CONTENTS xi 356 7 9 ΙΟ Letter stating his Position in Regard to the War and to Emancipation 96 Proclamation for Thanksgiving The Gettysburg Address Amnesty for those in Rebellion 97 ΙΟΙ 103 104 INTRODUCTION Abraham Lincoln was one of the most perfectly developed men intellectually and morally which this country has produced. He had the power which is the highest end of education, — that is, the power to think out to a logical conclusion the problems which life brought to him, and to express these conclusions in language which the simplest could understand, and which at the same time was distinguished in style and most effective in convincing and moving men. His moral power matched his intellectual power; that is, when he had once made up his mind that a course of action was wise, no amount of persuasion or pressure could dissuade him from following it. He had in the highest degree "the courage of his convictions." The superiority of Lincoln's development is the more surprising because of the circumstances under which it was worked out. He was born on a small farm in Kentucky, when that country was still sparsely settled and its opportunities for schooling were meager; his father moved when he was but seven years old to a piece of uncleared land in Indiana. The log cabin which became his home, young Lincoln helped to build. The food and clothes of the family he helped to produce. He was strong and good-natured, and was his father's most useful helper in the hard task of earning a living from what proved to be a rather poor farm. His father was illiterate, unable to sign his name save with difficulty, and never known to read any book but the Bible. The boy never had, all told, over a year of schooling, and even. this was under the itinerant system common to pioneer districts where the only qualifications required of a teacher were that he be able to teach "readin', writin', and 'rithmetic to the rule of three," and where a master who understood a little Latin was looked upon as a wizard. There was but one redeeming feature to his boyhood education, his mother, a gentle woman, able to read and write and with a genuine ambition to instruct and inspire her children. She gathered them about her, relating to them Bible stories, curious country legends, wild tales of Indians and of pioneer hardships, and often when it grew dark in the evenings, heaping the chimney place of the log cabin full of spicewood brush, that her boy and his sister might see to read their few books and to con their lessons. Lincoln's own mother died when he was only eight years old. His father married again, and fortunately for the boy, the stepmother proved to be as interested in his books and lessons and as ambitious that he should learn as his own mother had been. Indeed, as he grew up and his father objected to his taking time for reading and study, it was his stepmother who became his defender. ress,' In spite of the barrenness of his early surroundings the boy showed from the first a love of books and a necessity for expressing himself in writing. As soon as he had learned to read, books became his constant companions. There were few in either the house of his father or those of his neighbors. The Bible,"Æsop's Fables," "Robinson Crusoe," "Pilgrim's Prog," "A History of the United States," and Weems's “Life of Washington" comprised the store of reading matter in the community in which he lived, and when young Lincoln had exhausted this he began to borrow from a distance. He once told a friend that there was not a book he had not read within a radius of fifty miles of his boyhood home. The character of the books seems to have made little difference to him. The legends say that he walked as far to get a treatise of law as to get a volume of poetry or biography. Everything excited his eager curiosity, his hungry desire for new thought and expression. He did not simply read the books; he absorbed them, copying long extracts, making them literally his own, something which he could and did recite as he followed the plow, and which furnished him material for the long discussions he sought with every passing neighbor. When his boyhood was past and he had entered upon that career of Jack-of-all-trades which he was forced to pursue until he was nearly twenty-five years old, he continued to read much in the intervals of railsplitting, flatboating, storekeeping, acting as village postmaster and deputy surveyor. In this period of life he made a thorough and critical acquaintance with Shakespeare and Burns. It is rare indeed that a person is found so well versed in Shakespeare as Lincoln was. He could quote pages from many of the plays and had a very clear and intelligent opinion of the meaning of difficult passages. He was fond of seeing the plays acted, and while in Washington as President of the United States, never missed a Shakespearean play if he could help it. Often he sent for the leading actor after it was over and discussed the arrangement of the play, amazing his auditors by his knowledge. It was while Lincoln was studying Shakespeare that there fell into his hands a set of books which finally led him to read law. The incident illustrates very well the eagerness with which he always seized any book which came in his way and the avidity with which he read it. Soon after Lincoln's nomination to the Presidency, in 1860, an ardent Republican of New Jersey sent A. J. Conant, a well-known portrait painter of the day, to Springfield to paint the portrait of the party's nominee. Mr. Conant confesses that he had not expected to find much of a subject, for Lincoln was practically unknown in the East, and he was the more surprised to discover that this new man possessed a genuine, if unconventional, intellectual cultivation. Accordingly, during the sittings, he took pains to ask Mr. Lincoln many questions about his early life in order to find out, |