To Mrs. Bixby November 21, 1864 Executive Mansion, Washington, November 21, 1864. MRS. BIXBY, Boston, Massachusetts: DEAR MADAM: I have been shown in the files of the War Department a statement of the Adjutant-General of Massachusetts 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 the grief of a loss so overwhelming. But I cannot refrain from tendering to you the consolation that 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 lost, and the solemn pride that must be yours to have laid so costly a sacrifice upon the altar of freedom. Yours very sincerely and respectfully, ABRAHAM LINCOLN. To Thurlow Weed March 15, 1865 [This most interesting letter, written a month before Lincoln's assassination, should be read in connection with the second inaugural ad dress.] Executive Mansion, Washington, March 15, 1865. DEAR MR. Weed: Every one likes a compliment. Thank you for yours on my little notification speech and on the recent inaugural address. I expect the latter to wear as well as-perhaps better thananything I have produced; but believe it is not immediately popular. Men are not flattered by being shown that there has been a differ ence of purpose between the Almighty and them. To deny it, however, in this case, is to deny that there is a God governing the world. It is a truth which I thought needed to be told, and, as whatever of humiliation there is in it falls most directly on myself, I thought others might afford for me to tell it. Truly yours, A. LINCOLN. "Lincoln's Lost Speech"* THE Republican party was first organized in Illinois on May 29th, 1856, at a State convention held in Bloomington. It was here that Abraham Lincoln made the speech which definitely severed his relations with the Whigs and allied him to the new organization. For two years previous he had been slowly working toward this change. The failure of his political ambitions in the summer of 1849 had decided him henceforth to devote himself to the law. For nearly six years he had kept this resolution. Then, in the spring of 1854, the passage by Congress of the Kansas-Nebraska bill repealing the Missouri Compromise of 1820, and establishing the principle of popular sovereignty, had so aroused him that he flung himself again into politics. Elected to the legislature in the fall of 1854, Lincoln had resigned in order to contest the vacant seat in the United States Senate. He showed in this campaign how much more important he considered it to insure legislation against slavery extension than to elect one of his own party; for when he found that the bal*Copyright. 1896, by Sarah A. Whitney. |