The Writings of Abraham Lincoln, vol 1 | Page 6

Mr. C. F.
Gunther, of Chicago, to the Chicago Historical Association and
personally to its capable Secretary, Miss McIlvaine, to Major Henry S.
Burrage, of Portland, Me., and to General Thomas J. Henderson, of
Illinois.

For various courtesies received, the editor is furthermore indebted to
the Librarian of the Library of Congress; to Messrs. McClure, Phillips
& Co., D. Appleton & Co., Macmillan & Co., Dodd, Mead & Co., and
Harper Brothers, of New York; to Houghton, Mifflin & Co., Dana,
Estes & Co., and L. C. Page & Co., of Boston; to A. C. McClurg & Co.,
of Chicago; to The Robert Clarke Co., of Cincinnati, and to the J. B.
Lippincott Co., of Philadelphia.
It is hardly necessary to add that every effort has been made by the
editor to bring into these volumes whatever material may there properly
belong, material much of which is widely scattered in public libraries
and in private collections. He has been fortunate in securing certain
interesting correspondence and papers which had not before come into
print in book form. Information concerning some of these papers had
reached him too late to enable the papers to find place in their proper
chronological order in the set. Rather, however, than not to present
these papers to the readers they have been included in the seventh
volume of the set, which concludes the "Writings."
[These later papers are, in this etext, re-arranged into chronologic order.
D.W.]
October, 1905,
A. B. L.

ABRAHAM LINCOLN:
AN ESSAY BY CARL SHURZ
No American can study the character and career of Abraham Lincoln
without being carried away by sentimental emotions. We are always
inclined to idealize that which we love,--a state of mind very
unfavorable to the exercise of sober critical judgment. It is therefore not
surprising that most of those who have written or spoken on that
extraordinary man, even while conscientiously endeavoring to draw a
lifelike portraiture of his being, and to form a just estimate of his public
conduct, should have drifted into more or less indiscriminating eulogy,
painting his great features in the most glowing colors, and covering
with tender shadings whatever might look like a blemish.
But his standing before posterity will not be exalted by mere praise of
his virtues and abilities, nor by any concealment of his limitations and
faults. The stature of the great man, one of whose peculiar charms

consisted in his being so unlike all other great men, will rather lose than
gain by the idealization which so easily runs into the commonplace. For
it was distinctly the weird mixture of qualities and forces in him, of the
lofty with the common, the ideal with the uncouth, of that which he had
become with that which he had not ceased to be, that made him so
fascinating a character among his fellow-men, gave him his singular
power over their minds and hearts, and fitted him to be the greatest
leader in the greatest crisis of our national life.
His was indeed a marvellous growth. The statesman or the military
hero born and reared in a log cabin is a familiar figure in American
history; but we may search in vain among our celebrities for one whose
origin and early life equalled Abraham Lincoln's in wretchedness. He
first saw the light in a miserable hovel in Kentucky, on a farm
consisting of a few barren acres in a dreary neighborhood; his father a
typical "poor Southern white," shiftless and without ambition for
himself or his children, constantly looking for a new piece of land on
which he might make a living without much work; his mother, in her
youth handsome and bright, grown prematurely coarse in feature and
soured in mind by daily toil and care; the whole household squalid,
cheerless, and utterly void of elevating inspirations... Only when the
family had "moved" into the malarious backwoods of Indiana, the
mother had died, and a stepmother, a woman of thrift and energy, had
taken charge of the children, the shaggy-headed, ragged, barefooted,
forlorn boy, then seven years old, "began to feel like a human being."
Hard work was his early lot. When a mere boy he had to help in
supporting the family, either on his father's clearing, or hired out to
other farmers to plough, or dig ditches, or chop wood, or drive ox
teams; occasionally also to "tend the baby," when the farmer's wife was
otherwise engaged. He could regard it as an advancement to a higher
sphere of activity when he obtained work in a "crossroads store," where
he amused the customers by his talk over the counter; for he soon
distinguished himself among the backwoods folk as one who had
something to say worth listening to. To win that distinction, he had to
draw mainly upon his