...false to the responsibility of a ruler, there were those who cited against him his own modest words : " I claim not to have controlled events, but confess plainly that events have controlled me." Others, however, put upon this language the more kindly and more honest interpretation, that Mr. Lincoln...

...mysterious girding of the Almighty upon them, whose behests they are set to fulfil." — HORACE BUSHNELL. " I claim not to have controlled events, but confess plainly that events have controlled me>" "No human council has devised, nor hath any mortal hand worked out, these great things. They are the...

...mysterious girding of the Almighty upon them, whose behests they are set to fulfil." — HORACE BUSHNELL. -" I claim not to have controlled events, but confess plainly that events have controlled me." "No human council has devised, nor hath any mortal hand worked out, these great things. They are the...

...was not in the verbal conversation. In telling this tale, I attempt no compliment to my own sagacity. I claim not to have controlled events, but confess...now wills the removal of a great wrong, and wills also that we of the North, as well as you of the South, shall pay fairly for our complicity in that...

...was not in the verbal conversation. In telling this tale I attempt no compliment to my own sagacity. I claim not to have controlled events, but confess...now wills the removal of a great wrong, and wills also that we of the North, as well as you of the South, shall pay fairly for our complicity in that...

...— Sophocles "Whatsoever we perpetrate, we do but row, we are steered by fate." — Samuel Butler "I claim not to have controlled events, but confess plainly that events have controlled me." — Abraham Lincoln "What is ordained is master of the gods and thee." — "Necessity is harsh. Fate...

...greatness. David Herbert Donald chose to put this quote from Lincoln after the title page of his book: "I claim not to have controlled events, but confess plainly that events have controlled me." Yet, if nothing else emerges from Lincoln it is the personality of a man certainly brought to the forefront...

...political leadership style in an April 4, 1864 letter to Albert G. Hodges, a Kentucky newspaper editor: "I claim not to have controlled events, but confess plainly that events have controlled me." To his contemporaries, Lincoln "was a mere politician with no settled convictions. He swayed from moment...

...through the first seventeen months of Lincoln's presidency were driving him toward emancipation. ("1 claim not to have controlled events but confess plainly that events have controlled me," he later wrote in a wartime letter to Albert G. Hodges of Kentucky.) Not only were aggressive abolitionists,...

...writing that letter to his wife Sarah. "People make choices." Yes, they do; but then, do they 7 . 1 claim not to have controlled events, but confess plainly that events have controlled me. Historians cannot busy themselves with fate. That is the realm of mystics, poets; that is outside the...