be an
assignment of a judgment in the Circuit Court of Sangamon County
from Joseph Anderson, the late husband of the widow above named,
to James Adams, the judgment being in favor of said Anderson
against one Joseph Miller.  Knowing that this judgment had some
connection with the land affair, I immediately took a copy of it,
which is word for word, letter for letter and cross for cross as
follows:

"Joseph Anderson,
vs.
Joseph Miller.

Judgment in Sangamon Circuit Court against Joseph Miller obtained
on a note originally 25 dolls and interest thereon accrued.
I assign all my right, title and interest to James Adams which is
in consideration of a debt I owe said Adams.

his
JOSEPH  x  ANDERSON.
mark."


As the copy shows, it bore date May 10, 1827; although the
judgment assigned by it was not obtained until the October
afterwards, as may be seen by any one on the records of the
Circuit Court.  Two other strange circumstances attended it which
cannot be represented by a copy.  One of them was, that the date
"1827" had first been made "1837" and, without the figure "3,"
being fully obliterated, the figure "2" had afterwards been made
on top of it; the other was that, although the date was ten years
old, the writing on it, from the freshness of its appearance, was
thought by many, and I believe by all who saw it, not to be more
than a week old.  The paper on which it was written had a very
old appearance; and there were some old figures on the back of it
which made the freshness of the writing on the face of it much
more striking than I suppose it otherwise might have been.  The
reader's curiosity is no doubt excited to know what connection
this assignment had with the land in question.  The story is
this: Dixon sold and deeded the land to Thomas; Thomas sold it to
Anderson; but before he gave a deed, Anderson sold it to Miller,
and took Miller's note for the purchase money.  When this note
became due, Anderson sued Miller on it, and Miller procured an
injunction from the Court of Chancery to stay the collection of
the money until he should get a deed for the land.  Gen. Adams
was employed as an attorney by Anderson in this chancery suit,
and at the October term, 1827, the injunction was dissolved, and
a judgment given in favor of Anderson against Miller; and it was
provided that Thomas was to execute a deed for the land in favor
of Miller and deliver it to Gen. Adams, to be held up by him till
Miller paid the judgment, and then to deliver it to him.  Miller
left the county without paying the judgment.  Anderson moved to
Fulton county, where he has since died  When the widow came to
Springfield last May or June, as before mentioned, and found the
land deeded to Gen. Adams by Miller, she was naturally led to
inquire why the money due upon the judgment had not been sent to
them, inasmuch as he, Gen. Adams, had no authority to deliver
Thomas's deed to Miller until the money was paid.  Then it was
the General told her, or perhaps her son, who came with her, that
Anderson, in his lifetime, had assigned the judgment to him, Gen.
Adams.  I am now told that the General is exhibiting an
assignment of the same judgment bearing date "1828" and in other
respects differing from the one described; and that he is
asserting that no such assignment as the one copied by me ever
existed; or if there did, it was forged between Talbott and the
lawyers, and slipped into his papers for the purpose of injuring
him.  Now, I can only say that I know precisely such a one did
exist, and that Ben.  Talbott, Wm.  Butler, C.R.  Matheny, John
T.  Stuart, Judge Logan, Robert Irwin, P.  C.  Canedy and S.  M.
Tinsley, all saw and examined it, and that at least one half of
them will swear that IT WAS IN GENERAL ADAMS'S HANDWRITING !! And
further, I know that Talbott will swear that he got it out of the
General's possession, and returned it into his possession again.
The assignment which the General is now exhibiting purports to
have been by Anderson in writing.  The one I copied was signed
with a cross.

I am told that Gen. Neale says that he will swear that he heard
Gen. Adams tell young Anderson that the assignment made by his
father was signed with a cross.

The above are 'facts, as stated.  I leave them without comment.
I have given the names of persons who have knowledge of these
facts, in order that any one who chooses may call on them and
ascertain how far they will corroborate my statements.  I have
only made these statements because I am known by many to be one
of the individuals against whom the charge of forging the
assignment and slipping it into the General's papers has been
made, and because our silence might be construed into a
confession of its truth.  I shall not subscribe my name; but I
hereby authorize the editor of the Journal to give it up to any
one that may call for it."




LINCOLN AND TALBOTT IN REPLY TO GEN. ADAMS.

"SANGAMON JOURNAL," SPRINGFIELD, ILL., Oct. 28, 1837.

In the Republican of this morning a publication of Gen. Adams's
appears, in which my name is used quite unreservedly.  For this I
thank the General.  I thank him because it gives me an
opportunity, without appearing obtrusive, of explaining a part of
a former publication of mine, which appears to me to have been
misunderstood by many.

In the former publication alluded to, I stated, in substance,
that Mr. Talbott got a deed from a son of Gen. Adams's for the
purpose of correcting a mistake that had occurred on the record
of the said deed in the recorder's office; that he corrected the
record, and brought the deed and handed it to me, and that on
opening the deed, another paper, being the assignment of a
judgment, fell out of it.  This statement Gen. Adams and the
editor of the Republican have seized upon as a most palpable
evidence of fabrication and falsehood.  They set themselves
gravely about proving that the assignment could not have been in
the deed when Talbott got it from young Adams, as he, Talbott,
would have seen it when he opened the deed to correct the record.
Now, the truth is, Talbott did see the assignment when he opened
the deed, or at least he told me he did on the same day; and I
only omitted to say so, in my former publication, because it was
a matter of such palpable and necessary inference.  I had stated
that Talbott had corrected the record by the deed; and of course
he must have opened it; and, just as the General and his friends
argue, must have seen the assignment.  I omitted to state the
fact of Talbott's seeing the assignment, because its existence
was so necessarily connected with other facts which I did state,
that I thought the greatest dunce could not but understand it.
Did I say Talbott had not seen it? Did I say anything that was
inconsistent with his having seen it before? Most certainly I did
neither; and if I did not, what becomes of the argument? These
logical gentlemen can sustain their argument only by assuming
that I did say negatively everything that I did not say
affirmatively; and upon the same assumption, we may expect to
find the General, if a little harder pressed for argument, saying
that I said Talbott came to our office with his head downward,
not that I actually said so, but because I omitted to say he came
feet downward.

In his publication to-day, the General produces the affidavit of
Reuben Radford, in which it is said that Talbott told Radford
that he did not find the assignment in the deed, in the recording
of which the error was committed, but that he found it wrapped in
another paper in the recorder's office, upon which statement the
Genl.  comments as follows, to wit:
"If it be true as stated by Talbott to Radford, that he found the
assignment wrapped up in another paper at his office, that
contradicts the statement of Lincoln that it fell out of the
deed."

Is common sense to be abused with such sophistry? Did I say what
Talbott found it in? If Talbott did find it in another paper at
his office, is that any reason why he could not have folded it in
a deed and brought it to my office? Can any one be so far duped
as to be made believe that what may have happened at Talbot's
office at one time is inconsistent with what happened at my
office at another time?

Now Talbott's statement of the case as he makes it to me is this,
that he got a bunch of deeds from young Adams, and that he knows
he found the assignment in the bunch, but he is not certain which
particular deed it was in, nor is he certain whether it was
folded in the same deed out of which it was taken, or another
one, when it was brought to my office.  Is this a mysterious
story? Is there anything suspicious about it?

"But it is useless to dwell longer on this point.  Any man who is
not wilfully blind can see at a flash, that there is no
discrepancy, and Lincoln has shown that they are not only
inconsistent with truth, but each other"--I can only say, that I
have shown that he has done no such thing; and if the reader is
disposed to require any other evidence than the General's
assertion, he will be of my opinion.

Excepting the General's most flimsy attempt at mystification, in
regard to a discrepance between Talbott and myself, he has not
denied a single statement that I made in my hand-bill.  Every
material statement that I made has been sworn to by men who, in
former times, were thought as respectable as General Adams.  I
stated that an assignment of a judgment, a copy of which I gave,
had existed--Benj.  Talbott, C.  R.  Matheny, Wm.  Butler, and
Judge Logan swore to its existence.  I stated that it was said to
be in Gen. Adams's handwriting--the same men swore it was in his
handwriting.  I stated that Talbott would swear that he got it
out of Gen. Adams's possession--Talbott came forward and did
swear it.

Bidding adieu to the former publication, I now propose to examine
the General's last gigantic production.  I now propose to point
out some discrepancies in the General's address; and such, too,
as he shall not be able to escape from.  Speaking of the famous
assignment, the General says: "This last charge, which was their
last resort, their dying effort to render my character infamous
among my fellow citizens, was manufactured at a certain lawyer's
office in the town, printed at the office of the Sangamon
Journal, and found its way into the world some time between two
days just before the last election."  Now turn to Mr. Keys'
affidavit, in which you will find the following, viz.: "I certify
that some time in May or the early part of June, 1837, I saw at
Williams's corner a paper purporting to be an assignment from
Joseph Anderson to James Adams, which assignment was signed by a
mark to Anderson's name," etc.  Now mark, if Keys saw the
assignment on the last of May or first of June, Gen. Adams tells
a falsehood when he says it was manufactured just before the
election, which was on the 7th of August; and if it was
manufactured just before the election, Keys tells a falsehood
when he says he saw it on the last of May or first of June.
Either Keys or the General is irretrievably in for it; and in the
General's very condescending language, I say "Let them settle it
between them."

Now again, let the reader, bearing in mind that General Adams has
unequivocally said, in one part of his address, that the charge
in relation to the assignment was manufactured just before the
election, turn to the affidavit of Peter S.  Weber, where the
following will be found viz.: "I, Peter S.  Weber, do certify
that from the best of my recollection, on the day or day after
Gen. Adams started for the Illinois Rapids, in May last, that I
was at the house of Gen. Adams, sitting in the kitchen, situated
on the back part of the house, it being in the afternoon, and
that Benjamin Talbott came around the house, back into the
kitchen, and appeared wild and confused, and that he laid a
package of papers on the kitchen table and requested that they
should be handed to Lucian.  He made no apology for coming to the
kitchen, nor for not handing them to Lucian himself, but showed
the token of being frightened and confused both in demeanor and
speech and for what cause I could not apprehend."

Commenting on Weber's affidavit, Gen. Adams asks, "Why this
fright and confusion?" I reply that this is a question for the
General himself.  Weber says that it was in May, and if so, it is
most clear that Talbott was not frightened on account of the
assignment, unless the General lies when he says the assignment
charge was manufactured just before the election.  Is it not a
strong evidence, that the General is not traveling with the pole-
star of truth in his front, to see him in one part of his address
roundly asserting that the assignment was manufactured just
before the election, and then, forgetting that position,
procuring Weber's most foolish affidavit, to prove that Talbott
had been engaged in manufacturing it two months before?

In another part of his address, Gen. Adams says:  "That I hold an
assignment of said judgment, dated the 20th of May, 1828, and
signed by said Anderson, I have never pretended to deny or
conceal, but stated that fact in one of my circulars previous to
the election, and also in answer to a bill in chancery." Now I
pronounce this statement unqualifiedly false, and shall not rely
on the word or oath of any man to sustain me in what I say; but
will let the whole be decided by reference to the circular and
answer in chancery of which the General speaks.  In his circular
he did speak of an assignment; but he did not say it bore date
20th of May, 1828; nor did he say it bore any date.  In his
answer in chancery, he did say that he had an assignment; but he
did not say that it bore date the 20th May, 1828; but so far from
it, he said on oath (for he swore to the answer) that as well as
recollected, he obtained it in 1827.  If any one doubts, let him
examine the circular and answer for himself.  They are both
accessible.

It will readily be observed that the principal part of Adams's
defense rests upon the argument that if he had been base enough
to forge an assignment he would not have been fool enough to
forge one that would not cover the case.  This argument he used
in his circular before the election.  The Republican has used it
at least once, since then; and Adams uses it again in his
publication of to-day.  Now I pledge myself to show that he is
just such a fool that he and his friends have contended it was
impossible for him to be.  Recollect--he says he has a genuine
assignment; and that he got Joseph Klein's affidavit, stating
that he had seen it, and that he believed the signature to have
been executed by the same hand that signed Anderson's name to the
answer in chancery.  Luckily Klein took a copy of this genuine
assignment, which I have been permitted to see; and hence I know
it does not cover the case.  In the first place it is headed
"Joseph Anderson vs.  Joseph Miller," and heads off "Judgment in
Sangamon Circuit Court." Now, mark, there never was a case in
Sangamon Circuit Court entitled Joseph Anderson vs.  Joseph
Miller.  The case mentioned in my former publication, and the
only one between these parties that ever existed in the Circuit
Court, was entitled Joseph Miller vs.  Joseph Anderson, Miller
being the plaintiff.  What then becomes of all their sophistry
about Adams not being fool enough to forge an assignment that
would not cover the case? It is certain that the present one does
not cover the case; and if he got it honestly, it is still clear
that he was fool enough to pay for an assignment that does not
cover the case.

The General asks for the proof of disinterested witnesses.  Whom
does he consider disinterested? None can be more so than those
who have already testified against him.  No one of them had the
least interest on earth, so far as I can learn, to injure him.
True, he says they had conspired against him; but if the
testimony of an angel from Heaven were introduced against him, he
would make the same charge of conspiracy.  And now I put the
question to every reflecting man, Do you believe that Benjamin
Talbott, Chas.  R.  Matheny, William Butler and Stephen T.
Logan, all sustaining high and spotless characters, and justly
proud of them, would deliberately perjure themselves, without any
motive whatever, except to injure a man's election; and that,
too, a man who had been a candidate, time out of mind, and yet
who had never been elected to any office?

Adams's assurance, in demanding disinterested testimony, is
surpassing.  He brings in the affidavit of his own son, and even
of Peter S.  Weber, with whom I am not acquainted, but who, I
suppose, is some black or mulatto boy, from his being kept in the
kitchen, to prove his points; but when such a man as Talbott, a
man who, but two years ago, ran against Gen. Adams for the office
of Recorder and beat him more than four votes to one, is
introduced against him, he asks the community, with all the
consequence of a lord, to reject his testimony.

I might easily write a volume, pointing out inconsistencies
between the statements in Adams's last address with one another,
and with other known facts; but I am aware the reader must
already be tired with the length of this article.  His opening
statements, that he was first accused of being a Tory, and that
he refuted that; that then the Sampson's ghost story was got up,
and he refuted that; that as a last resort, a dying effort, the
assignment charge was got up is all as false as hell, as all this
community must know.  Sampson's ghost first made its appearance
in print, and that, too, after Keys swears he saw the assignment,
as any one may see by reference to the files of papers; and Gen.
Adams himself, in reply to the Sampson's ghost story, was the
first man that raised the cry of toryism, and it was only by way
of set-off, and never in seriousness, that it was bandied back at
him.  His effort is to make the impression that his enemies first
made the charge of toryism and he drove them from that, then
Sampson's ghost, he drove them from that, then finally the
assignment charge was manufactured just before election.  Now,
the only general reply he ever made to the Sampson's ghost and
tory charges he made at one and the same time, and not in
succession as he states; and the date of that reply will show,
that it was made at least a month after the date on which Keys
swears he saw the Anderson assignment.  But enough.  In
conclusion I will only say that I have a character to defend as
well as Gen. Adams, but I disdain to whine about it as he does.
It is true I have no children nor kitchen boys; and if I had, I
should scorn to lug them in to make affidavits for me.

A. LINCOLN,  September 6, 1837.




Gen. ADAMS CONTROVERSY--CONTINUED

TO THE PUBLIC.

"SANGAMON JOURNAL," Springfield, Ill, Oct.28, 1837.

Such is the turn which things have taken lately, that when Gen.
Adams writes a book, I am expected to write a commentary on it.
In the Republican of this morning he has presented the world with
a new work of six columns in length; in consequence of which I
must beg the room of one column in the Journal.  It is obvious
that a minute reply cannot be made in one column to everything
that can be said in six; and, consequently, I hope that
expectation will be answered if I reply to such parts of the
General's publication as are worth replying to.

It may not be improper to remind the reader that in his
publication of Sept.  6th General Adams said that the assignment
charge was manufactured just before the election; and that in
reply I proved that statement to be false by Keys, his own
witness.  Now, without attempting to explain, he furnishes me
with another witness (Tinsley) by which the same thing is proved,
to wit, that the assignment was not manufactured just before the
election; but that it was some weeks before.  Let it be borne in
mind that Adams made this statement--has himself furnished two
witnesses to prove its falsehood, and does not attempt to deny or
explain it.  Before going farther, let a pin be stuck here,
labeled "One lie proved and confessed." On the 6th of September
he said he had before stated in the hand-bill that he held an
assignment dated May 20th, 1828, which in reply I pronounced to
be false, and referred to the hand-bill for the truth of what I
said.  This week he forgets to make any explanation of this.  Let
another pin be stuck here, labelled as before.  I mention these
things because, if, when I convict him in one falsehood, he is
permitted to shift his ground and pass it by in silence, there
can be no end to this controversy.

The first thing that attracts my attention in the General's
present production is the information he is pleased to give to
"those who are made to suffer at his (my) hands."

Under present circumstances, this cannot apply to me, for I am
not a widow nor an orphan: nor have I a wife or children who
might by possibility become such.  Such, however, I have no
doubt, have been, and will again be made to suffer at his hands!
Hands!  Yes, they are the mischievous agents.  The next thing I
shall notice is his favorite expression, "not of lawyers, doctors
and others," which he is so fond of applying to all who dare
expose his rascality.  Now, let it be remembered that when he
first came to this country he attempted to impose himself upon
the community as a lawyer, and actually carried the attempt so
far as to induce a man who was under a charge of murder to
entrust the defence of his life in his hands, and finally took
his money and got him hanged.  Is this the man that is to raise a
breeze in his favor by abusing lawyers? If he is not himself a
lawyer, it is for the lack of sense, and not of inclination.  If
he is not a lawyer, he is a liar, for he proclaimed himself a
lawyer, and got a man hanged by depending on him.

Passing over such parts of the article as have neither fact nor
argument in them, I come to the question asked by Adams whether
any person ever saw the assignment in his possession.  This is an
insult to common sense.  Talbott has sworn once and repeated time
and again, that he got it out of Adams's possession and returned
it into the same possession.  Still, as though he was addressing
fools, he has assurance to ask if any person ever saw it in his
possession.

Next I quote a sentence,     "Now my son Lucian swears that when
Talbott called for the deed, that he, Talbott, opened it and
pointed out the error." True.  His son Lucian did swear as he
says; and in doing so, he swore what I will prove by his own
affidavit to be a falsehood.  Turn to Lucian's affidavit, and you
will there see that Talbott called for the deed by which to
correct an error on the record.  Thus it appears that the error
in question was on the record, and not in the deed.  How then
could Talbott open the deed and point out the error? Where a
thing is not, it cannot be pointed out.  The error was not in the
deed, and of course could not be pointed out there.  This does
not merely prove that the error could not be pointed out, as
Lucian swore it was; but it proves, too, that the deed was not
opened in his presence with a special view to the error, for if
it had been, he could not have failed to see that there was no
error in it.  It is easy enough to see why Lucian swore this.
His object was to prove that the assignment was not in the deed
when Talbott got it: but it was discovered he could not swear
this safely, without first swearing the deed was opened--and if
he swore it was opened, he must show a motive for opening it, and
the conclusion with him and his father was that the pointing out
the error would appear the most plausible.

For the purpose of showing that the assignment was not in the
bundle when Talbott got it, is the story introduced into Lucian's
affidavit that the deeds were counted.  It is a remarkable fact,
and one that should stand as a warning to all liars and
fabricators, that in this short affidavit of Lucian's he only
attempted to depart from the truth, so far as I have the means of
knowing, in two points, to wit, in the opening the deed and
pointing out the error and the counting of the deeds,--and in
both of these he caught himself.  About the counting, he caught
himself thus--after saying the bundle contained five deeds and a
lease, he proceeds, "and I saw no other papers than the said deed
and lease." First he has six papers, and then he saw none but
two; for "my son Lucian's" benefit, let a pin be stuck here.

Adams again adduces the argument, that he could not have forged
the assignment, for the reason that he could have had no motive
for it.  With those that know the facts there is no absence of
motive.  Admitting the paper which he has filed in the suit to be
genuine, it is clear that it cannot answer the purpose for which
he designs it.  Hence his motive for making one that he supposed
would answer is obvious.  His making the date too old is also
easily enough accounted for.  The records were not in his hands,
and then, there being some considerable talk upon this particular
subject, he knew he could not examine the records to ascertain
the precise dates without subjecting himself to suspicion; and
hence he concluded to try it by guess, and, as it turned out,
missed it a little.  About Miller's deposition I have a word to
say.  In the first place, Miller's answer to the first question
shows upon its face that he had been tampered with, and the
answer dictated to him.  He was asked if he knew Joel Wright and
James Adams; and above three-fourths of his answer consists of
what he knew about Joseph Anderson, a man about whom nothing had
been asked, nor a word said in the question--a fact that can only
be accounted for upon the supposition that Adams had secretly
told him what he wished him to swear to.

