INTRODUCTION.

THE memory of ABRAHAM LINCOLN grows dearer to his countrymen with lapse of time. The more thorough study of his writings, and a higher appreciation of his public services, may involve a revision of some opinions founded upon imperfect or unreliable evidence, but they will lead no one to admire or love him less. It seems to be the desire of true Americans to know him just as he was.

No more valuable contribution to an accurate knowledge of Abraham Lincoln could be made, than a proper selection from his speeches and writings, in a single volume of convenient, readable form; and no book of that kind could be more difficult to make. His collected works, including his speeches in Congress, his political debates, and his official papers, would fill several large volumes. Upon what principle or by what rule shall they be compressed into a duodecimo of three or four hundred pages, which will hold the

interest of the reader, and enable him to form an accurate estimate of their great author and the true lessons of his life and pen?

The compilation which I have made will be better understood by a statement of some of the facts of his early life. I shall give these facts as I understand them, without citing authorities. Doubtless there are those who will controvert them, with whom I shall here have no dispute. As I give them, they are consistent with his character, and the evidence is open to those who wish to examine it further.

Abraham Lincoln, born in Kentucky, was descended from a New England ancestry, from which he inherited an intense love of liberty, thoroughness of character, and perfect integrity. As often happens, these qualities did not appear in his father, who was poor, improvident, and ignorant. His mother was an energetic Christian woman of much refinement, whose devotion to her domestic and maternal duties soon wore out her frail body, but imprinted her image indelibly upon the heart of her son. Many times he said that all he was, he owed to her. Then it may be assumed that to her he owed his rugged honesty, which became a part of his name, and that thoroughness which led him to commit

much of the Bible to memory, and which lay at the foundation of his success. He did with his might whatever his hand found to do. Born to poverty, without paternal direction, he turned from one avocation to another, until he became a lawyer, entered public life, and was elected to Congress. From 1848, when he declined a reelection to Congress, to June, 1858, he scarcely challenged public notice. He made a speech at Peoria in 1854, and a few addresses in the Fremont campaign, but during those ten years he was not in public life, nor a candidate for office.

The period of his apparent inaction was that of the metamorphosis of slavery. It comprised the repeal of the Missouri Compromise, the Dred Scott decision, and the warfare in Kansas and Nebraska. What he was doing all this time is evident from his subsequent life.

From that source we learn that he must have been diligently engaged in the study of the history of American slavery. He saw in it the great question of the time, upon which depended the perpetuity of the Union. Slavery had previously been patient under restriction, it had consented to the several compromises. Now it had suddenly become aggressive, and not only demanded the repeal of those compromises, but the affirma

tion of its right to enter any Territory of the United States. In defiance of their constitutions, it even threatened to claim recognition in the States which were supposed to have been appropriated in perpetuity to freedom.

Mr. Lincoln began his study of slavery with the adoption of the Federal Constitution, the commencement of its legislative history. The thoroughness of his investigations may be seen in his Cooper Institute speech in New York (February, 1860), wherein he traced the opinions of a majority of the members of the first Constitutional Convention on the subject of slavery. Step by step he followed that history, there was no public man whose votes or speeches escaped his search. Finally he reached the conclusion which made him the President of the United States, the destroyer of the institution, and the emancipator of a race.

That conclusion was, that the free and the slave States had lived harmoniously together for eighty years, because the framers of the Constitution, the statesmen who succeeded them, and the public mind during all that time had rested in the belief that slavery was in the course of ultimate extinction, and would finally come to a peaceful end. Therefore they had consented to

the abolition of the African slave-trade and other restrictions without objection.

But a great change had taken place. The advocates of slavery in the South, and their allies in the North, now claimed that slavery should be fostered and made a permanent institution; that property in slaves, like any other property, was entitled to be taken into any Territory of the United States, and to be protected there; that the Missouri Compromise must be repealed, and all other restrictions removed. These claims involved the further claim that slave property should be protected, and consequently that slavery should be lawful in all the free States of the Union.

Mr. Lincoln knew that the free States would never consent to these changes. The differences between them and the teachers of the new school were radical. The free States held that the clause in the Declaration of Independence that all men were created equal, included the negro, and that to enslave him was to commit a moral and political wrong. The South held that slavery was morally and politically right. The surrender of its opinions was prohibited by the conscience of the North; the South would not give up its claim. The two could not live