U. S. Grant-E. B. Washburne-George W. Julian- 23 Fac-simile of Letter from Abraham Lincoln to Horace Greeley .... 523 24 Thomas Hicks. 593 25 A. Lincoln, from the Original Painting by Thomas Hicks. 602 26 Fac-simile of Letter from O. H. Browning to Thomas Hicks 606 27 Account of his Birth-place, in Handwriting of Lincoln... 607 INTRODUCTION. T was mainly with the view of accumulating a mass of trustworthy evidence concerning the personal traits and private utterances of Abraham Lincoln that I conceived the plan and approached the task of uniting in one or more volumes the opinions of the most distinguished characters, still surviving, of the great war which produced them. The result has been gratifying beyond expectation, furnishing—I think it is not too much to say-a remarkable book about a remarkable man. Most men who visited Washington during the civil war met Abraham Lincoln. Amid the clash of armed strife and the din of party struggle, he never denied to the humblest citizen a willing ear and a cheering word. Although not "all things to all men," in the common acceptation of the phrase, there was rarely an hour too crowded for him to utter a memorable word or to tell an apt story to the passing visitor. By degrees and by accretion, these utterances and stories, or rather these parables, have grown in number with the growth of a great reputa B tion. Story after story and trait after trait, as varying in value as in authenticity, has been added to the Lincolniana, until at last the name of the great war President has come to be a biographic lodestone, attracting without distinction or discrimination both the true and the false. Talleyrand himself was not made sponsor for so many historic sayings as have fallen to the heritage of Abraham Lincoln. It may, indeed, be doubted whether his entire presidential term would have sufficed to utter the number attributed to him. Yet it is certain that he rarely failed to scize an opportunity to illustrate the situation by a homely parable, which substituted a story for an argument and left the argument to the listener's own deductive powers. He rarely refused audience to any one He rarely declined to face any person or any situation, however annoying the interview or the occasion. He felt himself capable of confronting all the difficulties of his high place, and this faith in his own strength sufficed to guide him through some of the severest trials that have ever fallen to the lot of a public man. His many-sided nature en abled him to excel in most of the tasks that he attempted, and the triumphant power he showed on most occasions was one of the essential characteristics of his nature. From a local politician and an obscure member of Congress, he suddenly arose to be one of the world's most influential statesmen. From a volunteer against Indian insurgents, he became the mover of vast armies, and met with firmness, patience and skill the most harassing exigencies of a great civil war. Beginning as a stump speaker and corner-grocery debater, he lived to take his place in the front rank of immortal orators. It was this power of compassing the most trying situations that made the brief and crowded space of four years suffice for him to accomplish a task that generations had been preparing, and which, to use his own words, before assuming the presidency, "offered more difficulties than had devolved upon Washington." But, to struggle was not new to him. His whole life had been a series of obscure but heroic struggles, and it may safely be said that no man of Lincoln's historical stature ever passed through a more checkered or more varied career. It fills one with astonishment to follow the vocations that successively fell to the lot of this extraordinary man, since, as a boy, in 1826, he left the school (to reach which he walked nine miles every day), to the sad hour when, in 1865, he perished, as President of the United States. Beginning as a farm laborer, studying at night by the light of the fire, he was the hostler, he ground corn, he built fires and he cooked-all for thirty-one cents a day. In 1827, he is recorded as an athlete of local renown, while, at the same time, he was a writer on temperance and a champion of the |