Another of Miller's answers I will prove both by common sense and
the Court of Record is untrue.  To one question he answers,
"Anderson brought a suit against me before James Adams, then an
acting justice of the peace in Sangamon County, before whom he
obtained a judgment.

"Q.--Did you remove the same by injunction to the Sangamon
Circuit Court? Ans.--I did remove it."

Now mark--it is said he removed it by injunction.  The word
"injunction" in common language imports a command that some
person or thing shall not move or be removed; in law it has the
same meaning.  An injunction issuing out of chancery to a justice
of the peace is a command to him to stop all proceedings in a
named case until further orders.  It is not an order to remove
but to stop or stay something that is already moving.  Besides
this, the records of the Sangamon Circuit Court show that the
judgment of which Miller swore was never removed into said Court
by injunction or otherwise.

I have now to take notice of a part of Adams's address which in
the order of time should have been noticed before.  It is in
these words: "I have now shown, in the opinion of two competent
judges, that the handwriting of the forged assignment differed
from mine, and by one of them that it could not be mistaken for
mine."  That is false.  Tinsley no doubt is the judge referred
to; and by reference to his certificate it will be seen that he
did not say the handwriting of the assignment could not be
mistaken for Adams's--nor did he use any other expression
substantially, or anything near substantially, the same.  But if
Tinsley had said the handwriting could not be mistaken for
Adams's, it would have been equally unfortunate for Adams: for it
then would have contradicted Keys, who says, "I looked at the
writing and judged it the said Adams's or a good imitation."

Adams speaks with much apparent confidence of his success on
attending lawsuits, and the ultimate maintenance of his title to
the land in question.  Without wishing to disturb the pleasure of
his dream, I would say to him that it is not impossible that he
may yet be taught to sing a different song in relation to the
matter.

At the end of Miller's deposition, Adams asks, Will Mr. Lincoln
now say that he is almost convinced my title to this ten acre
tract of land is founded in fraud?" I answer, I will not.  I will
now change the phraseology so as to make it run--I am quite
convinced, &c.  I cannot pass in silence Adams's assertion that
he has proved that the forged assignment was not in the deed when
it came from his house by Talbott, the recorder.  In this,
although Talbott has sworn that the assignment was in the bundle
of deeds when it came from his house, Adams has the unaccountable
assurance to say that he has proved the contrary by Talbott.  Let
him or his friends attempt to show wherein he proved any such
thing by Talbott.

In his publication of the 6th of September he hinted to Talbott,
that he might be mistaken.  In his present, speaking of Talbott
and me he says "They may have been imposed upon." Can any man of
the least penetration fail to see the object of this? After be
has stormed and raged till he hopes and imagines he has got us a
little scared he wishes to softly whisper in our ears, "If you'l1
quit I will." If he could get us to say that some unknown,
undefined being had slipped the assignment into our hands without
our knowledge, not a doubt remains but that be would immediately
discover that we were the purest men on earth.  This is the
ground he evidently wishes us to understand he is willing to
compromise upon.  But we ask no such charity at his hands.  We
are neither mistaken nor imposed upon.  We have made the
statements we have because we know them to be true and we choose
to live or die by them.

Esq.  Carter, who is Adams's friend, personal and political, will
recollect, that, on the 5th of this month, he (Adams), with a
great affectation of modesty, declared that he would never
introduce his own child as a witness.  Notwithstanding this
affectation of modesty, he has in his present publication
introduced his child as witness; and as if to show with how much
contempt he could treat his own declaration, he has had this same
Esq.  Carter to administer the oath to him.  And so important a
witness does he consider him, and so entirely does the whole of
his entire present production depend upon the testimony of his
child, that in it he has mentioned "my son," "my son Lucian,"
"Lucian, my son," and the like expressions no less than fifteen
different times.  Let it be remembered here, that I have shown
the affidavit of "my darling son Lucian" to be false by the
evidence apparent on its own face; and I now ask if that
affidavit be taken away what foundation will the fabric have left
to stand upon?

General Adams's publications and out-door maneuvering, taken in
connection with the editorial articles of the Republican, are not
more foolish and contradictory than they are ludicrous and
amusing.  One week the Republican notifies the public that Gen.
Adams is preparing an instrument that will tear, rend, split,
rive, blow up, confound, overwhelm, annihilate, extinguish,
exterminate, burst asunder, and grind to powder all its
slanderers, and particularly Talbott and Lincoln--all of which is
to be done in due time.

Then for two or three weeks all is calm--not a word said.  Again
the Republican comes forth with a mere passing remark that
"public" opinion has decided in favor of Gen. Adams, and
intimates that he will give himself no more trouble about the
matter.  In the meantime Adams himself is prowling about and, as
Burns says of the devil, "For prey, and holes and corners
tryin'," and in one instance goes so far as to take an old
acquaintance of mine several steps from a crowd and, apparently
weighed down with the importance of his business, gravely and
solemnly asks him if "he ever heard Lincoln say he was a deist."

Anon the Republican comes again.  "We invite the attention of the
public to General Adams's communication," &c.  "The victory is a
great one, the triumph is overwhelming." I really believe the
editor of the Illinois Republican is fool enough to think General
Adams leads off--"Authors most egregiously mistaken) &c.  Most
woefully shall their presumption be punished," &c.  (Lord have
mercy on us.) "The hour is yet to come, yea, nigh at hand--(how
long first do you reckon ?)--when the Journal and its junto shall
say, I have appeared too early." "Their infamy shall be laid bare
to the public gaze." Suddenly the General appears to relent at
the severity with which he is treating us and he exclaims: "The
condemnation of my enemies is the inevitable result of my own
defense." For your health's sake, dear Gen., do not permit your
tenderness of heart to afflict you so much on our account.  For
some reason (perhaps because we are killed so quickly) we shall
never be sensible of our suffering.

Farewell, General.  I will see you again at court if not before--
when and where we will settle the question whether you or the
widow shall have the land.

A. LINCOLN.
October 18, 1837.




1838


TO Mrs. O. H. BROWNING--A FARCE

SPRINGFIELD,  April 1, 1838.

DEAR MADAM:--Without apologizing for being egotistical, I shall
make the history of so much of my life as has elapsed since I saw
you the subject of this letter.  And, by the way, I now discover
that, in order to give a full and intelligible account of the
things I have done and suffered since I saw you, I shall
necessarily have to relate some that happened before.

It was, then, in the autumn of 1836 that a married lady of my
acquaintance, and who was a great friend of mine, being about to
pay a visit to her father and other relatives residing in
Kentucky, proposed to me that on her return she would bring a
sister of hers with her on condition that I would engage to
become her brother-in-law with all convenient despatch.  I, of
course, accepted the proposal, for you know I could not have done
otherwise had I really been averse to it; but privately, between
you and me, I was most confoundedly well pleased with the
project.  I had seen the said sister some three years before,
thought her intelligent and agreeable, and saw no good objection
to plodding life through hand in hand with her.  Time passed on;
the lady took her journey and in due time returned, sister in
company, sure enough.  This astonished me a little, for it
appeared to me that her coming so readily showed that she was a
trifle too willing, but on reflection it occurred to me that she
might have been prevailed on by her married sister to come
without anything concerning me ever having been mentioned to her,
and so I concluded that if no other objection presented itself, I
would consent to waive this.  All this occurred to me on hearing
of her arrival in the neighborhood--for, be it remembered, I had
not yet seen her, except about three years previous, as above
mentioned.  In a few days we had an interview, and, although I
had seen her before, she did not look as my imagination had
pictured her.  I knew she was over-size, but she now appeared a
fair match for Falstaff.  I knew she was called an "old maid,"
and I felt no doubt of the truth of at least half of the
appellation, but now, when I beheld her, I could not for my life
avoid thinking of my mother; and this, not from withered
features,--for her skin was too full of fat to permit of its
contracting into wrinkles,--but from her want of teeth, weather-
beaten appearance in general, and from a kind of notion that ran
in my head that nothing could have commenced at the size of
infancy and reached her present bulk in less than thirty-five or
forty years; and in short, I was not at all pleased with her.
But what could I do? I had told her sister that I would take her
for better or for worse, and I made a point of honor and
conscience in all things to stick to my word especially if others
had been induced to act on it which in this case I had no doubt
they had, for I was now fairly convinced that no other man on
earth would have her, and hence the conclusion that they were
bent on holding me to my bargain.

"Well," thought I, "I have said it, and, be the consequences what
they may, it shall not be my fault if I fail to do it." At once I
determined to consider her my wife; and, this done, all my powers
of discovery were put to work in search of perfections in her
which might be fairly set off against her defects.  I tried to
imagine her handsome, which, but for her unfortunate corpulency,
was actually true.  Exclusive of this no woman that I have ever
seen has a finer face.  I also tried to convince myself that the
mind was much more to be valued than the person; and in this she
was not inferior, as I could discover, to any with whom I had
been acquainted.

Shortly after this, without coming to any positive understanding
with her, I set out for Vandalia, when and where you first saw
me.  During my stay there I had letters from her which did not
change my opinion of either her intellect or intention, but on
the contrary confirmed it in both.

All this while, although I was fixed, "firm as the surge-
repelling rock," in my resolution, I found I was continually
repenting the rashness which had led me to make it.  Through
life, I have been in no bondage, either real or imaginary, from
the thraldom of which I so much desired to be free.  After my
return home, I saw nothing to change my opinions of her in any
particular.  She was the same, and so was I.  I now spent my time
in planning how I might get along through life after my
contemplated change of circumstances should have taken place, and
how I might procrastinate the evil day for a time, which I really
dreaded as much, perhaps more, than an Irishman does the halter.

After all my suffering upon this deeply interesting subject, here
I am, wholly, unexpectedly, completely, out of the "scrape"; and
now I want to know if you can guess how I got out of it----out,
clear, in every sense of the term; no violation of word, honor,
or conscience.  I don't believe you can guess, and so I might as
well tell you at once.  As the lawyer says, it was done in the
manner following, to wit: After I had delayed the matter as long
as I thought I could in honor do (which, by the way, had brought
me round into the last fall), I concluded I might as well bring
it to a consummation without further delay; and so I mustered my
resolution, and made the proposal to her direct; but, shocking to
relate, she answered, No.  At first I supposed she did it through
an affectation of modesty, which I thought but ill became her
under the peculiar circumstances of her case; but on my renewal
of the charge, I found she repelled it with greater firmness than
before.  I tried it again and again but with the same success, or
rather with the same want of success.

I finally was forced to give it up; at which I very unexpectedly
found myself mortified almost beyond endurance.  I was mortified,
it seemed to me, in a hundred different ways.  My vanity was
deeply wounded by the reflection that I had been too stupid to
discover her intentions, and at the same time never doubting that
I understood them perfectly, and also that she, whom I had taught
myself to believe nobody else would have, had actually rejected
me with all my fancied greatness.  And, to cap the whole, I then
for the first time began to suspect that I was really a little in
love with her.  But let it all go.  I'll try and outlive it.
Others have been made fools of by the girls, but this can never
with truth be said of me.  I most emphatically in this instance,
made a fool of myself.  I have now come to the conclusion never
again to think of marrying, and for this reason: I can never be
satisfied with any one who would be blockhead enough to have me.

When you receive this, write me a long yarn about something to
amuse me.  Give my respects to Mr. Browning.

Your sincere friend,
A. LINCOLN.




1839


REMARKS ON SALE OF PUBLIC LANDS

IN THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES, January 17, 1839.

Mr. Lincoln, from Committee on Finance, to which the subject was
referred, made a report on the subject of purchasing of the
United States all the unsold lands lying within the limits of the
State of Illinois, accompanied by resolutions that this State
propose to purchase all unsold lands at twenty-five cents per
acre, and pledging the faith of the State to carry the proposal
into effect if the government accept the same within two years.

Mr. Lincoln thought the resolutions ought to be seriously
considered.  In reply to the gentleman from Adams, he said that
it was not to enrich the State.  The price of the lands may be
raised, it was thought by some; by others, that it would be
reduced.  The conclusion in his mind was that the representatives
in this Legislature from the country in which the lands lie would
be opposed to raising the price, because it would operate against
the settlement of the lands.  He referred to the lands in the
military tract.  They had fallen into the hands of large
speculators in consequence of the low price.  He was opposed to a
low price of land.  He thought it was adverse to the interests of
the poor settler, because speculators buy them up.  He was
opposed to a reduction of the price of public lands.

Mr. Lincoln referred to some official documents emanating from
Indiana, and compared the progressive population of the two
States.  Illinois had gained upon that State under the public
land system as it is.  His conclusion was that ten years from
this time Illinois would have no more public land unsold than
Indiana now has.  He referred also to Ohio.  That State had sold
nearly all her public lands.  She was but twenty years ahead of
us, and as our lands were equally salable--more so, as he
maintained--we should have no more twenty years from now than she
has at present.

Mr. Lincoln referred to the canal lands, and supposed that the
policy of the State would be different in regard to them, if the
representatives from that section of country could themselves
choose the policy; but the representatives from other parts of
the State had a veto upon it, and regulated the policy.  He
thought that if the State had all the lands, the policy of the
Legislature would be more liberal to all sections.

He referred to the policy of the General Government.  He thought
that if the national debt had not been paid, the expenses of the
government would not have doubled, as they had done since that
debt was paid.




TO _________ ROW.

SPRINGFIELD, June 11, 1839

DEAR ROW:

Mr. Redman informs me that you wish me to write you the
particulars of a conversation between Dr. Felix and myself
relative to you.  The Dr. overtook me between Rushville and
Beardstown.

He, after learning that I had lived at Springfield, asked if I
was acquainted with you.  I told him I was.  He said you had
lately been elected constable in Adams, but that you never would
be again.  I asked him why.  He said the people there had found
out that you had been sheriff or deputy sheriff in Sangamon
County, and that you came off and left your securities to suffer.
He then asked me if I did not know such to be the fact.  I told
him I did not think you had ever been sheriff or deputy sheriff
in Sangamon, but that I thought you had been constable.  I
further told him that if you had left your securities to suffer
in that or any other case, I had never heard of it, and that if
it had been so, I thought I would have heard of it.

If the Dr. is telling that I told him anything against you
whatever, I authorize you to contradict it flatly.  We have no
news here.

Your friend, as ever,

A. LINCOLN.




SPEECH ON NATIONAL BANK

IN THE HALL OF THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES

SPRINGFIELD, ILLINOIS,  December 20, 1839.

FELLOW-CITIZENS:--It is peculiarly embarrassing to me to attempt
a continuance of the discussion, on this evening, which has been
conducted in this hall on several preceding ones.  It is so
because on each of those evenings there was a much fuller
attendance than now, without any reason for its being so, except
the greater interest the community feel in the speakers who
addressed them then than they do in him who is to do so now.  I
am, indeed, apprehensive that the few who have attended have done
so more to spare me mortification than in the hope of being
interested in anything I may be able to say.  This circumstance
casts a damp upon my spirits, which I am sure I shall be unable
to overcome during the evening.  But enough of preface.

The subject heretofore and now to be discussed is the subtreasury
scheme of the present administration, as a means of collecting,
safe-keeping, transferring, and disbursing, the revenues of the
nation, as contrasted with a national bank for the same purposes.
Mr. Douglas has said that we (the Whigs) have not dared to meet
them (the Locos) in argument on this question.  I protest against
this assertion.  I assert that we have again and again, during
this discussion, urged facts and arguments against the
subtreasury which they have neither dared to deny nor attempted
to answer.  But lest some may be led to believe that we really
wish to avoid the question, I now propose, in my humble way, to
urge those arguments again; at the same time begging the audience
to mark well the positions I shall take and the proof I shall
offer to sustain them, and that they will not again permit Mr.
Douglas or his friends to escape the force of them by a round and
groundless assertion that we "dare not meet them in argument."

Of the subtreasury, then, as contrasted with a national bank for
the before-enumerated purposes, I lay down the following
propositions, to wit: (1) It will injuriously affect the
community by its operation on the circulating medium.  (2) It
will be a more expensive fiscal agent.  (3) It will be a less
secure depository of the public money.  To show the truth of the
first proposition, let us take a short review of our condition
under the operation of a national bank.  It was the depository of
the public revenues.  Between the collection of those revenues
and the disbursement of them by the government, the bank was
permitted to and did actually loan them out to individuals, and
hence the large amount of money actually collected for revenue
purposes, which by any other plan would have been idle a great
portion of the time, was kept almost constantly in circulation.
Any person who will reflect that money is only valuable while in
circulation will readily perceive that any device which will keep
the government revenues in constant circulation, instead of being
locked up in idleness, is no inconsiderable advantage.  By the
subtreasury the revenue is to be collected and kept in iron boxes
until the government wants it for disbursement; thus robbing the
people of the use of it, while the government does not itself
need it, and while the money is performing no nobler office than
that of rusting in iron boxes.  The natural effect of this change
of policy, every one will see, is to reduce the quantity of money
in circulation.  But, again, by the subtreasury scheme the
revenue is to be collected in specie.  I anticipate that this
will be disputed.  I expect to hear it said that it is not the
policy of the administration to collect the revenue in specie.
If it shall, I reply that Mr. Van Buren, in his message
recommending the subtreasury, expended nearly a column of that
document in an attempt to persuade Congress to provide for the
collection of the revenue in specie exclusively; and he concludes
with these words:

"It may be safely assumed that no motive of convenience to the
citizens requires the reception of bank paper." In addition to
this, Mr. Silas Wright, Senator from New York, and the political,
personal and confidential friend of Mr. Van Buren, drafted and
introduced into the Senate the first subtreasury bill, and that
bill provided for ultimately collecting the revenue in specie.
It is true, I know, that that clause was stricken from the bill,
but it was done by the votes of the Whigs, aided by a portion
only of the Van Buren senators.  No subtreasury bill has yet
become a law, though two or three have been considered by
Congress, some with and some without the specie clause; so that I
admit there is room for quibbling upon the question of whether
the administration favor the exclusive specie doctrine or not;
but I take it that the fact that the President at first urged the
specie doctrine, and that under his recommendation the first bill
introduced embraced it, warrants us in charging it as the policy
of the party until their head as publicly recants it as he at
first espoused it.  I repeat, then, that by the subtreasury the
revenue is to be collected in specie.  Now mark what the effect
of this must be.  By all estimates ever made there are but
between sixty and eighty millions of specie in the United States.
The expenditures of the Government for the year 1838--the last
for which we have had the report--were forty millions.  Thus it
is seen that if the whole revenue be collected in specie, it will
take more than half of all the specie in the nation to do it.  By
this means more than half of all the specie belonging to the
fifteen millions of souls who compose the whole population of the
country is thrown into the hands of the public office-holders,
and other public creditors comprising in number perhaps not more
than one quarter of a million, leaving the other fourteen
millions and three quarters to get along as they best can, with
less than one half of the specie of the country, and whatever
rags and shinplasters they may be able to put, and keep, in
circulation.  By this means, every office-holder and other public
creditor may, and most likely will, set up shaver; and a most
glorious harvest will the specie-men have of it,--each specie-
man, upon a fair division, having to his share the fleecing of
about fifty-nine rag-men.  In all candor let me ask, was such a
system for benefiting the few at the expense of the many ever
before devised? And was the sacred name of Democracy ever before
made to indorse such an enormity against the rights of the
people?

I have already said that the subtreasury will reduce the quantity
of money in circulation.  This position is strengthened by the
recollection that the revenue is to be collected in Specie, so
that the mere amount of revenue is not all that is withdrawn, but
the amount of paper circulation that the forty millions would
serve as a basis to is withdrawn, which would be in a sound state
at least one hundred millions.  When one hundred millions, or
more, of the circulation we now have shall be withdrawn, who can
contemplate without terror the distress, ruin, bankruptcy, and
beggary that must follow? The man who has purchased any article--
say a horse--on credit, at one hundred dollars, when there are
two hundred millions circulating in the country, if the quantity
be reduced to one hundred millions by the arrival of pay-day,
will find the horse but sufficient to pay half the debt; and the
other half must either be paid out of his other means, and
thereby become a clear loss to him, or go unpaid, and thereby
become a clear loss to his creditor.  What I have here said of a
single case of the purchase of a horse will hold good in every
case of a debt existing at the time a reduction in the quantity
of money occurs, by whomsoever, and for whatsoever, it may have
been contracted.  It may be said that what the debtor loses the
creditor gains by this operation; but on examination this will be
found true only to a very limited extent.  It is more generally
true that all lose by it--the creditor by losing more of his
debts than he gains by the increased value of those he collects;
the debtor by either parting with more of his property to pay his
debts than he received in contracting them, or by entirely
breaking up his business, and thereby being thrown upon the world
in idleness.

