Abraham Lincoln 1809-1865

The sixteenth president of the United States, Abraham Lincoln was born near Hodgenville, Kentucky (1809). He was raised on farms in Kentucky, Indiana, and Illinois. He had little formal education, and spent much of his time doing chores like shucking corn, chopping wood and killing hogs. As a young man, he left his family to work on a cargo boat that went down the Mississippi River to New Orleans. He later described himself as a "friendless, uneducated, penniless boy, working on a flat boat."

He settled in the small town of New Salem, Illinois, where he helped manage a general store and worked as a surveyor and postmaster. He joined a debate society, read books on grammar and rhetoric, and studied to become a lawyer. 

When Lincoln was older, he wrote to a young man who wanted to become a lawyer: "If you are resolutely determined to make a lawyer of yourself, the thing is more than half-done already. It is but a small matter whether you read with anybody or not. I did not read with anyone. Get the books, and read and study them till you understand them in their principal features; and that is the main thing. It is of no consequence to be in a large town while you are reading. I read at New Salem, which never had three hundred people living in it. The books, and your capacity for understanding them, are just the same in all places. Always bear in mind that your own resolution to succeed is more important than any other one thing."

Lincoln ran for the Illinois state legislature in 1832. In his first political speech he said, "Every man is said to have his peculiar ambition. Whether it be true or not, I can say for one that I have no other so great as that of being truly esteemed of my fellow men, by rendering myself worthy of their esteem. How far I shall succeed in gratifying this ambition, is yet to be developed." He lost the 1832 election, but won it two years later. He served in the Illinois House of Representatives for eight years, and in 1846 he was elected to the United States Congress.

By 1854 he had become so consumed by his work as a lawyer that he had almost given up on politics. It was then that a Democratic senator from Illinois named Stephen A. Douglas introduced the Kansas-Nebraska bill, which threatened to repeal the restrictions on slavery for some northern states that had been in effect since the 1820 Missouri Compromise. Lincoln said, "The Missouri Compromise aroused me as I had never been aroused before."

In the summer of 1858, Lincoln decided to run for Congress against Douglas, and challenged him to a series of debates in seven different Illinois cities. The debates attracted huge crowds, and newspapers gave full reports using a recently invented shorthand. Douglas argued that slavery should be allowed as long as that's what a majority of a state's citizens wanted, and Lincoln argued for the abolition of slavery on moral grounds.

Lincoln lost the election, but the debates with Douglas gave him the exposure and confidence to run for president two years later, and this time he beat out Douglas. He didn't start out as a popular president. He won only 40 percent of the popular vote in 1860. He had just lost an election to Congress and many Americans still didn't know who he was. He had to enter Washington D.C. surreptitiously because of a death threat, and some newspapers called him a coward. People made fun of his physical appearance; he was six feet, four inches tall, skinny, slightly stooped, and he wore an old top hat and a coat that was too small for him. People called him a snake, a pretzel, an oversized frog.

But Lincoln was a great public speaker. He would write sentences and paragraphs as they came to him, on small scraps of paper, and then copy them out when he thought he had enough material. Most other public speakers at the time wrote flowery speeches that went on longer than they had to, but Lincoln's were always plain-spoken and to the point.

_________      ________________       ________________       ______________________________________

Second Inaugural Address

by Abraham Lincoln

selections from Abraham Lincoln's "Second Inaugural Adress." 

Neither party expected for the war the magnitude or the duration which it has already attained. Neither anticipated that the cause of the conflict might cease with or even before the conflict itself should cease. Each looked for an easier triumph, and a result less fundamental and astounding. Both read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes His aid against the other. It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God's assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men's faces, but let us judge not, that we be not judged. The prayers of both could not be answered. That of neither has been answered fully. The Almighty has His own purposes. . . . "The judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether."

With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.

Source: The Writer's Almanac

The Gettysburg Address

Gettysburg, Pennsylvania

November 19, 1863

On June 1, 1865, Senator Charles Sumner commented on what is now considered the most famous speech by President Abraham Lincoln. In his eulogy on the slain president, he called it a "monumental act." He said Lincoln was mistaken that "the world will little note, nor long remember what we say here." Rather, the Bostonian remarked, "The world noted at once what he said, and will never cease to remember it. The battle itself was less important than the speech."

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate -- we can not consecrate -- we can not hallow -- this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us -- that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion -- that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain -- that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom -- and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

* Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man's character, give him power. 

* You can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time. 

*I am not bound to win, but I am bound to be true. I am not bound to succeed, but I am bound to live by the light that I have. I must stand with anybody that stands right, and stand with him while he is right, and part with him when he goes wrong. 

*Be sure you put your feet in the right place, then stand firm. 

*The best thing about the future is that it comes one day at a time. 

*People are just as happy as they make up their minds to be.

*Whatever you are, be a good one.

*America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves. 

*And in the end it is not the years in your life that count, it's the life in your years.

*Do I not destroy my enemies when I make them my friends? 

*My Best Friend is a person who will give me a book I have not read.

*Books serve to show a man that those original thoughts of his aren't very new after all.

O Captain! My Captain!

O Captain, my Captain! our fearful trip is done,

The ship has weathered every rack, the prize we sought is won,

The port is near, the bells I hear, the people all exulting,

While follow eyes the steady keel, the vessel grim and daring;

But O heart! heart! heart! 

O the bleeding drops of red!

Where on the deck my Captain lies,

Fallen cold and dead

O Captain! my Captain! rise up and hear the bells;

Rise up — for you the flag is hung — for you the bugle trills,

For you bouquets and ribboned wreaths — for you the shores a-crowding,

For you they call, the swaying mass, their eager faces turning;

Here Captain! dear father!

This arm beneath your head!

It is some dream that on the deck

You've fallen cold and dead.

My Captain does not answer, his lips are pale and still,

My father does not feel my arm, he has no pulse nor will;

The ship is anchored safe and sound, its voyage closed and done,

From fearful trip the victor ship comes in with object won;

Exult, O shores! and ring, O bells!

But I, with mournful tread,

Walk the deck my Captain lies,

Fallen cold and dead.

By: Walt Whitman 1819 – 1892