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in her efforts to induce him to make a proper use of his business advantages.

Mr. Lincoln's mind had now recovered health and tone and the calm strength which it never again lost. He was as hard a student as ever, both of books and men, and his professional reputation was increasing. He was once more the life and soul of political movements and party organizations. There was no danger that his ambition would be permitted to slumber, with a wife at his elbow who fully believed in his capacity for almost any earthly achievement, and whose own political faculties were much more than ordinary.

CHAPTER XVIII.

MANHOOD.

An Honest Lawyer-A Storm-The Henry Clay Campaign-The Old Cabin -Partnerships-Coarse and Fine-Elected Congressman-The Mexican War-President Making-The Pro-Slavery Formula-Southern Friendships.

NEITHER politics nor social nor domestic interests prevented Mr. Lincoln from giving careful and laborious attention to his professional duties. On the 3d of December, 1839, he was admitted to practice in the Circuit Court of the United States. His presentation of his first case in that court stands all alone in the annals of the law. He arose and addressed the bench as follows:

"This is the first case I have ever had in this court, and I have therefore examined it with great care. As the Court will perceive by looking at the abstract of the record, the only question in this case is one of authority. I have not been able to find any authority sustaining my side of the case, but I have found several cases directly in point on the other side. I will now give these cases and then submit the case."

The courage, candor, simple honor, required for such an utterance, working out afterwards in all he said or did, before judges and juries, gave him a power with them which was peculiarly his own. Men cannot fail to be influenced by the truth-seeking argument of an advocate in whose integrity they are compelled by him to repose unquestioning confidence.

There were cases brought to him which he could not and would not touch. No possible fee would induce him to be

come the instrument of injustice under cover of legal form and merely technical right.

A few months after Mr. Lincoln's marriage an active can vass began within the limits of the Whig party as to who should be its candidate for Congressman from the Sangamon district. The prospect for an election by the people was very good, and there were several gentlemen whose friends were hotly urging their respective claims. Mr. Lincoln earnestly desired the nomination, but now, for the first time in his political career, he found himself assailed upon purely personal grounds. It would hardly have answered the purposes of his rivals to attack him for his low origin before a community among whom such an assault would but have added to his popularity. He could, on the other hand, be accused of having deserted the cause of the common people by marrying an "aristocratic" wife. All good men who believed the Bible could be told that he was a deist or an infidel. At the same time, members of the more numerous sects could be assured that he was an Episcopalian or a Presbyterian, with equal recklessness of the fact that he was neither. Nothing was forgotten or neglected which could be remembered or invented against him, and he was compelled to bend before the storm. He withdrew his name at last in favor of Mr. E. D. Baker, and that gentleman was both nominated and elected to the Twenty-ninth Congress. He received, throughout the canvass, the active support of the defeated aspirant.

In the year 1844, Mr. Lincoln's political idol, Henry Clay, was nominated by the Whigs for the Presidency, and Lincoln was once more named as a candidate for Presidential Elector. He threw himself into the campaign with all his energy, and was bitterly disappointed by the defeat of his party and its great representative. He made many speeches in Illinois, but the most notable part of his work, that year, came to him in Indiana. The course of his campaign appointments carried him to Gentryville and its neighborhood. He made three

speeches within a few miles, one of them within two miles, of the log-cabin his father had built so many years before. The country had vastly changed, and so had its inhabitants, but not so much as had the barefooted boy who shivered under the "pole-shelter" that first winter.

While in the middle of his speech at Gentryville, he espied an old boy-friend and neighbor, Nat Grigsby, far back among his hearers. The argument suddenly stopped and the orator sprang down from the platform, urging his way through the crowd and exclaiming, "There's Nat!" Not till after a good shake of the hand and a hearty word about old times with Nat did the gathered voters hear the rest of Lincoln's plea on behalf of Henry Clay.

Nat and nearly all the rest of the children of the early settlers of the Pigeon Creek forests were still, except for the lapse of time, living at the earthy level upon which they had been born. Their original advantages had been at least as good, and in many instances had been much better, than those of Abraham Lincoln. He, however, had so grown and so departed from that level of human life, during the thirteen years since he toiled on foot from the woods of Indiana to the prairies of Illinois, that now there was a great gulf between him and them.

Other eyes could discern the abyss of separation more clearly than could those of "the orator of the day." He insisted on going with Nat Grigsby to pay a visit to the same Mr. Jones, in Gentryville, for whom he had performed his earliest service as clerk. He made it a merry time, apparently, and he met all old and new acquaintances with the heartiest cordiality. The uses of fun and humor as a mask of his inner man were already only too familiar to him. It was well for him, then and afterwards, that he possessed so excellent a shield.

In the shadows of the woods near Gentryville there were many graves. Among them were those of Lincoln's own mother and sister. The very woods themselves were a sort of

burial-ground for the strange, hard, unchildlike childhood out of whose hunger and thirst and nakedness of soul and body he had grown to his present stature. He could not look upon the log-cabin of his earlier days without understanding that some of the precious treasures of human life had been denied him. His very capacity for reading and so for leading the coarse and sordid men and women around him told of a side of his being that was born and bred with him and that never could or would be polished away. The capacity was needful, was invaluable, but it had cost something. If it had been possible, and if he had chiseled his character away to a finer model, more in accord with conventional standards of human perfection, all these important elements of American life would have missed finding their own image in him. Failing that, the people would have refused him the strong, instinctive confidence and love which finally flowed to him and enabled him to bind the hearts of a nation together as one man, and in one man, in the hour of the nation's trial.

It is a curious fact that, now, it is among the same people, educated or uneducated, whether nominally high or low, rich or poor, but who personally knew Lincoln so very well in those old days, we hear the one faint and grumbling negation of his greatness. In the language of one prairie-farmer, unconsciously speaking for many: "Wal, no. Linkern wasn't

so much of a man. I knowed him. He lived out this away. I've seen him a heap o' times. His folks was torn-down poor. Reckon they wouldn't ha' made sech a fuss about him ef he hadn't been shot. That helped him powerful. I knowed him."

After the defeat of Henry Clay there was little to be done in politics until another campaign, and the life Mr. Lincoln led was necessarily a quiet one. He followed the movements of the courts from place to place, establishing his hard-earned reputation more and more firmly, and beginning to reap a harvest of fees which was wealth to a man of his simple tastes and inexpensive habits. He was now able to do something for

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