The general distress thus created will, to be sure, be temporary,
because, whatever change may occur in the quantity of money in
any community, time will adjust the derangement produced; but
while that adjustment is progressing, all suffer more or less,
and very many lose everything that renders life desirable.  Why,
then, shall we suffer a severe difficulty, even though it be but
temporary, unless we receive some equivalent for it?

What I have been saying as to the effect produced by a reduction
of the quantity of money relates to the whole country.  I now
propose to show that it would produce a peculiar and permanent
hardship upon the citizens of those States and Territories in
which the public lands lie.  The land-offices in those States and
Territories, as all know, form the great gulf by which all, or
nearly all, the money in them is swallowed up.  When the quantity
of money shall be reduced, and consequently everything under
individual control brought down in proportion, the price of those
lands, being fixed by law, will remain as now.  Of necessity it
will follow that the produce or labor that now raises money
sufficient to purchase eighty acres will then raise but
sufficient to purchase forty, or perhaps not that much; and this
difficulty and hardship will last as long, in some degree, as any
portion of these lands shall remain undisposed of.  Knowing, as I
well do, the difficulty that poor people now encounter in
procuring homes, I hesitate not to say that when the price of the
public lands shall be doubled or trebled, or, which is the same
thing, produce and labor cut down to one half or one third of
their present prices, it will be little less than impossible for
them to procure those homes at all....

Well, then, what did become of him?   (Postmaster General Barry)
Why, the President immediately expressed his high disapprobation
of his almost unequaled incapacity and corruption by appointing
him to a foreign mission, with a salary and outfit of $18,000 a
year! The party now attempt to throw Barry off, and to avoid the
responsibility of his sins.  Did not the President indorse those
sins when, on the very heel of their commission, he appointed
their author to the very highest and most honorable office in his
gift, and which is but a single step behind the very goal of
American political ambition?

I return to another of Mr. Douglas's excuses for the expenditures
of 1838, at the same time announcing the pleasing intelligence
that this is the last one.  He says that ten millions of that
year's expenditure was a contingent appropriation, to prosecute
an anticipated war with Great Britain on the Maine boundary
question.  Few words will settle this.  First, that the ten
millions appropriated was not made till 1839, and consequently
could not have been expended in 1838; second, although it was
appropriated, it has never been expended at all.  Those who heard
Mr. Douglas recollect that he indulged himself in a contemptuous
expression of pity for me.  "Now he's got me," thought I.  But
when he went on to say that five millions of the expenditure of
1838 were payments of the French indemnities, which I knew to be
untrue; that five millions had been for the post-office, which I
knew to be untrue; that ten millions had been for the Maine
boundary war, which I not only knew to be untrue, but supremely
ridiculous also; and when I saw that he was stupid enough to hope
that I would permit such groundless and audacious assertions to
go unexposed,--I readily consented that, on the score both of
veracity and sagacity, the audience should judge whether he or I
were the more deserving of the world's contempt.

Mr. Lamborn insists that the difference between the Van Buren
party and the Whigs is that, although the former sometimes err in
practice, they are always correct in principle, whereas the
latter are wrong in principle; and, better to impress this
proposition, he uses a figurative expression in these words: "The
Democrats are vulnerable in the heel, but they are sound in the
head and the heart." The first branch of the figure--that is,
that the Democrats are vulnerable in the heel--I admit is not
merely figuratively, but literally true.  Who that looks but for
a moment at their Swartwouts, their Prices, their Harringtons,
and their hundreds of others, scampering away with the public
money to Texas, to Europe, and to every spot of the earth where a
villain may hope to find refuge from justice, can at all doubt
that they are most distressingly affected in their heels with a
species of "running itch"?  It seems that this malady of their
heels operates on these sound-headed and honest-hearted creatures
very much like the cork leg in the comic song did on its owner:
which, when he had once got started on it, the more he tried to
stop it, the more it would run away.  At the hazard of wearing
this point threadbare, I will relate an anecdote which seems too
strikingly in point to be omitted.  A witty Irish soldier, who
was always boasting of his bravery when no danger was near, but
who invariably retreated without orders at the first charge of an
engagement, being asked by his captain why he did so, replied:
"Captain, I have as brave a heart as Julius Caesar ever had; but,
somehow or other, whenever danger approaches, my cowardly legs
will run away with it." So with Mr. Lamborn's party.  They take
the public money into their hand for the most laudable purpose
that wise heads and honest hearts can dictate; but before they
can possibly get it out again, their rascally "vulnerable heels"
will run away with them.

Seriously this proposition of Mr. Lamborn is nothing more or less
than a request that his party may be tried by their professions
instead of their practices.  Perhaps no position that the party
assumes is more liable to or more deserving of exposure than this
very modest request; and nothing but the unwarrantable length to
which I have already extended these remarks forbids me now
attempting to expose it.  For the reason given, I pass it by.

I shall advert to but one more point.  Mr. Lamborn refers to the
late elections in the States, and from their results confidently
predicts that every State in the Union will vote for Mr. Van
Buren at the next Presidential election.  Address that argument
to cowards and to knaves; with the free and the brave it will
effect nothing.  It may be true; if it must, let it.  Many free
countries have lost their liberty, and ours may lose hers; but if
she shall, be it my proudest plume, not that I was the last to
desert, but that I never deserted her.  I know that the great
volcano at Washington, aroused and directed by the evil spirit
that reigns there, is belching forth the lava of political
corruption in a current broad and deep, which is sweeping with
frightful velocity over the whole length and breadth of the land,
bidding fair to leave unscathed no green spot or living thing;
while on its bosom are riding, like demons on the waves of hell,
the imps of that evil spirit, and fiendishly taunting all those
who dare resist its destroying course with the hopelessness of
their effort; and, knowing this, I cannot deny that all may be
swept away.  Broken by it I, too, may be; bow to it I never will.
The probability that we may fall in the struggle ought not to
deter us from the support of a cause we believe to be just; it
shall not deter me.  If ever I feel the soul within me elevate
and expand to those dimensions not wholly unworthy of its
almighty Architect, it is when I contemplate the cause of my
country deserted by all the world beside, and I standing up
boldly and alone, and hurling defiance at her victorious
oppressors.  Here, without contemplating consequences, before
high heaven and in the face of the world, I swear eternal
fidelity to the just cause, as I deem it, of the land of my life,
my liberty, and my love.  And who that thinks with me will not
fearlessly adopt the oath that I take? Let none falter who thinks
he is right, and we may succeed.  But if, after all, we shall
fail, be it so.  We still shall have the proud consolation of
saying to our consciences, and to the departed shade of our
country's freedom, that the cause approved of our judgment, and
adored of our hearts, in disaster, in chains, in torture, in
death, we never faltered in defending.




TO JOHN T. STUART.

SPRINGFIELD, December 23, 1839.

DEAR STUART:

Dr.  Henry will write you all the political news.  I write this
about some little matters of business.  You recollect you told me
you had drawn the Chicago Masark money, and sent it to the
claimants.  A hawk-billed Yankee is here besetting me at every
turn I take, saying that Robert Kinzie never received the eighty
dollars to which he was entitled.  Can you tell me anything about
the matter? Again, old Mr. Wright, who lives up South Fork
somewhere, is teasing me continually about some deeds which he
says he left with you, but which I can find nothing of.  Can you
tell me where they are? The Legislature is in session and has
suffered the bank to forfeit its charter without benefit of
clergy.  There seems to be little disposition to resuscitate it.

Whenever a letter comes from you to Mrs._____________
I carry it to her, and then I see Betty; she is a tolerable nice
"fellow" now.  Maybe I will write again when I get more time.

Your friend as ever,
A. LINCOLN

P. S.--The Democratic giant is here, but he is not much worth
talking about.
A.L.




1840


CIRCULAR FROM WHIG COMMITTEE.

Confidential.

January [1?], 1840.

To MESSRS _______

GENTLEMEN:--In obedience to a resolution of the Whig State
convention, we have appointed you the Central Whig Committee of
your county.  The trust confided to you will be one of
watchfulness and labor; but we hope the glory of having
contributed to the overthrow of the corrupt powers that now
control our beloved country will be a sufficient reward for the
time and labor you will devote to it.  Our Whig brethren
throughout the Union have met in convention, and after due
deliberation and mutual concessions have elected candidates for
the Presidency and Vice-Presidency not only worthy of our cause,
but worthy of the support of every true patriot who would have
our country redeemed, and her institutions honestly and
faithfully administered.  To overthrow the trained bands that are
opposed to us whose salaried officers are ever on the watch, and
whose misguided followers are ever ready to obey their smallest
commands, every Whig must not only know his duty, but must firmly
resolve, whatever of time and labor it may cost, boldly and
faithfully to do it.  Our intention is to organize the whole
State, so that every Whig can be brought to the polls in the
coming Presidential contest.  We cannot do this, however, without
your co-operation; and as we do our duty, so we shall expect you
to do yours.  After due deliberation, the following is the plan
of organization, and the duties required of each county
committee:

(1) To divide their county into small districts, and to appoint
in each a subcommittee, whose duty it shall be to make a perfect
list of all the voters in their respective districts, and to
ascertain with certainty for whom they will vote.  If they meet
with men who are doubtful as to the man they will support, such
voters should be designated in separate lines, with the name of
the man they will probably support.

(2) It will be the duty of said subcommittee to keep a constant
watch on the doubtful voters, and from time to time have them
talked to by those in whom they have the most confidence, and
also to place in their hands such documents as will enlighten and
influence them.

(3) It will also be their duty to report to you, at least once a
month, the progress they are making, and on election days see
that every Whig is brought to the polls.

(4) The subcommittees should be appointed immediately; and by the
last of April, at least, they should make their first report.

(5) On the first of each month hereafter we shall expect to hear
from you.  After the first report of your subcommittees, unless
there should be found a great many doubtful voters, you can tell
pretty accurately the manner in which your county will vote. In
each of your letters to us, you will state the number of certain
votes both for and against us, as well as the number of doubtful
votes, with your opinion of the manner in which they will be
cast.

(6) When we have heard from all the counties, we shall be able to
tell with similar accuracy the political complexion of the State.
This information will be forwarded to you as soon as received.

(7) Inclosed is a prospectus for a newspaper to be continued
until after the Presidential election. It will be superintended
by ourselves, and every Whig in the State must take it.  It will
be published so low that every one can afford it.  You must raise
a fund and forward us for extra copies,--every county ought to
send--fifty or one hundred dollars,--and the copies will be
forwarded to you for distribution among our political opponents.
The paper will be devoted exclusively to the great cause in which
we are engaged.  Procure subscriptions, and forward them to us
immediately.

(8) Immediately after any election in your county, you must
inform us of its results; and as early as possible after any
general election we will give you the like information.

(9) A senator in Congress is to be elected by our next
Legislature.  Let no local interests divide you, but select
candidates that can succeed.

(10) Our plan of operations will of course be concealed from
every one except our good friends who of right ought to know
them.

Trusting much in our good cause, the strength of our candidates,
and the determination of the Whigs everywhere to do their duty,
we go to the work of organization in this State confident of
success. We have the numbers, and if properly organized and
exerted, with the gallant Harrison at our head, we shall meet our
foes and conquer them in all parts of the Union.

Address your letters to Dr. A. G. Henry, R. F, Barrett; A.
Lincoln, E. D. Baker, J. F. Speed.




TO JOHN T. STUART.

SPRINGFIELD,
March 1, 1840

DEAR STUART:

I have never seen the prospects of our party so bright in these
parts as they are now.  We shall carry this county by a larger
majority than we did in 1836, when you ran against May.  I do not
think my prospects, individually, are very flattering, for I
think it probable I shall not be permitted to be a candidate; but
the party ticket will succeed triumphantly.  Subscriptions to the
"Old Soldier" pour in without abatement.  This morning I took
from the post office a letter from Dubois enclosing the names of
sixty subscribers, and on carrying it to Francis I found he had
received one hundred and forty more from other quarters by the
same day's mail.  That is but an average specimen of every day's
receipts.  Yesterday Douglas, having chosen to consider himself
insulted by something in the Journal, undertook to cane Francis
in the street.  Francis caught him by the hair and jammed him
back against a market cart where the matter ended by Francis
being pulled away from him.  The whole affair was so ludicrous
that Francis and everybody else (Douglass excepted) have been
laughing about it ever since.

I send you the names of some of the V.B.  men who have come out
for Harrison about town, and suggest that you send them some
documents.

Moses Coffman (he let us appoint him a delegate yesterday), Aaron
Coffman, George Gregory, H.  M.  Briggs, Johnson (at Birchall's
Bookstore), Michael Glyn, Armstrong (not Hosea nor Hugh, but a
carpenter), Thomas Hunter, Moses Pileher (he was always a Whig
and deserves attention), Matthew Crowder Jr., Greenberry Smith;
John Fagan, George Fagan, William Fagan (these three fell out
with us about Early, and are doubtful now), John M.  Cartmel,
Noah Rickard, John Rickard, Walter Marsh.

The foregoing should be addressed at Springfield.

Also send some to Solomon Miller and John Auth at Salisbury.
Also to Charles Harper, Samuel Harper, and B.  C.  Harper, and T.
J.  Scroggins, John Scroggins at Pulaski, Logan County.

Speed says he wrote you what Jo Smith said about you as he passed
here.  We will procure the names of some of his people here, and
send them to you before long.  Speed also says you must not fail
to send us the New York Journal he wrote for some time since.

Evan Butler is jealous that you never send your compliments to
him.  You must not neglect him next time.

Your friend, as ever,
A. LINCOLN




RESOLUTION IN THE ILLINOIS LEGISLATURE.

November 28, 1840.

In the Illinois House of Representatives, November 28, 1840, Mr.
Lincoln offered the following:

Resolved, That so much of the governor's message as relates to
fraudulent voting, and other fraudulent practices at elections,
be referred to the Committee on Elections, with instructions to
said committee to prepare and report to the House a bill for such
an act as may in their judgment afford the greatest possible
protection of the elective franchise against all frauds of all
sorts whatever.




RESOLUTION IN THE ILLINOIS LEGISLATURE.

December 2, 1840.

Resolved, That the Committee on Education be instructed to
inquire into the expediency of providing by law for the
examination as to the qualification of persons offering
themselves as school teachers, that no teacher shall receive any
part of the public school fund who shall not have successfully
passed such examination, and that they report by bill or
otherwise.




REMARKS IN THE ILLINOIS LEGISLATURE.

December 4, 1840

In the House of Representatives, Illinois, December 4, 1840, on
presentation of a report respecting petition of H. N. Purple,
claiming the seat of Mr. Phelps from Peoria, Mr. Lincoln moved
that the House resolve itself into Committee of the Whole on the
question, and take it up immediately.  Mr. Lincoln considered the
question of the highest importance whether an individual had a
right to sit in this House or not.  The course he should propose
would be to take up the evidence and decide upon the facts
seriatim.

Mr. Drummond wanted time; they could not decide in the heat of
debate, etc.

Mr. Lincoln thought that the question had better be gone into
now.  In courts of law jurors were required to decide on
evidence, without previous study or examination.  They were
required to know nothing of the subject until the evidence was
laid before them for their immediate decision.  He thought that
the heat of party would be augmented by delay.

The Speaker called Mr. Lincoln to order as being irrelevant; no
mention had been made of party heat.

Mr. Drummond said he had only spoken of debate.  Mr. Lincoln
asked what caused the heat, if it was not party? Mr. Lincoln
concluded by urging that the question would be decided now better
than hereafter, and he thought with less heat and excitement.

(Further debate, in which Lincoln participated.)




REMARKS IN THE ILLINOIS LEGISLATURE.

December 4, 1840.

In the Illinois House of Representatives, December 4, 1840,House
in Committee of the Whole on the bill providing for payment of
interest on the State debt,--Mr. Lincoln moved to strike out the
body and amendments of the bill, and insert in lieu thereof an
amendment which in substance was that the governor be authorized
to issue bonds for the payment of the interest; that these be
called "interest bonds"; that the taxes accruing on Congress
lands as they become taxable be irrevocably set aside and devoted
as a fund to the payment of the interest bonds.  Mr. Lincoln went
into the reasons which appeared to him to render this plan
preferable to that of hypothecating the State bonds.  By this
course we could get along till the next meeting of the
Legislature, which was of great importance.  To the objection
which might be urged that these interest bonds could not be
cashed, he replied that if our other bonds could, much more could
these, which offered a perfect security, a fund being irrevocably
set aside to provide for their redemption.  To another objection,
that we should be paying compound interest, he would reply that
the rapid growth and increase of our resources was in so great a
ratio as to outstrip the difficulty; that his object was to do
the best that could be done in the present emergency.  All agreed
that the faith of the State must be preserved; this plan appeared
to him preferable to a hypothecation of bonds, which would have
to be redeemed and the interest paid. How this was to be done, he
could not see; therefore he had, after turning the matter over in
every way, devised this measure, which would carry us on till the
next Legislature.

(Mr. Lincoln spoke at some length, advocating his measure.)

Lincoln advocated his measure, December 11, 1840.

December 12, 1840, he had thought some permanent provision ought
to be made for the bonds to be hypothecated, but was satisfied
taxation and revenue could not be connected with it now.




1841


TO JOHN T. STUART--ON DEPRESSION

SPRINGFIELD, Jan 23, 1841

DEAR STUART:
I am now the most miserable man living.  If what I feel were
equally distributed to the whole human family, there would not be
one cheerful face on earth.  Whether I shall ever be better, I
cannot tell; I awfully forbode I shall not.  To remain as I am is
impossible.  I must die or be better, as it appears to me....
I fear I shall be unable to attend any business here, and a
change of scene might help me.  If I could be myself, I would
rather remain at home with Judge Logan.  I can write no more.




REMARKS IN THE ILLINOIS LEGISLATURE.

January 23, 1841


In the House of Representatives January 23, 1841, while
discussing the continuation of the Illinois and Michigan Canal,
Mr. Moore was afraid the holders of the "scrip" would lose.

Mr. Napier thought there was no danger of that; and Mr. Lincoln
said he had not examined to see what amount of scrip would
probably be needed.  The principal point in his mind was this,
that nobody was obliged to take these certificates.  It is
altogether voluntary on their part, and if they apprehend it will
fall in their hands they will not take it.  Further the loss, if
any there be, will fall on the citizens of that section of the
country.

This scrip is not going to circulate over an extensive range of
country, but will be confined chiefly to the vicinity of the
canal.  Now, we find the representatives of that section of the
country are all in favor of the bill.

When we propose to protect their interests, they say to us: Leave
us to take care of ourselves; we are willing to run the risk.
And this is reasonable; we must suppose they are competent to
protect their own interests, and it is only fair to let them do
it.




CIRCULAR FROM WHIG COMMITTEE.

February 9, 1841.

Appeal to the People of the State of Illinois.

FELLOW-CITIZENS:--When the General Assembly, now about
adjourning, assembled in November last, from the bankrupt state
of the public treasury, the pecuniary embarrassments prevailing
in every department of society, the dilapidated state of the
public works, and the impending danger of the degradation of the
State, you had a right to expect that your representatives would
lose no time in devising and adopting measures to avert
threatened calamities, alleviate the distresses of the people,
and allay the fearful apprehensions in regard to the future
prosperity of the State.  It was not expected by you that the
spirit of party would take the lead in the councils of the State,
and make every interest bend to its demands.  Nor was it expected
that any party would assume to itself the entire control of
legislation, and convert the means and offices of the State, and
the substance of the people, into aliment for party subsistence.
Neither could it have been expected by you that party spirit,
however strong its desires and unreasonable its demands, would
have passed the sanctuary of the Constitution, and entered with
its unhallowed and hideous form into the formation of the
judiciary system.

