Abraham Lincoln

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Excerpt from Abraham Lincoln: An Address Delivered at the Shawmut Congregational Church in Boston on February 14, 1909As a poor boy among poor settlers, as shop-keeper, post master, surveyor, stump speaker, legislator, and young lawyer whose practice was in small matters, he had been from birth at every moment in touch with the plain people. Their feelings were his feelings, he knew their habits, their ways of thought, their tastes, their instincts, as a man knows his own family. Born in the most wretched circumstances, but with abilities and ambitions that carried him to the highest place in his country, he could not help believing in the people, and in the great principles of free government laid down as everlasting truths in the Declaration of Independence. It was from the Declaration that he drew the faith which made him, in the fulness of time, the great emancipator N othing of Europe here. He was, and he could not help being, American in everv fibre of his being, and his life must ever be the strongest argu ment in favor of the political system which makes possible such a career as his, and can produce such a ruler.. Barren and poor as was the soil from which he sprung, that soil was in no small measure the source of his rare power.Had Lincoln died at the end of his term in Congress, he would have been forgotten. He had done and said nothing in any way memorable. His life had been like that of many another young politician. In 1837 during his second term in the legislature of Illinois he had written a protest, signed bv himself and another member, against certain pro-slavery reso lutions which had passed the legislature, and this protest had been spread upon the journal of the House. In this the signers declared their belief that the institution of slavery is founded on both injustice and bad policy, but that the promulgation of abolition doctrines tends rather to increase than abate its evils. In 1840 his heart was touched by the sight of twelve negroes whom he saw chained together on a steamboat going south, and of this he afterwards wrote, That sight was a con tinued torment to me. While in Congress, he introduced a bill to abolish slavery in the District of Columbia with the consent of the voters of the District and with compensation to owners, but there are few references to slavery in his speeches or correspondence, and evidently it had not stirred him deeply. In a eulogy of Henry Clay delivered in 1852 he stated Clay's position on this question in these words: He ever was on principle and in feeling opposed to slavery. He did notperceive that on a question of human right the negroes were to be excepted from the human race. Cast into life when slavery was already widely spread and deeply seated, he did not perceive, as I think no wise man has perceived, how it could be at once eradicated without producing a greater evil even to the cause of human liberty itself. His feeling and hisjudgment therefore ever led him to oppose both extremes of opinion on the subject. The name and opinions and in¿uence of Mr. Clay are fully and as I trust effectually and enduringly arrayed against the extreme abolitionists. But I would also, if I could, array his name, opinions and in¿uence against the opposite extreme - against a few but an increasing number of men who, for the sake of perpetuating slavery, are beginning to assail and to ridicule the white man's charter of freedom, the declaration that 'all men are created free and The views which he attributed to Clay were at that time doubtless his own, and it is interesting to observe in this early statement that devotion to the Declaration of Inde pendence which he always felt and constantly expressed.About the PublisherForgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com