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I

KNEW Mr. Lincoln very well, I may say somewhat intimately, before he was ever thought of in connection with the exalted station to which he was afterwards elected. In those years of his comparative obscurity, I knew him as preeminently a truthful man. His love of truth was conspicious in all his thinking. The object of his pursuit was truth, and not victory in argument or the triumph of his party, or the success of his own cause. This was always conspicuous in his conversation. It constituted the charm of his conversation. In his society one plainly saw, that his aim was so to use words to express and not conceal his real thoughts. This characteristic had formed his style, both of conversation. and of writing. His habitual love of truth had led him successfully to cultivate such a use of language as would most clearly and accurately express his thoughts. His words were a perfectly transparent medium through which his thought always shone out with unclouded distinctness. No matter on what subject he was speaking, anyperson could understand him. This characteristic of his mind and heart gave a peculiar complexion to his speeches, whether at the bar, or in discussing the great political issues of the time. He always preferred to do more than justice rather than less to an opponent. It was often noticed, that he stated his opponent's argument with more force than his opponent himself had done. In the opening of his argument, his friends would often feel for the moment that he was surrendering the whole ground

in debate. They had no need to concern themselves on that subject, it would always turn out that he had only surrendered fallacious grounds, on which it was unsafe to rely, while the solid foundation on which his own faith rested was left intact, as the enduring basis on which he would build his argument. He was a very conscientious. man; his anti-slavery opinions had their seat in no mere political expediency, but in the very depths of his moral nature. In the summer of 1856 he delivered a speech to a very large audience assembled on the public square in this city; the population of this county were at that time very largely of Southern origin, and had those views of slavery which prevailed in the States from which they His audience on that occasion were very largely of that character. Yet Mr. Lincoln made a very frank and explicit avowal of his opposition to slavery on moral grounds, and drew his argument against it from the deepest roots of natural justice; yet he presented the case with such irresistible eloquence that his speech was received with the greatest favor, and often with outbursts of very hearty applause. That speech went far in all this region to establish his reputation as a popular orator.

came.

In a conversation I once had with him, at what was then his dingy office in Springfield, where I had gone for no other purpose than to enjoy the luxury of an hour's conversation with him, I spoke of the then recent antislavery excitement in St. Louis as proceeding entirely upon the ground of expediency for the white man. "I," said Mr. Lincoln, "must take into account the rights of the poor negro." That conscientious element is apparent in the whole course of his public policy. Conscience

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constrained him to regard his oath to respect the constitution of the United States; and yet always to remember the rights of the negro, and to do all for him which his constitutional powers permitted him to do. Had he not been conscientious in both these directions, he would, in all probability, have plunged his country in last anarchy. Most admirably did his statesmanship combine in itself the true conservative and the true radical. He was just such a statesman as every nation needs in the great crisis of its history. It is eminently an American phenomenon, that a man was born in a log-cabin in the backwoods of Kentucky, who had precisely the intellectual endowments and moral characteristics which his country would need in its chief magistrate, in its hour of supreme necessity. Verily there is a God in history! Mr. Lincoln's emotional character was one of the most kindly I have ever known. The tenderness of his affections was almost womanly. I confess I sometimes thought this trait in his character was rather in excess, certainly, for the ruler of a great nation. He was not only incapable of malice, but I sometimes thought he was too much afraid of hurting anybody's feelings. If it was a fault, it was a fault of a great and magnanimous soul, of which few men are capable. If he had any vices they always leaned to virtue's side. The wail of sorrow with which his foul taking-off was received throughout the civilized world was a spontaneous tribute to the exalted and unique virtues of his character, pointing him out as the man who, of all the great historic names, had least deserved so sad a fate. There are remarkable analogies and equally remarkable contrasts between the careers of Mr. Lincoln and Gen. Garfield.

Both originated in obscurity and in the midst of the pri vations of frontier life; both were great in the natural endowments of the intellect, and greater still in the exalted moral characteristics in which they shone above most others of our statesmen. Both were cut off in the midst of their high career and in the very prime of life, by the hand of the merciless assassin. At the untimely and violent death of both, the civilized world put on mourning to an extent never before seen in history.

The contrast appears chiefly in this. Mr. Lincoln was born and reared in a community in which the advantages of education had been little enjoyed, and consequently the spirit of liberal learning had been little diffused. He had none to encourage and help him. He must find his way out into the light of knowledge by his own unassisted efforts. As a consequence, he did not acquire the first rudiments of an education till he had reached mature manhood. Mr. Garfield was born in a community in which education had been universal from its very origin, and where men built the school-house in every neighborhood simultaneously with their own log cabins. The whole people was, as the consequence, imbued with the spirit of liberal learning, and as soon as young Garfield began to show the superiority of his talents in the common school, the suggestion came from every quarter, you should have a collegiate education. An educated community bore him onward towards his great destiny from his very boyhood. This made the task a comparatively easy one. At the time of life when Mr. Lincoln was just beginning to acquire the first rudiments, Mr. Garfield was already a graduate of one of our most renowned colleges. Such is

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the advantage of being born in a community in which the first rudiments of knowledge are universally diffused by the ubiquitous common school.

That Mr. Lincoln succeeded in surmounting the obstacles which hemmed him in on every side, is wonderful indeed. Few men, certainly, have ever risen to greatness, purely by the force of intellectual and moral excellence, by a road so hard as that by which he traveled; yet he accomplished the mighty task without one of the arts of the demagogue, or one of the vices of the corrupt politician; and transferred his residence from the obscure logcabin in the wilderness, to the executive mansion of a mighty nation, in his fifty-third year. Dying by violence in his fifty-seventh year, he left a name behind to be forever spoken with honor and reverence in the halls of the great and in the palaces of kings, and to be cherished with imperishable affection in the humble dwellings of the poor and lowly.

full. Shuleret

JACKSONVILLE, 1882.

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