At the early period of the session, measures were adopted by the
dominant party to take possession of the State, to fill all
public offices with party men, and make every measure affecting
the interests of the people and the credit of the State operate
in furtherance of their party views.  The merits of men and
measures therefore became the subject of discussion in caucus,
instead of the halls of legislation, and decisions there made by
a minority of the Legislature have been executed and carried into
effect by the force of party discipline, without any regard
whatever to the rights of the people or the interests of the
State.  The Supreme Court of the State was organized, and judges
appointed, according to the provisions of the Constitution, in
1824.  The people have never complained of the organization of
that court; no attempt has ever before been made to change that
department.  Respect for public opinion, and regard for the
rights and liberties of the people, have hitherto restrained the
spirit of party from attacks upon the independence and integrity
of the judiciary.  The same judges have continued in office since
1824; their decisions have not been the subject of complaint
among the people; the integrity and honesty of the court have not
been questioned, and it has never been supposed that the court
has ever permitted party prejudice or party considerations to
operate upon their decisions.  The court was made to consist of
four judges, and by the Constitution two form a quorum for the
transaction of business.  With this tribunal, thus constituted,
the people have been satisfied for near sixteen years.  The same
law which organized the Supreme Court in 1824 also established
and organized circuit courts to be held in each county in the
State, and five circuit judges were appointed to hold those
courts.  In 1826 the Legislature abolished these circuit courts,
repealed the judges out of office, and required the judges of the
Supreme Court to hold the circuit courts.  The reasons assigned
for this change were, first, that the business of the country
could be better attended to by the four judges of the Supreme
Court than by the two sets of judges; and, second, the state of
the public treasury forbade the employment of unnecessary
officers.  In 1828 a circuit was established north of the
Illinois River, in order to meet the wants of the people, and a
circuit judge was appointed to hold the courts in that circuit.

In 1834 the circuit-court system was again established throughout
the State, circuit judges appointed to hold the courts, and the
judges of the Supreme Court were relieved from the performance of
circuit court duties. The change was recommended by the then
acting governor of the State, General W. L. D. Ewing, in the
following terms:

"The augmented population of the State, the multiplied number of
organized counties, as well as the increase of business in all,
has long since convinced every one conversant with this
department of our government of the indispensable necessity of an
alteration in our judiciary system, and the subject is therefore
recommended to the earnest patriotic consideration of the
Legislature.  The present system has never been exempt from
serious and weighty objections.  The idea of appealing from the
circuit court to the same judges in the Supreme Court is
recommended by little hopes of redress to the injured party
below.  The duties of the circuit, too, it may be added, consume
one half of the year, leaving a small and inadequate portion of
time (when that required for domestic purposes is deducted) to
erect, in the decisions of the Supreme Court, a judicial monument
of legal learning and research, which the talent and ability of
the court might otherwise be entirely competent to."

With this organization of circuit courts the people have never
complained. The only complaints which we have heard have come
from circuits which were so large that the judges could not
dispose of the business, and the circuits in which Judges Pearson
and Ralston lately presided.

Whilst the honor and credit of the State demanded legislation
upon the subject of the public debt, the canal, the unfinished
public works, and the embarrassments of the people, the judiciary
stood upon a basis which required no change--no legislative
action. Yet the party in power, neglecting every interest
requiring legislative action, and wholly disregarding the rights,
wishes, and interests of the people, has, for the unholy purpose
of providing places for its partisans and supplying them with
large salaries, disorganized that department of the government.
Provision is made for the election of five party judges of the
Supreme Court, the proscription of four circuit judges, and the
appointment of party clerks in more than half the counties of the
State.  Men professing respect for public opinion, and
acknowledged to be leaders of the party, have avowed in the halls
of legislation that the change in the judiciary was intended to
produce political results favorable to their party and party
friends.  The immutable principles of justice are to make way for
party interests, and the bonds of social order are to be rent in
twain, in order that a desperate faction may be sustained at the
expense of the people.  The change proposed in the judiciary was
supported upon grounds so destructive to the institutions of the
country, and so entirely at war with the rights and liberties of
the people, that the party could not secure entire unanimity in
its support, three Democrats of the Senate and five of the House
voting against the measure. They were unwilling to see the
temples of justice and the seats of independent judges occupied
by the tools of faction.  The declarations of the party leaders,
the selection of party men for judges, and the total disregard
for the public will in the adoption of the measure, prove
conclusively that the object has been not reform, but
destruction; not the advancement of the highest interests of the
State, but the predominance of party.

We cannot in this manner undertake to point out all the
objections to this party measure; we present you with those
stated by the Council of Revision upon returning the bill, and we
ask for them a candid consideration.

Believing that the independence of the judiciary has been
destroyed, that hereafter our courts will be independent of the
people, and entirely dependent upon the Legislature; that our
rights of property and liberty of conscience can no longer be
regarded as safe from the encroachments of unconstitutional
legislation; and knowing of no other remedy which can be adopted
consistently with the peace and good order of society, we call
upon you to avail yourselves of the opportunity afforded, and, at
the next general election, vote for a convention of the people.

S. H. LITTLE,
E. D. BAKER,
J. J. HARDIN,
E. B. WEBS,
A. LINCOLN,
J. GILLESPIE,

Committee on behalf of the Whig members of the Legislature.




EXTRACT FROM A PROTEST IN THE ILLINOIS LEGISLATURE AGAINST THE
REORGANIZATION OF THE JUDICIARY.

February 26, 1841

For the reasons thus presented, and for others no less apparent,
the undersigned cannot assent to the passage of the bill, or
permit it to become a law, without this evidence of their
disapprobation; and they now protest against the reorganization
of the judiciary, because--(1) It violates the great principles
of free government by subjecting the judiciary to the
Legislature.  (2) It is a fatal blow at the independence of the
judges and the constitutional term of their office.  (3) It is a
measure not asked for, or wished for, by the people.  (4) It will
greatly increase the expense of our courts, or else greatly
diminish their utility.  (5) It will give our courts a political
and partisan character, thereby impairing public confidence in
their decisions.  (6) It will impair our standing with other
States and the world.  (7)It is a party measure for party
purposes, from which no practical good to the people can possibly
arise, but which may be the source of immeasurable evils.

The undersigned are well aware that this protest will be
altogether unavailing with the majority of this body.  The blow
has already fallen, and we are compelled to stand by, the
mournful spectators of the ruin it will cause.

[Signed by 35 members, among whom was Abraham Lincoln.]




TO JOSHUA F. SPEED--MURDER CASE

SPRINGFIELD June 19, 1841.

DEAR SPEED:--We have had the highest state of excitement here for
a week past that our community has ever witnessed; and, although
the public feeling is somewhat allayed, the curious affair which
aroused it is very far from being even yet cleared of mystery.
It would take a quire of paper to give you anything like a full
account of it, and I therefore only propose a brief outline.  The
chief personages in the drama are Archibald Fisher, supposed to
be murdered, and Archibald Trailor, Henry Trailor, and William
Trailor, supposed to have murdered him.  The three Trailors are
brothers: the first, Arch., as you know, lives in town; the
second, Henry, in Clary's Grove; and the third, William, in
Warren County; and Fisher, the supposed murdered, being without a
family, had made his home with William.  On Saturday evening,
being the 29th of May, Fisher and William came to Henry's in a
one-horse dearborn, and there stayed over Sunday; and on Monday
all three came to Springfield (Henry on horseback) and joined
Archibald at Myers's, the Dutch carpenter.  That evening at
supper Fisher was missing, and so next morning some ineffectual
search was made for him; and on Tuesday, at one o'clock P.M.,
William and Henry started home without him.  In a day or two
Henry and one or two of his Clary-Grove neighbors came back for
him again, and advertised his disappearance in the papers.  The
knowledge of the matter thus far had not been general, and here
it dropped entirely, till about the 10th instant, when Keys
received a letter from the postmaster in Warren County, that
William had arrived at home, and was telling a very mysterious
and improbable story about the disappearance of Fisher, which
induced the community there to suppose he had been disposed of
unfairly.  Keys made this letter public, which immediately set
the whole town and adjoining county agog.  And so it has
continued until yesterday.  The mass of the people commenced a
systematic search for the dead body, while Wickersham was
despatched to arrest Henry Trailor at the Grove, and Jim Maxcy to
Warren to arrest William.  On Monday last, Henry was brought in,
and showed an evident inclination to insinuate that he knew
Fisher to be dead, and that Arch.  and William had killed him.
He said he guessed the body could be found in Spring Creek,
between the Beardstown road and Hickox's mill.  Away the people
swept like a herd of buffalo, and cut down Hickox's mill-dam
nolens volens, to draw the water out of the pond, and then went
up and down and down and up the creek, fishing and raking, and
raking and ducking and diving for two days, and, after all, no
dead body found.

In the meantime a sort of scuffling-ground had been found in the
brush in the angle, or point, where the road leading into the
woods past the brewery and the one leading in past the brick-yard
meet.  From the scuffle-ground was the sign of something about
the size of a man having been dragged to the edge of the thicket,
where it joined the track of some small-wheeled carriage drawn by
one horse, as shown by the road-tracks.  The carriage-track led
off toward Spring Creek.  Near this drag-trail Dr. Merryman found
two hairs, which, after a long scientific examination, he
pronounced to be triangular human hairs, which term, he says,
includes within it the whiskers, the hair growing under the arms
and on other parts of the body; and he judged that these two were
of the whiskers, because the ends were cut, showing that they had
flourished in the neighborhood of the razor's operations.  On
Thursday last Jim Maxcy brought in William Trailor from Warren.
On the same day Arch. was arrested and put in jail.  Yesterday
(Friday) William was put upon his examining trial before May and
Lovely.  Archibald and Henry were both present.  Lamborn
prosecuted, and Logan, Baker, and your humble servant defended.
A great many witnesses were introduced and examined, but I shall
only mention those whose testimony seemed most important.  The
first of these was Captain Ransdell.  He swore that when William
and Henry left Springfield for home on Tuesday before mentioned
they did not take the direct route,--which, you know, leads by
the butcher shop,--but that they followed the street north until
they got opposite, or nearly opposite, May's new house, after
which he could not see them from where he stood; and it was
afterwards proved that in about an hour after they started, they
came into the street by the butcher shop from toward the brick-
yard.  Dr.  Merryman and others swore to what is stated about the
scuffle-ground, drag-trail, whiskers, and carriage tracks.  Henry
was then introduced by the prosecution.  He swore that when they
started for home they went out north, as Ransdell stated, and
turned down west by the brick-yard into the woods, and there met
Archibald; that they proceeded a small distance farther, when he
was placed as a sentinel to watch for and announce the approach
of any one that might happen that way; that William and Arch.
took the dearborn out of the road a small distance to the edge of
the thicket, where they stopped, and he saw them lift the body of
a man into it; that they then moved off with the carriage in the
direction of Hickox's mill, and he loitered about for something
like an hour, when William returned with the carriage, but
without Arch., and said they had put him in a safe place; that
they went somehow he did not know exactly how--into the road
close to the brewery, and proceeded on to Clary's Grove.  He also
stated that some time during the day William told him that he and
Arch.  had killed Fisher the evening before; that the way they
did it was by him William knocking him down with a club, and
Arch.  then choking him to death.

An old man from Warren, called Dr.  Gilmore, was then introduced
on the part of the defense.  He swore that he had known Fisher
for several years; that Fisher had resided at his house a long
time at each of two different spells--once while he built a barn
for him, and once while he was doctored for some chronic disease;
that two or three years ago Fisher had a serious hurt in his head
by the bursting of a gun, since which he had been subject to
continued bad health and occasional aberration of mind.  He also
stated that on last Tuesday, being the same day that Maxcy
arrested William Trailor, he (the doctor) was from home in the
early part of the day, and on his return, about eleven o'clock,
found Fisher at his house in bed, and apparently very unwell;
that he asked him how he came from Springfield; that Fisher said
he had come by Peoria, and also told of several other places he
had been at more in the direction of Peoria, which showed that he
at the time of speaking did not know where he had been wandering
about in a state of derangement.  He further stated that in about
two hours he received a note from one of Trailor's friends,
advising him of his arrest, and requesting him to go on to
Springfield as a witness, to testify as to the state of Fisher's
health in former times; that he immediately set off, calling up
two of his neighbors as company, and, riding all evening and all
night, overtook Maxcy and William at Lewiston in Fulton County;
that Maxcy refusing to discharge Trailor upon his statement, his
two neighbors returned and he came on to Springfield.  Some
question being made as to whether the doctor's story was not a
fabrication, several acquaintances of his (among whom was the
same postmaster who wrote Keys, as before mentioned) were
introduced as sort of compurgators, who swore that they knew the
doctor to be of good character for truth and veracity, and
generally of good character in every way.

Here the testimony ended, and the Trailors were discharged, Arch.
and William expressing both in word and manner their entire
confidence that Fisher would be found alive at the doctor's by
Galloway, Mallory, and Myers, who a day before had been
despatched for that purpose; which Henry still protested that no
power on earth could ever show Fisher alive.  Thus stands this
curious affair.  When the doctor's story was first made public,
it was amusing to scan and contemplate the countenances and hear
the remarks of those who had been actively in search for the dead
body: some looked quizzical, some melancholy, and some furiously
angry.  Porter, who had been very active, swore he always knew
the man was not dead, and that he had not stirred an inch to hunt
for him; Langford, who had taken the lead in cutting down
Hickox's mill-dam, and wanted to hang Hickox for objecting,
looked most awfully woebegone: he seemed the "victim of
unrequited affection," as represented in the comic almanacs we
used to laugh over; and Hart, the little drayman that hauled
Molly home once, said it was too damned bad to have so much
trouble, and no hanging after all.

I commenced this letter on yesterday, since which I received
yours of the 13th.  I stick to my promise to come to Louisville.
Nothing new here except what I have written.  I have not seen
_____  since my last trip, and I am going out there as soon as I
mail this letter.

Yours forever,
LINCOLN.




STATEMENT ABOUT HARRY WILTON.

June 25, 1841

It having been charged in some of the public prints that Harry
Wilton, late United States marshal for the district of Illinois,
had used his office for political effect, in the appointment of
deputies for the taking of the census for the year 1840, we, the
undersigned, were called upon by Mr. Wilton to examine the papers
in his possession relative to these appointments, and to
ascertain therefrom the correctness or incorrectness of such
charge. We accompanied Mr. Wilton to a room, and examined the
matter as fully as we could with the means afforded us.  The only
sources of information bearing on the subject which were
submitted to us were the letters, etc., recommending and opposing
the various appointments made, and Mr. Wilton's verbal statements
concerning the same.  From these letters, etc., it appears that
in some instances appointments were made in accordance with the
recommendations of leading Whigs, and in opposition to those of
leading Democrats; among which instances the appointments at
Scott, Wayne, Madison, and Lawrence are the strongest.  According
to Mr. Wilton's statement of the seventy-six appointments we
examined, fifty-four were of Democrats, eleven of Whigs, and
eleven of unknown politics.

The chief ground of complaint against Mr. Wilton, as we had
understood it, was because of his appointment of so many
Democratic candidates for the Legislature, thus giving them a
decided advantage over their Whig opponents; and consequently our
attention was directed rather particularly to that point.  We
found that there were many such appointments, among which were
those in Tazewell, McLean, Iroquois, Coles, Menard, Wayne,
Washington, Fayette, etc.; and we did not learn that there was
one instance in which a Whig candidate for the Legislature had
been appointed. There was no written evidence before us showing
us at what time those appointments were made; but Mr. Wilton
stated that they all with one exception were made before those
appointed became candidates for the Legislature, and the letters,
etc., recommending them all bear date before, and most of them
long before, those appointed were publicly announced candidates.

We give the foregoing naked facts and draw no conclusions from
them.

BEND. S. EDWARDS, A. LINCOLN.




TO MISS MARY SPEED--PRACTICAL SLAVERY

BLOOMINGTON, ILL., September 27, 1841.

Miss Mary Speed, Louisville, Ky.

MY FRIEND:
By the way, a fine example was presented on board the boat for
contemplating the effect of condition upon human happiness.  A
gentleman had purchased twelve negroes in different parts of
Kentucky, and was taking them to a farm in the South.  They were
chained six and six together.  A small iron clevis was around the
left wrist of each, and this fastened to the main chain by a
shorter one, at a convenient distance from the others, so that
the negroes were strung together precisely like so many fish upon
a trotline.  In this condition they were being separated forever
from the scenes of their childhood, their friends, their fathers
and mothers, and brothers and sisters, and many of them from
their wives and children, and going into perpetual slavery where
the lash of the master is proverbially more ruthless and
unrelenting than any other where; and yet amid all these
distressing circumstances, as we would think them, they were the
most cheerful and apparently happy creatures on board.  One,
whose offence for which he had been sold was an overfondness for
his wife, played the fiddle almost continually, and the others
danced, sang, cracked jokes, and played various games with cards
from day to day.  How true it is that 'God tempers the wind to
the shorn lamb,' or in other words, that he renders the worst of
human conditions tolerable, while he permits the best to be
nothing better than tolerable.  To return to the narrative: When
we reached Springfield I stayed but one day, when I started on
this tedious circuit where I now am.  Do you remember my going to
the city, while I was in Kentucky, to have a tooth extracted, and
making a failure of it? Well, that same old tooth got to paining
me so much that about a week since I had it torn out, bringing
with it a bit of the jawbone, the consequence of which is that my
mouth is now so sore that I can neither talk nor eat.

Your sincere friend,
A. LINCOLN.




1842


TO JOSHUA F. SPEED--ON MARRIAGE

January 3?, 1842.

MY DEAR SPEED:--Feeling, as you know I do, the deepest solicitude
for the success of the enterprise you are engaged in, I adopt
this as the last method I can adopt to aid you, in case (which
God forbid!) you shall need any aid.  I do not place what I am
going to say on paper because I can say it better that way than I
could by word of mouth, but, were I to say it orally before we
part, most likely you would forget it at the very time when it
might do you some good.  As I think it reasonable that you will
feel very badly some time between this and the final consummation
of your purpose, it is intended that you shall read this just at
such a time.  Why I say it is reasonable that you will feel very
badly yet, is because of three special causes added to the
general one which I shall mention.

The general cause is, that you are naturally of a nervous
temperament; and this I say from what I have seen of you
personally, and what you have told me concerning your mother at
various times, and concerning your brother William at the time
his wife died.  The first special cause is your exposure to bad
weather on your journey, which my experience clearly proves to be
very severe on defective nerves.  The second is the absence of
all business and conversation of friends, which might divert your
mind, give it occasional rest from the intensity of thought which
will sometimes wear the sweetest idea threadbare and turn it to
the bitterness of death.  The third is the rapid and near
approach of that crisis on which all your thoughts and feelings
concentrate.

If from all these causes you shall escape and go through
triumphantly, without another "twinge of the soul," I shall be
most happily but most egregiously deceived.  If, on the contrary,
you shall, as I expect you will at sometime, be agonized and
distressed, let me, who have some reason to speak with judgment
on such a subject, beseech you to ascribe it to the causes I have
mentioned, and not to some false and ruinous suggestion of the
Devil.

"But," you will say, "do not your causes apply to every one
engaged in a like undertaking?" By no means.  The particular
causes, to a greater or less extent, perhaps do apply in all
cases; but the general one,--nervous debility, which is the key
and conductor of all the particular ones, and without which they
would be utterly harmless,--though it does pertain to you, does
not pertain to one in a thousand.  It is out of this that the
painful difference between you and the mass of the world springs.

I know what the painful point with you is at all times when you
are unhappy; it is an apprehension that you do not love her as
you should.  What nonsense! How came you to court her? Was it
because you thought she deserved it, and that you had given her
reason to expect it? If it was for that why did not the same
reason make you court Ann Todd, and at least twenty others of
whom you can think, and to whom it would apply with greater force
than to her? Did you court her for her wealth? Why, you know she
had none.  But you say you reasoned yourself into it.  What do
you mean by that? Was it not that you found yourself unable to
reason yourself out of it? Did you not think, and partly form the
purpose, of courting her the first time you ever saw her or heard
of her? What had reason to do with it at that early stage? There
was nothing at that time for reason to work upon.  Whether she
was moral, amiable, sensible, or even of good character, you did
not, nor could then know, except, perhaps, you might infer the
last from the company you found her in.

All you then did or could know of her was her personal appearance
and deportment; and these, if they impress at all, impress the
heart, and not the head.

Say candidly, were not those heavenly black eyes the whole basis
of all your early reasoning on the subject? After you and I had
once been at the residence, did you not go and take me all the
way to Lexington and back, for no other purpose but to get to see
her again, on our return on that evening to take a trip for that
express object? What earthly consideration would you take to find
her scouting and despising you, and giving herself up to another?
But of this you have no apprehension; and therefore you cannot
bring it home to your feelings.

