Our American Holidays: Lincolns Birthday | Page 2

Theodore Roosevelt 333 HIS
CHOICE AND HIS DESTINY F. M. Bristol 333 ABRAHAM
LINCOLN Robert G. Ingersoll 334 LINCOLN Paul Laurence Dunbar
341 THE GRANDEST FIGURE Walt Whitman 342 ABRAHAM
LINCOLN Lyman Abbott 345 "LINCOLN THE IMMORTAL"
Anonymous 346 THE CRISIS AND THE HERO Frederic Harrison
349 LINCOLN John Vance Cheney 351 MAJESTIC IN HIS
INDIVIDUALITY S. P. Newman 353
IX LINCOLN YARNS AND SAYINGS
THE QUESTION OF LEGS 359 HOW LINCOLN WAS
PRESENTED WITH A KNIFE 360 "WEEPING WATER" 361 MILD
REBUKE TO A DOCTOR 362
X FROM LINCOLN'S SPEECHES AND WRITINGS

LINCOLN'S LIFE AS WRITTEN BY HIMSELF 365 THE
INJUSTICE OF SLAVERY 365 SPEECH AT COOPER INSTITUTE
368 FIRST INAUGURAL ADDRESS 371 LETTER TO HORACE
GREELEY 376 EMANCIPATION PROCLAMATION 378
THANKSGIVING PROCLAMATION 380 GETTYSBURG
ADDRESS 382 REMARKS TO NEGROES ON THE STREETS OF
RICHMOND 383 SECOND INAUGURAL ADDRESS 384

PREFACE
An astounding number of books have been written on Abraham
Lincoln. Our Library of Congress contains over one thousand of them
in well-nigh every modern language. Yet, incredible as it may seem, no
miner has until to-day delved in these vast fields of Lincolniana until he
has brought together the most precious of the golden words written of
and by the Man of the People. Howe has collected a few of the best
poems on Lincoln; Rice, Oldroyd and others, the elder prose tributes
and reminiscences. McClure has edited Lincoln's yarns and stories;
Nicolay and Hay, his speeches and writings. But each successive
twelfth of February has emphasized the growing need for a unification
of this scattered material.
The present volume offers, in small compass, the most noteworthy
essays, orations, fiction and poems on Lincoln, together with some
fiction, with characteristic anecdotes and "yarns" and his most famous
speeches and writings. Taken in conjunction with a good biography, it
presents the first succinct yet comprehensive view of "the first
American." The Introduction gives some account of the celebration of
Lincoln's Birthday and of his principal biographers.

NOTE
The Editor and Publishers wish to acknowledge their indebtedness to
Houghton, Mifflin & Company; the McClure Company, R. S. Peale
and J. A. Hill Co.; Charles Scribner's Sons; Dana Estes Company; Mr.

David McKay, Mr. Joel Benton, Mr. C. P. Farrell and others who have
very kindly granted permission to reprint selections from works bearing
their copyright.

INTRODUCTION
Abraham Lincoln, sixteenth President of the United States, was born at
Nolin Creek, Kentucky, on Feb. 12, 1809. As the following pages
contain more than one biographical sketch it is not necessary here to
touch on the story of his life. Lincoln's Birthday is now a legal holiday
in Connecticut, Delaware, Illinois, Minnesota, New Jersey, New York,
North Dakota, Pennsylvania, Washington (state) and Wyoming, and is
generally observed in the other Northern States.
In its inspirational value to youth Lincoln's Birthday stands among the
most important of our American holidays. Its celebration in school and
home can not be made too impressive. "Rising as Lincoln did," writes
Edward Deems, "from social obscurity through a youth of manual toil
and poverty, steadily upward to the highest level of honor in the world,
and all this as the fruit of earnest purpose, hard work, humane feeling
and integrity of character, he is an example and an inspiration to youth
unparalleled in history. At the same time he is the best specimen of the
possibilities attainable by genius in our land and under our free
institutions."
In arranging exercises for Lincoln's Birthday the teacher and parent
should try not so much to teach the bare facts of his career as to give
the children a sense of Lincoln's actual personality through his own
yarns and speeches and such accounts as are given here by Herndon,
Bancroft, Mabie, Tarbell, Phillips Brooks and others. He should show
them Lincoln's greatest single act--Emancipation--through the eyes of
Garfield and Whittier. He should try to reach the children with the thrill
of an adoring sorrow-maddened country at the bier of its great
preserver; with such a passion of love and patriotism as vibrates in the
lines of Whitman, Brownell and Bryant, of Stoddard, Procter, Howe,
Holmes, Lowell, and in the throbbing periods of Henry Ward Beecher.

His main object should be to make his pupils love Lincoln. He should
appeal to their national pride with the foreign tributes to Lincoln's
greatness; make them feel how his memory still works through the
years upon such contemporary poets as Gilder, Thompson, Markham,
Cheney and Dunbar; and finally through the eyes of Harrison, Whitman,
Ingersoll, Newman and others, show them our hero set in his proud,
rightful place in the long vista of the ages.
In order to use the present volume with the best results it is advisable
for teacher and parent to gain a more consecutive view of Lincoln's life
than is