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CAVALRY GROUP OF STATUARY. NATIONAL LINCOLN MONUMENT.

Representing the rearing figure of a horse, from whose back his rider has just been thrown, and the wounded trumpeter, who is supported by a companion.

J. G. HOLLAND—ANSON G. M'COOK. 465

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HEN I began, a few weeks after his death, to write the life of Abraham Lincoln, I entertained a profound respect for his strong mind, his tender heart, and the memory of his beneficent life. When I wrote the last page of the book, I had become his affectionate admirer and enthusiastic partisan.

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IS services were of such inestimable value to the republic, and his life so identified with the struggle to maintain it, that no ordinary volume would be sufficient to more than touch upon them.

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NABLE to do more than wish the undertaking great success.

Henry Mr. Songfellow.

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1832.

CAMBRIDGE, MARCH 13, 1882.

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HAVE always thought Mr. Lincoln was a man born for his time. He was a leader without seeming to

be. He, more than any other man during his presidency, stood at the helm of State. Through his skill, which was only the best of common sense, we were taken by the only channel that led from secession to the true dictum of "an indestructible Union, composed of indestructible States." He died as he lived, a great statesman, who knew enough of the ways of politics to make his statesmanship practically useful.

M.R.Mari

WASHINGTON, 1882.

F there was any one trait in the make-up of that illus

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trious man that stood out more conspicuously than any other, it was, to use a favorite word of his, his fairness -his habitual, ever-recurring sense of justice. As an illustration of this, I offer for the LINCOLN MEMORIAL ALBUM a few recollections of his bearing towards his great political rival, Stephen A. Douglas: for great he, too, truly was, as a popular and sensational debater and political manager, to say nothing of his acknowledged ability in other directions.

The passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Bill-of which he was the admitted champion-in the spring of 1854, in open violation of both letter and spirit of the Missouri Compromise Act of 1820, throwing out that immense district of country covered by these Territories-now States-to the baneful institution of human slavery, was claimed to be a manifest breach of national good faith; and so repugnant was it to the sentiment of the Northern people, that it roused up a storm of popular indignation all over the North, unequaled in the previous history of the country. In no part of that country, Kansas alone excepted, did that excitement run higher than here in Illinois; as an evidence of which, about that time, or soon after, scores of law-abiding men armed themselves with Sharpe's rifles, and fled from our midst to the plains of "Bleeding Kansas"-then so-called-whilst many others contributed freely of their means to accomplish a common object.

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