I shall be so anxious about you that I shall want you to write by
every mail.  Your friend,

LINCOLN.




TO JOSHUA F. SPEED.

SPRINGFIELD, ILLINOIS, February 3, 1842.

DEAR SPEED:--Your letter of the 25th January came to hand to-day.
You well know that I do not feel my own sorrows much more keenly
than I do yours, when I know of them; and yet I assure you I was
not much hurt by what you wrote me of your excessively bad
feeling at the time you wrote.  Not that I am less capable of
sympathizing with you now than ever, not that I am less your
friend than ever, but because I hope and believe that your
present anxiety and distress about her health and her life must
and will forever banish those horrid doubts which I know you
sometimes felt as to the truth of your affection for her.  If
they can once and forever be removed (and I almost feel a
presentiment that the Almighty has sent your present affliction
expressly for that object), surely nothing can come in their
stead to fill their immeasurable measure of misery.  The death-
scenes of those we love are surely painful enough; but these we
are prepared for and expect to see: they happen to all, and all
know they must happen.  Painful as they are, they are not an
unlooked for sorrow.  Should she, as you fear, be destined to an
early grave, it is indeed a great consolation to know that she is
so well prepared to meet it.  Her religion, which you once
disliked so much, I will venture you now prize most highly.  But
I hope your melancholy bodings as to her early death are not well
founded.  I even hope that ere this reaches you she will have
returned with improved and still improving health, and that you
will have met her, and forgotten the sorrows of the past in the
enjoyments of the present.  I would say more if I could, but it
seems that I have said enough.  It really appears to me that you
yourself ought to rejoice, and not sorrow, at this indubitable
evidence of your undying affection for her.  Why, Speed, if you
did not love her although you might not wish her death, you would
most certainly be resigned to it.  Perhaps this point is no
longer a question with you, and my pertinacious dwelling upon it
is a rude intrusion upon your feelings.  If so, you must pardon
me.  You know the hell I have suffered on that point, and how
tender I am upon it.  You know I do not mean wrong.  I have been
quite clear of "hypo" since you left, even better than I was
along in the fall.  I have seen ______ but once.  She seemed very
cheerful, and so I said nothing to her about what we spoke of.

Old Uncle Billy Herndon is dead, and it is said this evening that
Uncle Ben Ferguson will not live.  This, I believe, is all the
news, and enough at that unless it were better.  Write me
immediately on the receipt of this.  Your friend, as ever,

LINCOLN.




TO JOSHUA F. SPEED--ON DEPRESSION

SPRINGFIELD, ILLINOIS, February 13, 1842.

DEAR SPEED:--Yours of the 1st instant came to hand three or four
days ago.  When this shall reach you, you will have been Fanny's
husband several days.  You know my desire to befriend you is
everlasting; that I will never cease while I know how to do
anything.  But you will always hereafter be on ground that I have
never occupied, and consequently, if advice were needed, I might
advise wrong.  I do fondly hope, however, that you will never
again need any comfort from abroad.  But should I be mistaken in
this, should excessive pleasure still be accompanied with a
painful counterpart at times, still let me urge you, as I have
ever done, to remember, in the depth and even agony of
despondency, that very shortly you are to feel well again.  I am
now fully convinced that you love her as ardently as you are
capable of loving.  Your ever being happy in her presence, and
your intense anxiety about her health, if there were nothing
else, would place this beyond all dispute in my mind.  I incline
to think it probable that your nerves will fail you occasionally
for a while; but once you get them firmly guarded now that
trouble is over forever.  I think, if I were you, in case my mind
were not exactly right, I would avoid being idle.  I would
immediately engage in some business, or go to making preparations
for it, which would be the same thing.  If you went through the
ceremony calmly, or even with sufficient composure not to excite
alarm in any present, you are safe beyond question, and in two or
three months, to say the most, will be the happiest of men.

I would desire you to give my particular respects to Fanny; but
perhaps you will not wish her to know you have received this,
lest she should desire to see it.  Make her write me an answer to
my last letter to her; at any rate I would set great value upon a
note or letter from her.  Write me whenever you have leisure.
Yours forever,
A. LINCOLN.
P.  S.--I have been quite a man since you left.




TO G. B. SHELEDY.

SPRINGFIELD, ILL., Feb.  16, 1842.

G. B. SHELEDY, ESQ.:

Yours of the 10th is duly received.  Judge Logan and myself are
doing business together now, and we are willing to attend to your
cases as you propose.  As to the terms, we are willing to attend
each case you prepare and send us for $10 (when there shall be no
opposition) to be sent in advance, or you to know that it is
safe.  It takes $5.75 of cost to start upon, that is, $1.75 to
clerk, and $2 to each of two publishers of papers.  Judge Logan
thinks it will take the balance of $20 to carry a case through.
This must be advanced from time to time as the services are
performed, as the officers will not act without.  I do not know
whether you can be admitted an attorney of the Federal court in
your absence or not; nor is it material, as the business can be
done in our names.

Thinking it may aid you a little, I send you one of our blank
forms of Petitions.  It, you will see, is framed to be sworn to
before the Federal court clerk, and, in your cases, will have
[to] be so far changed as to be sworn to before the clerk of your
circuit court; and his certificate must be accompanied with his
official seal.  The schedules, too, must be attended to.  Be sure
that they contain the creditors' names, their residences, the
amounts due each, the debtors' names, their residences, and the
amounts they owe, also all property and where located.

Also be sure that the schedules are all signed by the applicants
as well as the Petition.  Publication will have to be made here
in one paper, and in one nearest the residence of the applicant.
Write us in each case where the last advertisement is to be sent,
whether to you or to what paper.

I believe I have now said everything that can be of any
advantage.  Your friend as ever,
A. LINCOLN.




TO GEORGE E. PICKETT--ADVICE TO YOUTH

February 22, 1842.

I never encourage deceit, and falsehood, especially if you have
got a bad memory, is the worst enemy a fellow can have.  The fact
is truth is your truest friend, no matter what the circumstances
are.  Notwithstanding this copy-book preamble, my boy, I am
inclined to suggest a little prudence on your part.  You see I
have a congenital aversion to failure, and the sudden
announcement to your Uncle Andrew of the success of your "lamp
rubbing" might possibly prevent your passing the severe physical
examination to which you will be subjected in order to enter the
Military Academy.  You see I should like to have a perfect
soldier credited to dear old Illinois--no broken bones, scalp
wounds, etc.  So I think it might be wise to hand this letter
from me in to your good uncle through his room-window after he
has had a comfortable dinner, and watch its effect from the top
of the pigeon-house.

I have just told the folks here in Springfield on this 111th
anniversary of the birth of him whose name, mightiest in the
cause of civil liberty, still mightiest in the cause of moral
reformation, we mention in solemn awe, in naked, deathless
splendor, that the one victory we can ever call complete will be
that one which proclaims that there is not one slave or one
drunkard on the face of God's green earth.  Recruit for this
victory.

Now, boy, on your march, don't you go and forget the old maxim
that "one drop of honey catches more flies than a half-gallon of
gall." Load your musket with this maxim, and smoke it in your
pipe.




ADDRESS BEFORE THE SPRINGFIELD WASHINGTONIAN
TEMPERANCE SOCIETY, FEBRUARY 22, 1842.

Although the temperance cause has been in progress for near
twenty years, it is apparent to all that it is just now being
crowned with a degree of success hitherto unparalleled.

The list of its friends is daily swelled by the additions of
fifties, of hundreds, and of thousands.  The cause itself seems
suddenly transformed from a cold abstract theory to a living,
breathing, active, and powerful chieftain, going forth
"conquering and to conquer."  The citadels of his great adversary
are daily being stormed and dismantled; his temple and his
altars, where the rites of his idolatrous worship have long been
performed, and where human sacrifices have long been wont to be
made, are daily desecrated and deserted.  The triumph of the
conqueror's fame is sounding from hill to hill, from sea to sea,
and from land to land, and calling millions to his standard at a
blast.

For this new and splendid success we heartily rejoice. That that
success is so much greater now than heretofore is doubtless owing
to rational causes; and if we would have it continue, we shall do
well to inquire what those causes are.

The warfare heretofore waged against the demon intemperance has
somehow or other been erroneous.  Either the champions engaged or
the tactics they adopted have not been the most proper.  These
champions for the most part have been preachers, lawyers, and
hired agents.  Between these and the mass of mankind there is a
want of approachability, if the term be admissible, partially, at
least, fatal to their success.  They are supposed to have no
sympathy of feeling or interest with those very persons whom it
is their object to convince and persuade.

And again, it is so common and so easy to ascribe motives to men
of these classes other than those they profess to act upon.  The
preacher, it is said, advocates temperance because he is a
fanatic, and desires a union of the Church and State; the lawyer
from his pride and vanity of hearing himself speak; and the hired
agent for his salary.  But when one who has long been known as a
victim of intemperance bursts the fetters that have bound him,
and appears before his neighbors "clothed and in his right mind,"
a redeemed specimen of long-lost humanity, and stands up, with
tears of joy trembling in his eyes, to tell of the miseries once
endured, now to be endured no more forever; of his once naked and
starving children, now clad and fed comfortably; of a wife long
weighed down with woe, weeping, and a broken heart, now restored
to health, happiness, and a renewed affection; and how easily it
is all done, once it is resolved to be done; how simple his
language! there is a logic and an eloquence in it that few with
human feelings can resist.  They cannot say that he desires a
union of Church and State, for he is not a church member; they
cannot say he is vain of hearing himself speak, for his whole
demeanor shows he would gladly avoid speaking at all; they cannot
say he speaks for pay, for he receives none, and asks for none.
Nor can his sincerity in any way be doubted, or his sympathy for
those he would persuade to imitate his example be denied.

In my judgment, it is to the battles of this new class of
champions that our late success is greatly, perhaps chiefly,
owing.  But, had the old-school champions themselves been of the
most wise selecting, was their system of tactics the most
judicious?  It seems to me it was not.  Too much denunciation
against dram-sellers and dram-drinkers was indulged in.  This I
think was both impolitic and unjust.  It was impolitic, because
it is not much in the nature of man to be driven to anything;
still less to be driven about that which is exclusively his own
business; and least of all where such driving is to be submitted
to at the expense of pecuniary interest or burning appetite.
When the dram-seller and drinker were incessantly told not in
accents of entreaty and persuasion, diffidently addressed by
erring man to an erring brother, but in the thundering tones of
anathema and denunciation with which the lordly judge often
groups together all the crimes of the felon's life, and thrusts
them in his face just ere he passes sentence of death upon him
that they were the authors of all the vice and misery and crime
in the land; that they were the manufacturers and material of all
the thieves and robbers and murderers that infest the earth; that
their houses were the workshops of the devil; and that their
persons should be shunned by all the good and virtuous, as moral
pestilences--I say, when they were told all this, and in this
way, it is not wonderful that they were slow to acknowledge the
truth of such denunciations, and to join the ranks of their
denouncers in a hue and cry against themselves.

To have expected them to do otherwise than they did to have
expected them not to meet denunciation with denunciation,
crimination with crimination, and anathema with anathema--was to
expect a reversal of human nature, which is God's decree and can
never be reversed.

When the conduct of men is designed to be influenced, persuasion,
kind, unassuming persuasion, should ever be adopted.  It is an
old and a true maxim that "a drop of honey catches more flies
than a gallon of gall."  So with men. If you would win a man to
your cause, first convince him that you are his sincere friend.
Therein is a drop of honey that catches his heart, which, say
what he will, is the great highroad to his reason; and which,
when once gained, you will find but little trouble in convincing
his judgment of the justice of your cause, if indeed that cause
really be a just one.  On the contrary, assume to dictate to his
judgment, or to command his action, or to mark him as one to be
shunned and despised, and he will retreat within himself, close
all the avenues to his head and his heart; and though your cause
be naked truth itself, transformed to the heaviest lance, harder
than steel, and sharper than steel can be made, and though you
throw it with more than herculean force and precision, you shall
be no more able to pierce him than to penetrate the hard shell of
a tortoise with a rye straw.  Such is man, and so must he be
understood by those who would lead him, even to his own best
interests.

On this point the Washingtonians greatly excel the temperance
advocates of former times.  Those whom they desire to convince
and persuade are their old friends and companions.  They know
they are not demons, nor even the worst of men; they know that
generally they are kind, generous, and charitable even beyond the
example of their more staid and sober neighbors.  They are
practical philanthropists; and they glow with a generous and
brotherly zeal that mere theorizers are incapable of feeling.
Benevolence and charity possess their hearts entirely; and out of
the abundance of their hearts their tongues give utterance; "love
through all their actions runs, and all their words are mild."
In this spirit they speak and act, and in the same they are heard
and regarded.  And when such is the temper of the advocate, and
such of the audience, no good cause can be unsuccessful.  But I
have said that denunciations against dramsellers and dram-
drinkers are unjust, as well as impolitic.  Let us see. I have
not inquired at what period of time the use of intoxicating
liquors commenced; nor is it important to know.  It is sufficient
that, to all of us who now inhabit the world, the practice of
drinking them is just as old as the world itself that is, we have
seen the one just as long as we have seen the other.  When all
such of us as have now reached the years of maturity first opened
our eyes upon the stage of existence, we found intoxicating
liquor recognized by everybody, used by everybody, repudiated by
nobody.  It commonly entered into the first draught of the infant
and the last draught of the dying man.  From the sideboard of the
parson down to the ragged pocket of the houseless loafer, it was
constantly found.  Physicians proscribed it in this, that, and
the other disease; government provided it for soldiers and
sailors; and to have a rolling or raising, a husking or
"hoedown," anywhere about without it was positively insufferable.
So, too, it was everywhere a respectable article of manufacture
and merchandise.  The making of it was regarded as an honorable
livelihood, and he who could make most was the most enterprising
and respectable.  Large and small manufactories of it were
everywhere erected, in which all the earthly goods of their
owners were invested.  Wagons drew it from town to town; boats
bore it from clime to clime, and the winds wafted it from nation
to nation; and merchants bought and sold it, by wholesale and
retail, with precisely the same feelings on the part of the
seller, buyer, and bystander as are felt at the selling and
buying of ploughs, beef, bacon, or any other of the real
necessaries of life.  Universal public opinion not only tolerated
but recognized and adopted its use.

It is true that even then it was known and acknowledged that many
were greatly injured by it; but none seemed to think the injury
arose from the use of a bad thing, but from the abuse of a very
good thing.  The victims of it were to be pitied and
compassionated, just as are the heirs of consumption and other
hereditary diseases.  Their failing was treated as a misfortune,
and not as a crime, or even as a disgrace.  If, then, what I have
been saying is true, is it wonderful that some should think and
act now as all thought and acted twenty years ago? and is it just
to assail, condemn, or despise them for doing so?  The universal
sense of mankind on any subject is an argument, or at least an
influence, not easily overcome.  The success of the argument in
favor of the existence of an overruling Providence mainly depends
upon that sense; and men ought not in justice to be denounced for
yielding to it in any case, or giving it up slowly, especially
when they are backed by interest, fixed habits, or burning
appetites.

Another error, as it seems to me, into which the old reformers
fell, was the position that all habitual drunkards were utterly
incorrigible, and therefore must be turned adrift and damned
without remedy in order that the grace of temperance might
abound, to the temperate then, and to all mankind some hundreds
of years thereafter.  There is in this some thing so repugnant to
humanity, so uncharitable, so cold-blooded and feelingless, that
it, never did nor ever can enlist the enthusiasm of a popular
cause. We could not love the man who taught it we could not hear
him with patience.  The heart could not throw open its portals to
it, the generous man could not adopt it--it could not mix with
his blood. It looked so fiendishly selfish, so like throwing
fathers and brothers overboard to lighten the boat for our
security, that the noble-minded shrank from the manifest meanness
of the thing.  And besides this, the benefits of a reformation to
be effected by such a system were too remote in point of time to
warmly engage many in its behalf.  Few can be induced to labor
exclusively for posterity, and none will do it enthusiastically.
--Posterity has done nothing for us; and, theorize on it as we
may, practically we shall do very little for it, unless we are
made to think we are at the same time doing something for
ourselves.

What an ignorance of human nature does it exhibit to ask or to
expect a whole community to rise up and labor for the temporal
happiness of others, after themselves shall be consigned to the
dust, a majority of which community take no pains whatever to
secure their own eternal welfare at no more distant day!  Great
distance in either time or space has wonderful power to lull and
render quiescent the human mind.  Pleasures to be enjoyed, or
pains to be endured, after we shall be dead and gone are but
little regarded even in our own cases, and much less in the cases
of others.  Still, in addition to this there is something so
ludicrous in promises of good or threats of evil a great way off
as to render the whole subject with which they are connected
easily turned into ridicule.  "Better lay down that spade you are
stealing, Paddy; if you don't you'll pay for it at the day of
judgment."  "Be the powers, if ye 'll credit me so long I'll take
another jist."

By the Washingtonians this system of consigning the habitual
drunkard to hopeless ruin is repudiated.  They adopt a more
enlarged philanthropy; they go for present as well as future
good.  They labor for all now living, as well as hereafter to
live.  They teach hope to all-despair to none.  As applying to
their cause, they deny the doctrine of unpardonable sin; as in
Christianity it is taught, so in this they teach--"While--While
the lamp holds out to burn, The vilest sinner may return."  And,
what is a matter of more profound congratulation, they, by
experiment upon experiment and example upon example, prove the
maxim to be no less true in the one case than in the other.  On
every hand we behold those who but yesterday were the chief of
sinners, now the chief apostles of the cause.  Drunken devils are
cast out by ones, by sevens, by legions; and their unfortunate
victims, like the poor possessed who were redeemed from their
long and lonely wanderings in the tombs, are publishing to the
ends of the earth how great things have been done for them.

To these new champions and this new system of tactics our late
success is mainly owing, and to them we must mainly look for the
final consummation. The ball is now rolling gloriously on, and
none are so able as they to increase its speed and its bulk, to
add to its momentum and its magnitude--even though unlearned in
letters, for this task none are so well educated.  To fit them
for this work they have been taught in the true school.  They
have been in that gulf from which they would teach others the
means of escape.  They have passed that prison wall which others
have long declared impassable; and who that has not shall dare to
weigh opinions with them as to the mode of passing?

But if it be true, as I have insisted, that those who have
suffered by intemperance personally, and have reformed, are the
most powerful and efficient instruments to push the reformation
to ultimate success, it does not follow that those who have not
suffered have no part left them to perform.  Whether or not the
world would be vastly benefited by a total and final banishment
from it of all intoxicating drinks seems to me not now an open
question.  Three fourths of mankind confess the affirmative with
their tongues, and, I believe, all the rest acknowledge it in
their hearts.

Ought any, then, to refuse their aid in doing what good the good
of the whole demands?  Shall he who cannot do much be for that
reason excused if he do nothing?  "But," says one, "what good can
I do by signing the pledge?  I never drank, even without
signing."  This question has already been asked and answered more
than a million of times.  Let it be answered once more.  For the
man suddenly or in any other way to break off from the use of
drams, who has indulged in them for a long course of years and
until his appetite for them has grown ten or a hundredfold
stronger and more craving than any natural appetite can be,
requires a most powerful moral effort.  In such an undertaking he
needs every moral support and influence that can possibly be
brought to his aid and thrown around him.  And not only so, but
every moral prop should be taken from whatever argument might
rise in his mind to lure him to his backsliding.  When he casts
his eyes around him, he should be able to see all that he
respects, all that he admires, all that he loves, kindly and
anxiously pointing him onward, and none beckoning him back to his
former miserable "wallowing in the mire."

But it is said by some that men will think and act for
themselves; that none will disuse spirits or anything else
because his neighbors do; and that moral influence is not that
powerful engine contended for.  Let us examine this.  Let me ask
the man who could maintain this position most stiffly, what
compensation he will accept to go to church some Sunday and sit
during the sermon with his wife's bonnet upon his head?  Not a
trifle, I'll venture.  And why not?  There would be nothing
irreligious in it, nothing immoral, nothing uncomfortable--then
why not?  Is it not because there would be something egregiously
unfashionable in it?  Then it is the influence of fashion; and
what is the influence of fashion but the influence that other
people's actions have on our actions--the strong inclination each
of us feels to do as we see all our neighbors do?  Nor is the
influence of fashion confined to any particular thing or class of
things; it is just as strong on one subject as another. Let us
make it as unfashionable to withhold our names from the
temperance cause as for husbands to wear their wives' bonnets to
church, and instances will be just as rare in the one case as the
other.

"But," say some, "we are no drunkards, and we shall not
acknowledge ourselves such by joining a reformed drunkard's
society, whatever our influence might be."  Surely no Christian
will adhere to this objection.  If they believe as they profess,
that Omnipotence condescended to take on himself the form of
sinful man, and as such to die an ignominious death for their
sakes, surely they will not refuse submission to the infinitely
lesser condescension, for the temporal, and perhaps eternal,
salvation of a large, erring, and unfortunate class of their
fellow-creatures.  Nor is the condescension very great.  In my
judgment such of us as have never fallen victims have been spared
more by the absence of appetite than from any mental or moral
superiority over those who have.  Indeed, I believe if we take
habitual drunkards as a class, their heads and their hearts will
bear an advantageous comparison with those of any other class.
There seems ever to have been a proneness in the brilliant and
warm-blooded to fall into this vice--the demon of intemperance
ever seems to have delighted in sucking the blood of genius and
of generosity.  What one of us but can call to mind some
relative, more promising in youth than all his fellows, who has
fallen a sacrifice to his rapacity?  He ever seems to have gone
forth like the Egyptian angel of death, commissioned to slay, if
not the first, the fairest born of every family.  Shall he now be
arrested in his desolating career? In that arrest all can give
aid that will; and who shall be excused that can and will not?
Far around as human breath has ever blown he keeps our fathers,
our brothers, our sons, and our friends prostrate in the chains
of moral death.  To all the living everywhere we cry, "Come sound
the moral trump, that these may rise and stand up an exceeding
great army."  "Come from the four winds, O breath! and breathe
upon these slain that they may live."  If the relative grandeur
of revolutions shall be estimated by the great amount of human
misery they alleviate, and the small amount they inflict, then
indeed will this be the grandest the world shall ever have seen.

Of our political revolution of '76 we are all justly proud.  It
has given us a degree of political freedom far exceeding that of
any other nation of the earth.  In it the world has found a
solution of the long-mooted problem as to the capability of man
to govern himself.  In it was the germ which has vegetated, and
still is to grow and expand into the universal liberty of
mankind.  But, with all these glorious results, past, present,
and to come, it had its evils too.  It breathed forth famine,
swam in blood, and rode in fire; and long, long after, the
orphan's cry and the widow's wail continued to break the sad
silence that ensued.  These were the price, the inevitable price,
paid for the blessings it bought.

Turn now to the temperance revolution.  In it we shall find a
stronger bondage broken, a viler slavery manumitted, a greater
tyrant deposed; in it, more of want supplied, more disease
healed, more sorrow assuaged.  By it no Orphans starving, no
widows weeping.  By it none wounded in feeling, none injured in
interest; even the drammaker and dram-seller will have glided
into other occupations so gradually as never to have felt the
change, and will stand ready to join all others in the universal
song of gladness.  And what a noble ally this to the cause of
political freedom, with such an aid its march cannot fail to be
on and on, till every son of earth shall drink in rich fruition
the sorrow-quenching draughts of perfect liberty.  Happy day
when-all appetites controlled, all poisons subdued, all matter
subjected-mind, all-conquering mind, shall live and move, the
monarch of the world.  Glorious consummation!  Hail, fall of
fury! Reign of reason, all hail!

And when the victory shall be complete, when there shall be
neither a slave nor a drunkard on the earth, how proud the title
of that land which may truly claim to be the birthplace and the
cradle of both those revolutions that shall have ended in that
victory.  How nobly distinguished that people who shall have
planted and nurtured to maturity both the political and moral
freedom of their species.

This is the one hundred and tenth anniversary of the birthday of
Washington; we are met to celebrate this day.  Washington is the
mightiest name of earth long since mightiest in the cause of
civil liberty, still mightiest in moral reformation.  On that
name no eulogy is expected.  It cannot be.  To add brightness to
the sun or glory to the name of Washington is alike impossible.
Let none attempt it. In solemn awe pronounce the name, and in its
naked deathless splendor leave it shining on.




TO JOSHUA F. SPEED.

SPRINGFIELD, February 25, 1842.

DEAR SPEED:--Yours of the 16th instant, announcing that Miss
Fanny and you are "no more twain, but one flesh," reached me this
morning. I have no way of telling you how much happiness I wish
you both, though I believe you both can conceive it.  I feel
somewhat jealous of both of you now: you will be so exclusively
concerned for one another, that I shall be forgotten entirely.
My acquaintance with Miss Fanny (I call her this, lest you should
think I am speaking of your mother) was too short for me to
reasonably hope to long be remembered by her; and still I am sure
I shall not forget her soon. Try if you cannot remind her of that
debt she owes me--and be sure you do not interfere to prevent her
paying it.

I regret to learn that you have resolved to not return to
Illinois. I shall be very lonesome without you. How miserably
things seem to be arranged in this world!  If we have no friends,
we have no pleasure; and if we have them, we are sure to lose
them, and be doubly pained by the loss.  I did hope she and you
would make your home here; but I own I have no right to insist.
You owe obligations to her ten thousand times more sacred than
you can owe to others, and in that light let them be respected
and observed. It is natural that she should desire to remain with
her relatives and friends. As to friends, however, she could not
need them anywhere: she would have them in abundance here.

Give my kind remembrance to Mr. Williamson and his family,
particularly Miss Elizabeth; also to your mother, brother, and
sisters. Ask little Eliza Davis if she will ride to town with me
if I come there again. And finally, give Fanny a double
reciprocation of all the love she sent me. Write me often, and
believe me

Yours forever,

LINCOLN.

P. S. Poor Easthouse is gone at last. He died awhile before day
this morning.  They say he was very loath to die....

L.




TO JOSHUA F. SPEED--ON MARRIAGE CONCERNS

SPRINGFIELD, February 25,1842.

DEAR SPEED:--I received yours of the 12th written the day you
went down to William's place, some days since, but delayed
answering it till I should receive the promised one of the 16th,
which came last night.  I opened the letter with intense anxiety
and trepidation; so much so, that, although it turned out better
than I expected, I have hardly yet, at a distance of ten hours,
become calm.

I tell you, Speed, our forebodings (for which you and I are
peculiar) are all the worst sort of nonsense.  I fancied, from
the time I received your letter of Saturday, that the one of
Wednesday was never to come, and yet it did come, and what is
more, it is perfectly clear, both from its tone and handwriting,
that you were much happier, or, if you think the term preferable,
less miserable, when you wrote it than when you wrote the last
one before.  You had so obviously improved at the very time I so
much fancied you would have grown worse.  You say that something
indescribably horrible and alarming still haunts you.  You will
not say that three months from now, I will venture.  When your
nerves once get steady now, the whole trouble will be over
forever.  Nor should you become impatient at their being even
very slow in becoming steady.  Again you say, you much fear that
that Elysium of which you have dreamed so much is never to be
realized.  Well, if it shall not, I dare swear it will not be the
fault of her who is now your wife.  I now have no doubt that it
is the peculiar misfortune of both you and me to dream dreams of
Elysium far exceeding all that anything earthly can realize.  Far
short of your dreams as you may be, no woman could do more to
realize them than that same black-eyed Fanny.  If you could but
contemplate her through my imagination, it would appear
ridiculous to you that any one should for a moment think of being
unhappy with her.  My old father used to have a saying that "If
you make a bad bargain, hug it all the tighter"; and it occurs to
me that if the bargain you have just closed can possibly be
called a bad one, it is certainly the most pleasant one for
applying that maxim to which my fancy can by any effort picture.

I write another letter, enclosing this, which you can show her,
if she desires it.  I do this because she would think strangely,
perhaps, should you tell her that you received no letters from
me, or, telling her you do, refuse to let her see them.  I close
this, entertaining the confident hope that every successive
letter I shall have from you (which I here pray may not be few,
nor far between) may show you possessing a more steady hand and
cheerful heart than the last preceding it.
As ever, your friend,

LINCOLN.




TO JOSHUA F. SPEED.

SPRINGFIELD, March 27, 1842

DEAR SPEED:--Yours of the 10th instant was received three or four
days since.  You know I am sincere when I tell you the pleasure
its contents gave me was, and is, inexpressible.  As to your farm
matter, I have no sympathy with you.  I have no farm, nor ever
expect to have, and consequently have not studied the subject
enough to be much interested with it.  I can only say that I am
glad you are satisfied and pleased with it.  But on that other
subject, to me of the most intense interest whether in joy or
sorrow, I never had the power to withhold my sympathy from you.
It cannot be told how it now thrills me with joy to hear you say
you are "far happier than you ever expected to be." That much I
know is enough.  I know you too well to suppose your expectations
were not, at least, sometimes extravagant, and if the reality
exceeds them all, I say, Enough, dear Lord.  I am not going
beyond the truth when I tell you that the short space it took me
to read your last letter gave me more pleasure than the total sum
of all I have enjoyed since the fatal 1st of January, 1841.
Since then it seems to me I should have been entirely happy, but
for the never-absent idea that there is one still unhappy whom I
have contributed to make so.  That still kills my soul.  I cannot
but reproach myself for even wishing to be happy while she is
otherwise.  She accompanied a large party on the railroad cars to
Jacksonville last Monday, and on her return spoke, so that I
heard of it, of having enjoyed the trip exceedingly.  God be
praised for that.

You know with what sleepless vigilance I have watched you ever
since the commencement of your affair; and although I am almost
confident it is useless, I cannot forbear once more to say that I
think it is even yet possible for your spirits to flag down and
leave you miserable.  If they should, don't fail to remember that
they cannot long remain so.  One thing I can tell you which I
know you will be glad to hear, and that is that I have seen--and
scrutinized her feelings as well as I could, and am fully
convinced she is far happier now than she has been for the last
fifteen months past.

You will see by the last Sangamon Journal, that I made a
temperance speech on the 22d of February, which I claim that
Fanny and you shall read as an act of charity to me; for I cannot
learn that anybody else has read it, or is likely to.
Fortunately it is not very long, and I shall deem it a sufficient
compliance with my request if one of you listens while the other
reads it.

As to your Lockridge matter, it is only necessary to say that
there has been no court since you left, and that the next
commences to-morrow morning, during which I suppose we cannot
fail to get a judgment.

I wish you would learn of Everett what he would take, over and
above a discharge for all the trouble we have been at, to take
his business out of our hands and give it to somebody else.  It
is impossible to collect money on that or any other claim here
now; and although you know I am not a very petulant man, I
declare I am almost out of patience with Mr. Everett's
importunity.  It seems like he not only writes all the letters he
can himself, but gets everybody else in Louisville and vicinity
to be constantly writing to us about his claim.  I have always
said that Mr. Everett is a very clever fellow, and I am very
sorry he cannot be obliged; but it does seem to me he ought to
know we are interested to collect his claim, and therefore would
do it if we could.

I am neither joking nor in a pet when I say we would thank him to
transfer his business to some other, without any compensation for
what we have done, provided he will see the court cost paid, for
which we are security.

The sweet violet you inclosed came safely to hand, but it was so
dry, and mashed so flat, that it crumbled to dust at the first
attempt to handle it.  The juice that mashed out of it stained a
place in the letter, which I mean to preserve and cherish for the
sake of her who procured it to be sent.  My renewed good wishes
to her in particular, and generally to all such of your relations
who know me.

As ever,

LINCOLN.




TO JOSHUA F. SPEED.

SPRINGFIELD, ILLINOIS, July 4, 1842.

DEAR SPEED:--Yours of the 16th June was received only a day or
two since.  It was not mailed at Louisville till the 25th.  You
speak of the great time that has elapsed since I wrote you.  Let
me explain that.  Your letter reached here a day or two after I
started on the circuit.  I was gone five or six weeks, so that I
got the letters only a few weeks before Butler started to your
country.  I thought it scarcely worth while to write you the news
which he could and would tell you more in detail.  On his return
he told me you would write me soon, and so I waited for your
letter.  As to my having been displeased with your advice, surely
you know better than that.  I know you do, and therefore will not
labor to convince you.  True, that subject is painful to me; but
it is not your silence, or the silence of all the world, that can
make me forget it.  I acknowledge the correctness of your advice
too; but before I resolve to do the one thing or the other, I
must gain my confidence in my own ability to keep my resolves
when they are made.  In that ability you know I once prided
myself as the only or chief gem of my character; that gem I lost-
-how and where you know too well.  I have not yet regained it;
and until I do, I cannot trust myself in any matter of much
importance.  I believe now that had you understood my case at the
time as well as I understand yours afterward, by the aid you
would have given me I should have sailed through clear, but that
does not now afford me sufficient confidence to begin that or the
like of that again.

You make a kind acknowledgment of your obligations to me for your
present happiness.  I am pleased with that acknowledgment.  But a
thousand times more am I pleased to know that you enjoy a degree
of happiness worthy of an acknowledgment.  The truth is, I am not
sure that there was any merit with me in the part I took in your
difficulty; I was drawn to it by a fate.  If I would I could not
have done less than I did.  I always was superstitious; I believe
God made me one of the instruments of bringing your Fanny and you
together, which union I have no doubt He had fore-ordained.
Whatever He designs He will do for me yet.  "Stand still, and see
the salvation of the Lord" is my text just now.  If, as you say,
you have told Fanny all, I should have no objection to her seeing
this letter, but for its reference to our friend here: let her
seeing it depend upon whether she has ever known anything of my
affairs; and if she has not, do not let her.

I do not think I can come to Kentucky this season.  I am so poor
and make so little headway in the world, that I drop back in a
month of idleness as much as I gain in a year's sowing.  I should
like to visit you again.  I should like to see that "sis" of
yours that was absent when I was there, though I suppose she
would run away again if she were to hear I was coming.

My respects and esteem to all your friends there, and, by your
permission, my love to your Fanny.

Ever yours,

LINCOLN.




A LETTER FROM THE LOST TOWNSHIPS

Article written by Lincoln for the Sangamon Journal in ridicule
of James Shields, who, as State Auditor, had declined to receive
State Bank notes in payment of taxes.  The above letter purported
to come from a poor widow who, though supplied with State Bank
paper, could not obtain a receipt for her tax bill.  This, and
another subsequent letter by Mary Todd, brought about the
"Lincoln-Shields Duel."




LOST TOWNSHIPS

August 27, 1842.

DEAR Mr. PRINTER:

I see you printed that long letter I sent you a spell ago.  I 'm
quite encouraged by it, and can't keep from writing again.  I
think the printing of my letters will be a good thing all round--
it will give me the benefit of being known by the world, and give
the world the advantage of knowing what's going on in the Lost
Townships, and give your paper respectability besides.  So here
comes another.  Yesterday afternoon I hurried through cleaning up
the dinner dishes and stepped over to neighbor S_______ to see if
his wife Peggy was as well as mout be expected, and hear what
they called the baby.  Well, when I got there and just turned
round the corner of his log cabin, there he was, setting on the
doorstep reading a newspaper.  "How are you, Jeff?" says I.  He
sorter started when he heard me, for he hadn't seen me before.
"Why," says he, "I 'm mad as the devil, Aunt 'Becca!" "What
about?" says I; "ain't its hair the right color? None of that
nonsense, Jeff; there ain't an honester woman in the Lost
Townships than..."--"Than who?" says he; "what the mischief are
you about?" I began to see I was running the wrong trail, and so
says I, "Oh! nothing: I guess I was mistaken a little, that's
all.  But what is it you 're mad about?"

"Why," says he, "I've been tugging ever since harvest, getting
out wheat and hauling it to the river to raise State Bank paper
enough to pay my tax this year and a little school debt I owe;
and now, just as I 've got it, here I open this infernal Extra
Register, expecting to find it full of 'Glorious Democratic
Victories' and 'High Comb'd Cocks,' when, lo and behold! I find a
set of fellows, calling themselves officers of the State, have
forbidden the tax collectors, and school commissioners to receive
State paper at all; and so here it is dead on my hands.  I don't
now believe all the plunder I've got will fetch ready cash enough
to pay my taxes and that school debt."

I was a good deal thunderstruck myself; for that was the first I
had heard of the proclamation, and my old man was pretty much in
the same fix with Jeff.  We both stood a moment staring at one
another without knowing what to say.  At last says I, "Mr.
S______    let me look at that paper." He handed it to me, when I
read the proclamation over.

"There now," says he, "did you ever see such a piece of impudence
and imposition as that?" I saw Jeff was in a good tune for saying
some ill-natured things, and so I tho't I would just argue a
little on the contrary side, and make him rant a spell if I
could.  "Why," says I,  looking as dignified and thoughtful as I
could, "it seems pretty tough, to be sure, to have to raise
silver where there's none to be raised; but then, you see, 'there
will be danger of loss' if it ain't done."

"Loss! damnation!" says he.  "I defy Daniel Webster, I defy King
Solomon, I defy the world--I defy--I defy--yes, I defy even you,
Aunt 'Becca, to show how the people can lose anything by paying
their taxes in State paper."

"Well," says I, "you see what the officers of State say about it,
and they are a desarnin' set of men.  But," says I, "I guess you
're mistaken about what the proclamation says.  It don't say the
people will lose anything by the paper money being taken for
taxes.  It only says 'there will be danger of loss'; and though
it is tolerable plain that the people can't lose by paying their
taxes in something they can get easier than silver, instead of
having to pay silver; and though it's just as plain that the
State can't lose by taking State Bank paper, however low it may
be, while she owes the bank more than the whole revenue, and can
pay that paper over on her debt, dollar for dollar;--still there
is danger of loss to the 'officers of State'; and you know, Jeff,
we can't get along without officers of State."

"Damn officers of State!" says he; "that's what Whigs are always
hurrahing for."

"Now, don't swear so, Jeff," says I, "you know I belong to the
meetin', and swearin' hurts my feelings."

"Beg pardon, Aunt 'Becca," says he; "but I do say it's enough to
make Dr.  Goddard swear, to have tax to pay in silver, for
nothing only that Ford may get his two thousand a year, and
Shields his twenty-four hundred a year, and Carpenter his sixteen
hundred a year, and all without 'danger of loss' by taking it in
State paper.  Yes, yes: it's plain enough now what these officers
of State mean by 'danger of loss.' Wash, I s'pose, actually lost
fifteen hundred dollars out of the three thousand that two of
these 'officers of State' let him steal from the treasury, by
being compelled to take it in State paper.  Wonder if we don't
have a proclamation before long, commanding us to make up this
loss to Wash in silver."

And so he went on till his breath run out, and he had to stop.  I
couldn't think of anything to say just then, and so I begun to
look over the paper again.  "Ay! here's another proclamation, or
something like it."

"Another?" says Jeff; "and whose egg is it, pray?"

I looked to the bottom of it, and read aloud, "Your obedient
servant, James Shields, Auditor."

"Aha!" says Jeff, "one of them same three fellows again.  Well
read it, and let's hear what of it."

I read on till I came to where it says, "The object of this
measure is to suspend the collection of the revenue for the
current year."

"Now stop, now stop!" says he; "that's a lie a'ready, and I don't
want to hear of it."

"Oh, maybe not," says I.

"I say it-is-a-lie.  Suspend the collection, indeed! Will the
collectors, that have taken their oaths to make the collection,
dare to end it? Is there anything in law requiring them to
perjure themselves at the bidding of James Shields?

"Will the greedy gullet of the penitentiary be satisfied with
swallowing him instead of all of them, if they should venture to
obey him? And would he not discover some 'danger of loss,' and be
off about the time it came to taking their places?

"And suppose the people attempt to suspend, by refusing to pay;
what then? The collectors would just jerk up their horses and
cows, and the like, and sell them to the highest bidder for
silver in hand, without valuation or redemption.  Why, Shields
didn't believe that story himself; it was never meant for the
truth.  If it was true, why was it not writ till five days after
the proclamation? Why did n't Carlin and Carpenter sign it as
well as Shields? Answer me that, Aunt 'Becca.  I say it's a lie,
and not a well told one at that.  It grins out like a copper
dollar.  Shields is a fool as well as a liar.  With him truth is
out of the question; and as for getting a good, bright, passable
lie out of him, you might as well try to strike fire from a cake
of tallow.  I stick to it, it's all an infernal Whig lie!"

"A Whig lie! Highty tighty!"

"Yes, a Whig lie; and it's just like everything the cursed
British Whigs do.  First they'll do some divilment, and then
they'll tell a lie to hide it.  And they don't care how plain a
lie it is; they think they can cram any sort of a one down the
throats of the ignorant Locofocos, as they call the Democrats."

"Why, Jeff, you 're crazy: you don't mean to say Shields is a
Whig!"

"Yes, I do."

"Why, look here! the proclamation is in your own Democratic
paper, as you call it."

"I know it; and what of that? They only printed it to let us
Democrats see the deviltry the Whigs are at."

"Well, but Shields is the auditor of this Loco--I mean this
Democratic State."

"So he is, and Tyler appointed him to office."

"Tyler appointed him?"

"Yes (if you must chaw it over), Tyler appointed him; or, if it
was n't him, it was old Granny Harrison, and that's all one.  I
tell you, Aunt 'Becca, there's no mistake about his being a Whig.
Why, his very looks shows it; everything about him shows it: if I
was deaf and blind, I could tell him by the smell.  I seed him
when I was down in Springfield last winter.  They had a sort of a
gatherin' there one night among the grandees, they called a fair.
All the gals about town was there, and all the handsome widows
and married women, finickin' about trying to look like gals, tied
as tight in the middle, and puffed out at both ends, like bundles
of fodder that had n't been stacked yet, but wanted stackin'
pretty bad.  And then they had tables all around the house
kivered over with [        ] caps and pincushions and ten
thousand such little knick-knacks, tryin' to sell 'em to the
fellows that were bowin', and scrapin' and kungeerin' about 'em.
They would n't let no Democrats in, for fear they'd disgust the
ladies, or scare the little gals, or dirty the floor.  I looked
in at the window, and there was this same fellow Shields floatin'
about on the air, without heft or earthly substances, just like a
lock of cat fur where cats had been fighting.

"He was paying his money to this one, and that one, and t' other
one, and sufferin' great loss because it was n't silver instead
of State paper; and the sweet distress he seemed to be in,--his
very features, in the ecstatic agony of his soul, spoke audibly
and distinctly, 'Dear girls, it is distressing, but I cannot
marry you all.  Too well I know how much you suffer; but do, do
remember, it is not my fault that I am so handsome and so
interesting.'

"As this last was expressed by a most exquisite contortion of his
face, he seized hold of one of their hands, and squeezed, and
held on to it about a quarter of an hour.  'Oh, my good fellow!'
says I to myself, 'if that was one of our Democratic gals in the
Lost Townships, the way you 'd get a brass pin let into you would
be about up to the head.' He a Democrat! Fiddlesticks! I tell
you, Aunt 'Becca, he's a Whig, and no mistake; nobody but a Whig
could make such a conceity dunce of himself."

"Well," says I, "maybe he is; but, if he is, I 'm mistaken the
worst sort.  Maybe so, maybe so; but, if I am, I'll suffer by it;
I'll be a Democrat if it turns out that Shields is a Whig,
considerin' you shall be a Whig if he turns out a Democrat."

"A bargain, by jingoes!" says he; "but how will we find out?"

"Why," says I, "we'll just write and ax the printer."

"Agreed again!" says he; "and by thunder! if it does turn out
that Shields is a Democrat, I never will __________"

"Jefferson! Jefferson!"

"What do you want, Peggy?"

"Do get through your everlasting clatter some time, and bring me
a gourd of water; the child's been crying for a drink this
livelong hour."

"Let it die, then; it may as well die for water as to be taxed to
death to fatten officers of State."

Jeff run off to get the water, though, just like he hadn't been
saying anything spiteful, for he's a raal good-hearted fellow,
after all, once you get at the foundation of him.

I walked into the house, and, "Why, Peggy," says I, "I declare we
like to forgot you altogether."

"Oh, yes," says she, "when a body can't help themselves,
everybody soon forgets 'em; but, thank God! by day after to-
morrow I shall be well enough to milk the cows, and pen the
calves, and wring the contrary ones' tails for 'em, and no thanks
to nobody."

"Good evening, Peggy," says I, and so I sloped, for I seed she
was mad at me for making Jeff neglect her so long.

And now, Mr. Printer, will you be sure to let us know in your
next paper whether this Shields is a Whig or a Democrat? I don't
care about it for myself, for I know well enough how it is
already; but I want to convince Jeff.  It may do some good to let
him, and others like him, know who and what these officers of
State are.  It may help to send the present hypocritical set to
where they belong, and to fill the places they now disgrace with
men who will do more work for less pay, and take fewer airs while
they are doing it.  It ain't sensible to think that the same men
who get us in trouble will change their course; and yet it's
pretty plain if some change for the better is not made, it's not
long that either Peggy or I or any of us will have a cow left to
milk, or a calf's tail to wring.

Yours truly,

REBECCA ____________




INVITATION TO HENRY CLAY.

SPRINGFIELD, ILL.,  Aug 29, 1842.

HON. HENRY CLAY, Lexington, Ky.

DEAR SIR:--We hear you are to visit Indianapolis, Indiana, on the
5th Of October next.  If our information in this is correct we
hope you will not deny us the pleasure of seeing you in our
State.  We are aware of the toil necessarily incident to a
journey by one circumstanced as you are; but once you have
embarked, as you have already determined to do, the toil would
not be greatly augmented by extending the journey to our capital.
The season of the year will be most favorable for good roads, and
pleasant weather; and although we cannot but believe you would be
highly gratified with such a visit to the prairie-land, the
pleasure it would give us and thousands such as we is beyond all
question.  You have never visited Illinois, or at least this
portion of it; and should you now yield to our request, we
promise you such a reception as shall he worthy of the man on
whom are now turned the fondest hopes of a great and suffering
nation.

Please inform us at the earliest convenience whether we may
expect you.

Very respectfully your obedient servants,
A. G. HENRY,  A. T. BLEDSOE,
C. BIRCHALL,  A. LINCOLN,
G. M. CABANNISS,  ROB'T IRWIN,
P. A. SAUNDERS,  J. M. ALLEN,
F. N. FRANCIS.
Executive Committee "Clay Club."

(Clay's answer, September 6, 1842, declines with thanks.)




CORRESPONDENCE ABOUT THE LINCOLN-SHIELDS DUEL.

TREMONT, September 17, 1842.

ABRA. LINCOLN, ESQ.:--I regret that my absence on public business
compelled me to postpone a matter of private consideration a
little longer than I could have desired.  It will only be
necessary, however, to account for it by informing you that I
have been to Quincy on business that would not admit of delay.  I
will now state briefly the reasons of my troubling you with this
communication, the disagreeable nature of which I regret, as I
had hoped to avoid any difficulty with any one in Springfield
while residing there, by endeavoring to conduct myself in such a
way amongst both my political friends and opponents as to escape
the necessity of any.  Whilst thus abstaining from giving
provocation, I have become the object of slander, vituperation,
and personal abuse, which were I capable of submitting to, I
would prove myself worthy of the whole of it.

In two or three of the last numbers of the Sangamon Journal,
articles of the most personal nature and calculated to degrade me
have made their appearance.  On inquiring, I was informed by the
editor of that paper, through the medium of my friend General
Whitesides, that you are the author of those articles.  This
information satisfies me that I have become by some means or
other the object of your secret hostility.  I will not take the
trouble of inquiring into the reason of all this; but I will take
the liberty of requiring a full, positive, and absolute
retraction of all offensive allusions used by you in these
communications, in relation to my private character and standing
as a man, as an apology for the insults conveyed in them.

This may prevent consequences which no one will regret more than
myself.

Your obedient servant,    JAS.  SHIELDS.




TO J. SHIELDS.

TREMONT, September 17, 1842

JAS. SHIELDS, ESQ.:--Your note of to-day was handed me by General
Whitesides.  In that note you say you have been informed, through
the medium of the editor of the Journal, that I am the author of
certain articles in that paper which you deem personally abusive
of you; and without stopping to inquire whether I really am the
author, or to point out what is offensive in them, you demand an
unqualified retraction of all that is offensive, and then proceed
to hint at consequences.

Now, sir, there is in this so much assumption of facts and so
much of menace as to consequences, that I cannot submit to answer
that note any further than I have, and to add that the
consequences to which I suppose you allude would be matter of as
great regret to me as it possibly could to you.

Respectfully,

A. LINCOLN.




TO A. LINCOLN FROM JAS. SHIELDS

TREMONT, September 17, 1842.

ABRA. LINCOLN, ESQ.:--In reply to my note of this date, you
intimate that I assume facts and menace consequences, and that
you cannot submit to answer it further.  As now, sir, you desire
it, I will be a little more particular.  The editor of the
Sangamon Journal gave me to understand that you are the author of
an article which appeared, I think, in that paper of the 2d
September instant, headed "The Lost Townships," and signed
Rebecca or 'Becca.  I would therefore take the liberty of asking
whether you are the author of said article, or any other over the
same signature which has appeared in any of the late numbers of
that paper.  If so, I repeat my request of an absolute retraction
of all offensive allusions contained therein in relation to my
private character and standing.  If you are not the author of any
of these articles, your denial will he sufficient.  I will say
further, it is not my intention to menace, but to do myself
justice.

Your obedient servant,
JAS. SHIELDS.




MEMORANDUM OF INSTRUCTIONS TO E. H. MERRYMAN,

Lincoln's Second,

September 19, 1842.

In case Whitesides shall signify a wish to adjust this affair
without further difficulty, let him know that if the present
papers be withdrawn, and a note from Mr. Shields asking to know
if I am the author of the articles of which he complains, and
asking that I shall make him gentlemanly satisfaction if I am the
author, and this without menace, or dictation as to what that
satisfaction shall be, a pledge is made that the following answer
shall be given:

"I did write the 'Lost Townships' letter which appeared in the
Journal of the 2d instant, but had no participation in any form
in any other article alluding to you.  I wrote that wholly for
political effect--I had no intention of injuring your personal or
private character or standing as a man or a gentleman; and I did
not then think, and do not now think, that that article could
produce or has produced that effect against you; and had I
anticipated such an effect I would have forborne to write it.
And I will add that your conduct toward me, so far as I know, had
always been gentlemanly; and that I had no personal pique against
you, and no cause for any."

If this should be done, I leave it with you to arrange what shall
and what shall not be published.  If nothing like this is done,
the preliminaries of the fight are to be--

First.  Weapons: Cavalry broadswords of the largest size,
precisely equal in all respects, and such as now used by the
cavalry company at Jacksonville.

Second.  Position: A plank ten feet long, and from nine to twelve
inches broad, to be firmly fixed on edge, on the ground, as the
line between us, which neither is to pass his foot over upon
forfeit of his life.  Next a line drawn on the ground on either
side of said plank and parallel with it, each at the distance of
the whole length of the sword and three feet additional from the
plank; and the passing of his own such line by either party
during the fight shall be deemed a surrender of the contest.

Third.  Time: On Thursday evening at five o'clock, if you can get
it so; but in no case to be at a greater distance of time than
Friday evening at five o'clock.

Fourth.  Place: Within three miles of Alton, on the opposite side
of the river, the particular spot to be agreed on by you.

Any preliminary details coming within the above rules you are at
liberty to make at your discretion; but you are in no case to
swerve from these rules, or to pass beyond their limits.




TO JOSHUA F. SPEED.

SPRINGFIELD, October 4, 1842.

DEAR SPEED:--You have heard of my duel with Shields, and I have
now to inform you that the dueling business still rages in this
city.  Day before yesterday Shields challenged Butler, who
accepted, and proposed fighting next morning at sunrise in Bob
Allen's meadow, one hundred yards' distance, with rifles.  To
this Whitesides, Shields's second, said "No," because of the law.
Thus ended duel No.  2.  Yesterday Whitesides chose to consider
himself insulted by Dr.  Merryman, so sent him a kind of quasi-
challenge, inviting him to meet him at the Planter's House in St.
Louis on the next Friday, to settle their difficulty.  Merryman
made me his friend, and sent Whitesides a note, inquiring to know
if he meant his note as a challenge, and if so, that he would,
according to the law in such case made and provided, prescribe
the terms of the meeting.  Whitesides returned for answer that if
Merryman would meet him at the Planter's House as desired, he
would challenge him.  Merryman replied in a note that he denied
Whitesides's right to dictate time and place, but that he
(Merryman) would waive the question of time, and meet him at
Louisiana, Missouri.  Upon my presenting this note to Whitesides
and stating verbally its contents, he declined receiving it,
saying he had business in St.  Louis, and it was as near as
Louisiana.  Merryman then directed me to notify Whitesides that
he should publish the correspondence between them, with such
comments as he thought fit.  This I did.  Thus it stood at
bedtime last night.  This morning Whitesides, by his friend
Shields, is praying for a new trial, on the ground that he was
mistaken in Merryman's proposition to meet him at Louisiana,
Missouri, thinking it was the State of Louisiana.  This Merryman
hoots at, and is preparing his publication; while the town is in
a ferment, and a street fight somewhat anticipated.

But I began this letter not for what I have been writing, but to
say something on that subject which you know to be of such
infinite solicitude to me.  The immense sufferings you endured
from the first days of September till the middle of February you
never tried to conceal from me, and I well understood.  You have
now been the husband of a lovely woman nearly eight months.  That
you are happier now than the day you married her I well know, for
without you could not be living.  But I have your word for it,
too, and the returning elasticity of spirits which is manifested
in your letters.  But I want to ask a close question, "Are you
now in feeling as well as judgment glad that you are married as
you are?" From anybody but me this would be an impudent question,
not to be tolerated; but I know you will pardon it in me.  Please
answer it quickly, as I am impatient to know.  I have sent my
love to your Fanny so often, I fear she is getting tired of it.
However, I venture to tender it again.

Yours forever,

LINCOLN.




TO JAMES S. IRWIN.

SPRINGFIELD,
November 2, 1842.

JAS. S. IRWIN ESQ.:

Owing to my absence, yours of the 22nd ult.  was not received
till this moment.  Judge Logan and myself are willing to attend
to any business in the Supreme Court you may send us.  As to
fees, it is impossible to establish a rule that will apply in
all, or even a great many cases.  We believe we are never accused
of being very unreasonable in this particular; and we would
always be easily satisfied, provided we could see the money--but
whatever fees we earn at a distance, if not paid before, we have
noticed, we never hear of after the work is done.  We, therefore,
are growing a little sensitive on that point.

Yours etc.,

A. LINCOLN.




1843


RESOLUTIONS AT A WHIG MEETING AT SPRINGFIELD,
ILLINOIS, MARCH 1, 1843.

The object of the meeting was stated by Mr. Lincoln of
Springfield, who offered the following resolutions, which were
unanimously adopted:

Resolved, That a tariff of duties on imported goods, producing
sufficient revenue for the payment of the necessary expenditures
of the National Government, and so adjusted as to protect
American industry, is indispensably necessary to the prosperity
of the American people.

Resolved, That we are opposed to direct taxation for the support
of the National Government.

Resolved, That a national bank, properly restricted, is highly
necessary and proper to the establishment and maintenance of a
sound currency, and for the cheap and safe collection, keeping,
and disbursing of the public revenue.

Resolved, That the distribution of the proceeds of the sales of
the public lands, upon the principles of Mr. Clay's bill, accords
with the best interests of the nation, and particularly with
those of the State of Illinois.

Resolved, That we recommend to the Whigs of each Congressional
district of the State to nominate and support at the approaching
election a candidate of their own principles, regardless of the
chances of success.

Resolved, That we recommend to th, Whigs of all portions of the
State to adopt and rigidly adhere to the convention system of
nominating candidates.

Resolved, That we recommend to the Whigs of each Congressional
district to hold a district convention on or before the first
Monday of May next, to be composed of a number of delegates from
each county equal to double the n tuber of its representatives in
the General Assembly, provided, each county shall have at least
one delegate.  Said delegates to be chosen by primary meetings of
the Whigs, at such times and places as they in their respective
counties may see fit.  Said district conventions each to nominate
one candidate for Congress, and one delegate to a national
convention for the purpose of nominating candidates for President
and Vice-President of the United States.  The seven delegates so
nominated to a national convention to have power to add two
delegates to their own number, and to fill all vacancies.

Resolved, That A. T. Bledsoe, S. T. Logan, and A. Lincoln be
appointed a committee to prepare an address to the people of the
State.

Resolved, That N. W. Edwards, A. G. Henry, James H. Matheny, John
C. Doremus, and James C. Conkling be appointed a Whig Central
State Committee, with authority to fill any vacancy that may
occur in the committee.




CIRCULAR FROM WHIG COMMITTEE.

Address to the People of Illinois.

FELLOW-CITIZENS:-By a resolution of a meeting of such of the
Whigs of the State as are now at Springfield, we, the
undersigned, were appointed to prepare an address to you.  The
performance of that task we now undertake.

Several resolutions were adopted by the meeting; and the chief
object of this address is to show briefly the reasons for their
adoption.

The first of those resolutions declares a tariff of duties upon
foreign importations, producing sufficient revenue for the
support of the General Government, and so adjusted as to protect
American industry, to be indispensably necessary to the
prosperity of the American people; and the second declares direct
taxation for a national revenue to be improper.  Those two
resolutions are kindred in their nature, and therefore proper and
convenient to be considered together.  The question of protection
is a subject entirely too broad to be crowded into a few pages
only, together with several other subjects.  On that point we
therefore content ourselves with giving the following extracts
from the writings of Mr. Jefferson, General Jackson, and the
speech of Mr. Calhoun:

"To be independent for the comforts of life, we must fabricate
them ourselves.  We must now place the manufacturer by the side
of the agriculturalist. The grand inquiry now is, Shall we make
our own comforts, or go without them at the will of a foreign
nation?  He, therefore, who is now against domestic manufactures
must be for reducing us either to dependence on that foreign
nation, or to be clothed in skins and to live like wild beasts in
dens and caverns.  I am not one of those; experience has taught
me that manufactures are now as necessary to our independence as
to our comfort." Letter of Mr. Jefferson to Benjamin Austin.

"I ask, What is the real situation of the agriculturalist?  Where
has the American farmer a market for his surplus produce?  Except
for cotton, he has neither a foreign nor a home market.  Does not
this clearly prove, when there is no market at home or abroad,
that there [is] too much labor employed in agriculture?  Common
sense at once points out the remedy.  Take from agriculture six
hundred thousand men, women, and children, and you will at once
give a market for more breadstuffs than all Europe now furnishes.
In short, we have been too long subject to the policy of British
merchants.  It is time we should become a little more
Americanized, and instead of feeding the paupers and laborers of
England, feed our own; or else in a short time, by continuing our
present policy, we shall all be rendered paupers ourselves."--
General Jackson's Letter to Dr. Coleman.

"When our manufactures are grown to a certain perfection, as they
soon will be, under the fostering care of government, the farmer
will find a ready market for his surplus produce, and--what is of
equal consequence--a certain and cheap supply of all he wants;
his prosperity will diffuse itself to every class of the
community." Speech of Hon. J. C. Calhoun on the Tariff.

The question of revenue we will now briefly consider.  For
several years past the revenues of the government have been
unequal to its expenditures, and consequently loan after loan,
sometimes direct and sometimes indirect in form, has been
resorted to.  By this means a new national debt has been created,
and is still growing on us with a rapidity fearful to
contemplate--a rapidity only reasonably to be expected in time of
war.  This state of things has been produced by a prevailing
unwillingness either to increase the tariff or resort to direct
taxation.  But the one or the other must come.  Coming
expenditures must be met, and the present debt must be paid; and
money cannot always be borrowed for these objects.  The system of
loans is but temporary in its nature, and must soon explode.  It
is a system not only ruinous while it lasts, but one that must
soon fail and leave us destitute.  As an individual who
undertakes to live by borrowing soon finds his original means
devoured by interest, and, next, no one left to borrow from, so
must it be with a government.

We repeat, then, that a tariff sufficient for revenue, or a
direct tax, must soon be resorted to; and, indeed, we believe
this alternative is now denied by no one.  But which system shall
be adopted? Some of our opponents, in theory, admit the propriety
of a tariff sufficient for a revenue, but even they will not in
practice vote for such a tariff; while others boldly advocate
direct taxation.  Inasmuch, therefore, as some of them boldly
advocate direct taxation, and all the rest--or so nearly all as
to make exceptions needless--refuse to adopt the tariff, we think
it is doing them no injustice to class them all as advocates of
direct taxation.  Indeed, we believe they are only delaying an
open avowal of the system till they can assure themselves that
the people will tolerate it.  Let us, then, briefly compare the
two systems.  The tariff is the cheaper system, because the
duties, being collected in large parcels at a few commercial
points, will require comparatively few officers in their
collection; while by the direct-tax system the land must be
literally covered with assessors and collectors, going forth like
swarms of Egyptian locusts, devouring every blade of grass and
other green thing.  And, again, by the tariff system the whole
revenue is paid by the consumers of foreign goods, and those
chiefly the luxuries, and not the necessaries, of life.  By this
system the man who contents himself to live upon the products of
his own country pays nothing at all.  And surely that country is
extensive enough, and its products abundant and varied enough, to
answer all the real wants of its people.  In short, by this
system the burthen of revenue falls almost entirely on the
wealthy and luxurious few, while the substantial and laboring
many who live at home, and upon home products, go entirely free.
By the direct-tax system none can escape.  However strictly the
citizen may exclude from his premises all foreign luxuries,--fine
cloths, fine silks, rich wines, golden chains, and diamond
rings,--still, for the possession of his house, his barn, and his
homespun, he is to be perpetually haunted and harassed by the
tax-gatherer.  With these views we leave it to be determined
whether we or our opponents are the more truly democratic on the
subject.

The third resolution declares the necessity and propriety of a
national bank.  During the last fifty years so much has been said
and written both as to the constitutionality and expediency of
such an institution, that we could not hope to improve in the
least on former discussions of the subject, were we to undertake
it.  We, therefore, upon the question of constitutionality
content ourselves with remarking the facts that the first
national bank was established chiefly by the same men who formed
the Constitution, at a time when that instrument was but two
years old, and receiving the sanction, as President, of the
immortal Washington; that the second received the sanction, as
President, of Mr. Madison, to whom common consent has awarded the
proud title of "Father of the Constitution"; and subsequently the
sanction of the Supreme Court, the most enlightened judicial
tribunal in the world.  Upon the question of expediency, we only
ask you to examine the history of the times during the existence
of the two banks, and compare those times with the miserable
present.

The fourth resolution declares the expediency of Mr. Clay's land
bill.  Much incomprehensible jargon is often used against the
constitutionality of this measure.  We forbear, in this place,
attempting an answer to it, simply because, in our opinion, those
who urge it are through party zeal resolved not to see or
acknowledge the truth.  The question of expediency, at least so
far as Illinois is concerned, seems to us the clearest
imaginable.  By the bill we are to receive annually a large sum
of money, no part of which we otherwise receive.  The precise
annual sum cannot be known in advance; it doubtless will vary in
different years.  Still it is something to know that in the last
year--a year of almost unparalleled pecuniary pressure--it
amounted to more than forty thousand dollars.  This annual
income, in the midst of our almost insupportable difficulties, in
the days of our severest necessity, our political opponents are
furiously resolving to take and keep from us.  And for what?
Many silly reasons are given, as is usual in cases where a single
good one is not to be found.  One is that by giving us the
proceeds of the lands we impoverish the national treasury, and
thereby render necessary an increase of the tariff.  This may be
true; but if so, the amount of it only is that those whose pride,
whose abundance of means, prompt them to spurn the manufactures
of our country, and to strut in British cloaks and coats and
pantaloons, may have to pay a few cents more on the yard for the
cloth that makes them.  A terrible evil, truly, to the Illinois
farmer, who never wore, nor ever expects to wear, a single yard
of British goods in his whole life.  Another of their reasons is
that by the passage and continuance of Mr. Clay's bill, we
prevent the passage of a bill which would give us more.  This, if
it were sound in itself, is waging destructive war with the
former position; for if Mr. Clay's bill impoverishes the treasury
too much, what shall be said of one that impoverishes it still
more?  But it is not sound in itself.  It is not true that Mr.
Clay's bill prevents the passage of one more favorable to us of
the new States.  Considering the strength and opposite interest
of the old States, the wonder is that they ever permitted one to
pass so favorable as Mr. Clay's.  The last twenty-odd years'
efforts to reduce the price of the lands, and to pass graduation
bills and cession bills, prove the assertion to be true; and if
there were no experience in support of it, the reason itself is
plain.  The States in which none, or few, of the public lands
lie, and those consequently interested against parting with them
except for the best price, are the majority; and a moment's
reflection will show that they must ever continue the majority,
because by the time one of the original new States (Ohio, for
example) becomes populous and gets weight in Congress, the public
lands in her limits are so nearly sold out that in every point
material to this question she becomes an old State.  She does not
wish the price reduced, because there is none left for her
citizens to buy; she does not wish them ceded to the States in
which they lie, because they no longer lie in her limits, and she
will get nothing by the cession.  In the nature of things, the
States interested in the reduction of price, in graduation, in
cession, and in all similar projects, never can be the majority.
Nor is there reason to hope that any of them can ever succeed as
a Democratic party measure, because we have heretofore seen that
party in full power, year after year, with many of their leaders
making loud professions in favor of these projects, and yet doing
nothing.  What reason, then, is there to believe they will
hereafter do better?  In every light in which we can view this
question, it amounts simply to this: Shall we accept our share of
the proceeds under Mr. Clay's bill, or shall we rather reject
that and get nothing?

The fifth resolution recommends that a Whig candidate for
Congress be run in every district, regardless of the chances of
success.  We are aware that it is sometimes a temporary
gratification, when a friend cannot succeed, to be able to choose
between opponents; but we believe that that gratification is the
seed-time which never fails to be followed by a most abundant
harvest of bitterness.  By this policy we entangle ourselves.  By
voting for our opponents, such of us as do it in some measure
estop ourselves to complain of their acts, however glaringly
wrong we may believe them to be.  By this policy no one portion
of our friends can ever be certain as to what course another
portion may adopt; and by this want of mutual and perfect
understanding our political identity is partially frittered away
and lost.  And, again, those who are thus elected by our aid ever
become our bitterest persecutors.  Take a few prominent examples.
In 1830 Reynolds was elected Governor; in 1835 we exerted our
whole strength to elect Judge Young to the United States Senate,
which effort, though failing, gave him the prominence that
subsequently elected him; in 1836 General Ewing, was so elected
to the United States Senate; and yet let us ask what three men
have been more perseveringly vindictive in their assaults upon
all our men and measures than they?  During the last summer the
whole State was covered with pamphlet editions of
misrepresentations against us, methodized into chapters and
verses, written by two of these same men,--Reynolds and Young, in
which they did not stop at charging us with error merely, but
roundly denounced us as the designing enemies of human liberty,
itself.  If it be the will of Heaven that such men shall
politically live, be it so; but never, never again permit them to
draw a particle of their sustenance from us.

The sixth resolution recommends the adoption of the convention
system for the nomination of candidates.  This we believe to be
of the very first importance.  Whether the system is right in
itself we do not stop to inquire; contenting ourselves with
trying to show that, while our opponents use it, it is madness in
us not to defend ourselves with it.  Experience has shown that we
cannot successfully defend ourselves without it.  For examples,
look at the elections of last year.  Our candidate for governor,
with the approbation of a large portion of the party, took the
field without a nomination, and in open opposition to the system.
Wherever in the counties the Whigs had held conventions and
nominated candidates for the Legislature, the aspirants who were
not nominated were induced to rebel against the nominations, and
to become candidates, as is said, "on their own hook."  And, go
where you would into a large Whig county, you were sure to find
the Whigs not contending shoulder to shoulder against the common
enemy, but divided into factions, and fighting furiously with one
another.  The election came, and what was the result?  The
governor beaten, the Whig vote being decreased many thousands
since 1840, although the Democratic vote had not increased any.
Beaten almost everywhere for members of the Legislature,--
Tazewell, with her four hundred Whig majority, sending a
delegation half Democratic; Vermillion, with her five hundred,
doing the same; Coles, with her four hundred, sending two out of
three; and Morgan, with her two hundred and fifty, sending three
out of four,--and this to say nothing of the numerous other less
glaring examples; the whole winding up with the aggregate number
of twenty-seven Democratic representatives sent from Whig
counties.  As to the senators, too, the result was of the same
character.  And it is most worthy to be remembered that of all
the Whigs in the State who ran against the regular nominees, a
single one only was elected.  Although they succeeded in
defeating the nominees almost by scores, they too were defeated,
and the spoils chucklingly borne off by the common enemy.

We do not mention the fact of many of the Whigs opposing the
convention system heretofore for the purpose of censuring them.
Far from it.  We expressly protest against such a conclusion.  We
know they were generally, perhaps universally, as good and true
Whigs as we ourselves claim to be.

We mention it merely to draw attention to the disastrous result
it produced, as an example forever hereafter to be avoided.  That
"union is strength" is a truth that has been known, illustrated,
and declared in various ways and forms in all ages of the world.
That great fabulist and philosopher Aesop illustrated it by his
fable of the bundle of sticks; and he whose wisdom surpasses that
of all philosophers has declared that "a house divided against
itself cannot stand."  It is to induce our friends to act upon
this important and universally acknowledged truth that we urge
the adoption of the convention system.  Reflection will prove
that there is no other way of practically applying it.  In its
application we know there will be incidents temporarily painful;
but, after all, those incidents will be fewer and less intense
with than without the system.  If two friends aspire to the same
office it is certain that both cannot succeed.  Would it not,
then, be much less painful to have the question decided by mutual
friends some time before, than to snarl and quarrel until the day
of election, and then both be beaten by the common enemy?

Before leaving this subject, we think proper to remark that we do
not understand the resolution as intended to recommend the
application of the convention system to the nomination of
candidates for the small offices no way connected with politics;
though we must say we do not perceive that such an application.
of it would be wrong.

The seventh resolution recommends the holding of district
conventions in May next, for the purpose of nominating candidates
for Congress.  The propriety of this rests upon the same reasons
with that of the sixth, and therefore needs no further
discussion.

The eighth and ninth also relate merely to the practical
application of the foregoing, and therefore need no discussion.

Before closing, permit us to add a few reflections on the present
condition and future prospects of the Whig party.  In almost all
the States we have fallen into the minority, and despondency
seems to prevail universally among us.  Is there just cause for
this? In 1840 we carried the nation by more than a hundred and
forty thousand majority.  Our opponents charged that we did it by
fraudulent voting; but whatever they may have believed, we know
the charge to be untrue.  Where, now, is that mighty host?  Have
they gone over to the enemy? Let the results of the late
elections answer.  Every State which has fallen off from the Whig
cause since 1840 has done so not by giving more Democratic votes
than they did then, but by giving fewer Whig.  Bouck, who was
elected Democratic Governor of New York last fall by more than
15,000 majority, had not then as many votes as he had in 1840,
when he was beaten by seven or eight thousand.  And so has it
been in all the other States which have fallen away from our
cause.  From this it is evident that tens of thousands in the
late elections have not voted at all.  Who and what are they? is
an important question, as respects the future.  They can come
forward and give us the victory again.  That all, or nearly all,
of them are Whigs is most apparent.  Our opponents, stung to
madness by the defeat of 1840, have ever since rallied with more
than their usual unanimity.  It has not been they that have been
kept from the polls.  These facts show what the result must be,
once the people again rally in their entire strength.  Proclaim
these facts, and predict this result; and although unthinking
opponents may smile at us, the sagacious ones will "believe and
tremble."  And why shall the Whigs not all rally again?  Are
their principles less dear now than in 1840?  Have any of their
doctrines since then been discovered to be untrue? It is true,
the victory of 1840 did not produce the happy results
anticipated; but it is equally true, as we believe, that the
unfortunate death of General Harrison was the cause of the
failure.  It was not the election of General Harrison that was
expected to produce happy effects, but the measures to be adopted
by his administration.  By means of his death, and the unexpected
course of his successor, those measures were never adopted.  How
could the fruits follow?  The consequences we always predicted
would follow the failure of those measures have followed, and are
now upon us in all their horrors.  By the course of Mr. Tyler the
policy of our opponents has continued in operation, still leaving
them with the advantage of charging all its evils upon us as the
results of a Whig administration.  Let none be deceived by this
somewhat plausible, though entirely false charge.  If they ask us
for the sufficient and sound currency we promised, let them be
answered that we only promised it through the medium of a
national bank, which they, aided by Mr. Tyler, prevented our
establishing.  And let them be reminded, too, that their own
policy in relation to the currency has all the time been, and
still is, in full operation.  Let us then again come forth in our
might, and by a second victory accomplish that which death
prevented in the first.  We can do it.  When did the Whigs ever
fail if they were fully aroused and united?  Even in single
States, under such circumstances, defeat seldom overtakes them.
Call to mind the contested elections within the last few years,
and particularly those of Moore and Letcher from Kentucky,
Newland and Graham from North Carolina, and the famous New Jersey
case.  In all these districts Locofocoism had stalked omnipotent
before; but when the whole people were aroused by its enormities
on those occasions, they put it down, never to rise again.

We declare it to be our solemn conviction, that the Whigs are
always a majority of this nation; and that to make them always
successful needs but to get them all to the polls and to vote
unitedly.  This is the great desideratum.  Let us make every
effort to attain it.  At every election, let every Whig act as
though he knew the result to depend upon his action.  In the
great contest of 1840 some more than twenty one hundred thousand
votes were cast, and so surely as there shall be that many, with
the ordinary increase added, cast in 1844 that surely will a Whig
be elected President of the United States.

A. LINCOLN.
S. T. LOGAN.
A. T. BLEDSOE.

March 4, 1843.




TO JOHN BENNETT.

SPRINGFIELD, March 7, 1843.

FRIEND BENNETT:

Your letter of this day was handed me by Mr. Miles.  It is too
late now to effect the object you desire.  On yesterday morning
the most of the Whig members from this district got together and
agreed to hold the convention at Tremont in Tazewell County.  I
am sorry to hear that any of the Whigs of your county, or indeed
of any county, should longer be against conventions.  On last
Wednesday evening a meeting of all the Whigs then here from all
parts of the State was held, and the question of the propriety.
of conventions was brought up and fully discussed, and at the end
of the discussion a resolution recommending the system of
conventions to all the Whigs of the State was unanimously
adopted.  Other resolutions were also passed, all of which will
appear in the next Journal.  The meeting also appointed a
committee to draft an address to the people of the State, which
address will also appear in the next journal.

In it you will find a brief argument in favor of conventions--and
although I wrote it myself I will say to you that it is
conclusive upon the point and can not be reasonably answered.
The right way for you to do is hold your meeting and appoint
delegates any how, and if there be any who will not take part,
let it be so.  The matter will work so well this time that even
they who now oppose will come in next time.

The convention is to be held at Tremont on the 5th of April and
according to the rule we have adopted your county is to have
delegates -being double your representation.

If there be any good Whig who is disposed to stick out against
conventions get him at least to read the arguement in their
favor in the address.

Yours as ever,

A. LINCOLN.




JOSHUA F. SPEED.

SPRINGFIELD, March 24, 1843.

DEAR SPEED:--We had a meeting of the Whigs of the county here on
last Monday to appoint delegates to a district convention; and
Baker beat me, and got the delegation instructed to go for him.
The meeting, in spite of my attempt to decline it, appointed me
one of the delegates; so that in getting Baker the nomination I
shall be fixed a good deal like a fellow who is made a groomsman
to a man that has cut him out and is marrying his own dear "gal."
About the prospects of your having a namesake at our town, can't
say exactly yet.

A. LINCOLN.




TO MARTIN M. MORRIS.

SPRINGFIELD, ILL., March 26, 1843.

FRIEND MORRIS:

Your letter of the a 3 d, was received on yesterday morning, and
for which (instead of an excuse, which you thought proper to ask)
I tender you my sincere thanks.  It is truly gratifying to me to
learn that, while the people of Sangamon have cast me off, my old
friends of Menard, who have known me longest and best, stick to
me.  It would astonish, if not amuse, the older citizens to learn
that I (a stranger, friendless, uneducated, penniless boy,
working on a flatboat at ten dollars per month) have been put
down here as the candidate of pride, wealth, and aristocratic
family distinction.  Yet so, chiefly, it was.  There was, too,
the strangest combination of church influence against me.  Baker
is a Campbellite; and therefore, as I suppose, with few
exceptions got all that church.  My wife has some relations in
the Presbyterian churches, and some with the Episcopal churches;
and therefore, wherever it would tell, I was set down as either
the one or the other, while it was everywhere contended that no
Christian ought to go for me, because I belonged to no church,
was suspected of being a deist, and had talked about fighting a
duel.  With all these things, Baker, of course, had nothing to
do.  Nor do I complain of them.  As to his own church going for
him, I think that was right enough, and as to the influences I
have spoken of in the other, though they were very strong, it
would be grossly untrue and unjust to charge that they acted upon
them in a body or were very near so.  I only mean that those
influences levied a tax of a considerable per cent. upon my
strength throughout the religious controversy.  But enough of
this.

You say that in choosing a candidate for Congress you have an
equal right with Sangamon, and in this you are undoubtedly
correct.  In agreeing to withdraw if the Whigs of Sangamon should
go against me, I did not mean that they alone were worth
consulting, but that if she, with her heavy delegation, should be
against me, it would be impossible for me to succeed, and
therefore I had as well decline.  And in relation to Menard
having rights, permit me fully to recognize them, and to express
the opinion that, if she and Mason act circumspectly, they will
in the convention be able so far to enforce their rights as to
decide absolutely which one of the candidates shall be
successful.  Let me show the reason of this.  Hardin, or some
other Morgan candidate, will get Putnam, Marshall, Woodford,
Tazewell, and Logan--making sixteen.  Then you and Mason, having
three, can give the victory to either side.

You say you shall instruct your delegates for me, unless I
object.  I certainly shall not object.  That would be too
pleasant a compliment for me to tread in the dust.  And besides,
if anything should happen (which, however, is not probable) by
which Baker should be thrown out of the fight, I would be at
liberty to accept the nomination if I could get it.  I do,
however, feel myself bound not to hinder him in any way from
getting the nomination.  I should despise myself were I to
attempt it.  I think, then, it would be proper for your meeting
to appoint three delegates and to instruct them to go for some
one as the first choice, some one else as a second, and perhaps
some one as a third; and if in those instructions I were named as
the first choice, it would gratify me very much.  If you wish to
hold the balance of power, it is important for you to attend to
and secure the vote of Mason also: You should be sure to have men
appointed delegates that you know you can safely confide in.  If
yourself and James Short were appointed from your county, all
would be safe; but whether Jim's woman affair a year ago might
not be in the way of his appointment is a question.  I don't know
whether you know it, but I know him to be as honorable a man as
there is in the world.  You have my permission, and even request,
to show this letter to Short; but to no one else, unless it be a
very particular friend who you know will not speak of it.

Yours as ever,

A. LINCOLN.

P. S  Will you write me again?




TO MARTIN M. MORRIS.

April 14, 1843.

FRIEND MORRIS:

I have heard it intimated that Baker has been attempting to get
you or Miles, or both of you, to violate the instructions of the
meeting that appointed you, and to go for him.  I have insisted,
and still insist, that this cannot be true.  Surely Baker would
not do the like.  As well might Hardin ask me to vote for him in
the convention.  Again, it is said there will be an attempt to
get up instructions in your county requiring you to go for Baker.
This is all wrong.  Upon the same rule, Why might not I fly from
the decision against me in Sangamon, and get up instructions to
their delegates to go for me? There are at least twelve hundred
Whigs in the county that took no part, and yet I would as soon
put my head in the fire as to attempt it.  Besides, if any one
should get the nomination by such extraordinary means, all
harmony in the district would inevitably be lost.  Honest Whigs
(and very nearly all of them are honest) would not quietly abide
such enormities.  I repeat, such an attempt on Baker's part
cannot be true.  Write me at Springfield how the matter is.
Don't show or speak of this letter.

A. LINCOLN




TO GEN. J. J. HARDIN.

SPRINGFIELD, May 11, 1843.

FRIEND HARDIN:

Butler informs me that he received a letter from you, in which
you expressed some doubt whether the Whigs of Sangamon will
support you cordially.  You may, at once, dismiss all fears on
that subject.  We have already resolved to make a particular
effort to give you the very largest majority possible in our
county.  From this, no Whig of the county dissents.  We have many
objects for doing it.  We make it a matter of honor and pride to
do it; we do it because we love the Whig cause; we do it because
we like you personally; and last, we wish to convince you that we
do not bear that hatred to Morgan County that you people have so
long seemed to imagine.  You will see by the journals of this
week that we propose, upon pain of losing a barbecue, to give you
twice as great a majority in this county as you shall receive in
your own.  I got up the proposal.

Who of the five appointed is to write the district address?  I
did the labor of writing one address this year, and got thunder
for my reward.  Nothing new here.

Yours as ever,

A. LINCOLN.

P. S.--I wish you would measure one of the largest of those
swords we took to Alton and write me the length of it, from tip
of the point to tip of the hilt, in feet and inches.  I have a
dispute about the length.

A. L.