rous, and intelligent people, no man can succeed in doing that
the importance of which we all comprehend. Again thanking you for the
reception you have given me, I will now bid you farewell, and proceed upon
my journey.

ADDRESS IN TRENTON AT THE TRENTON HOUSE,

FEBRUARY 21, 1861

I have been invited by your representatives to the Legislature to visit
this the capital of your honored State, and in acknowledging their kind
invitation, compelled to respond to the welcome of the presiding officers
of each body, and I suppose they intended I should speak to you through
them, as they are the representatives of all of you; and if I were to
speak again here, I should only have to repeat in a great measure much
that I have said, which would be disgusting to my friends around me who
have met here. I have no speech to make, but merely appear to see you and
let you look at me; and as to the latter I think I have greatly the best
of the bargain. My friends, allow me to bid you farewell.

ADDRESS TO THE SENATE OF NEW JERSEY

FEBRUARY 21, 1861

MR. PRESIDENT AND GENTLEMEN OF THE SENATE OF THE STATE OF NEW JERSEY:--I
am very grateful to you for the honorable reception of which I have been
the object. I cannot but remember the place that New Jersey holds in our
early history. In the Revolutionary struggle few of the States among the
Old Thirteen had more of the battle-fields of the country within their
limits than New Jersey. May I be pardoned if, upon this occasion, I
mention that away back in my childhood, the earliest days of my being
able to read, I got hold of a small book, such a one as few of the younger
members have ever seen Weems's Life of Washington. I remember all the
accounts there given of the battle-fields and struggles for the liberties
of the country; and none fixed themselves upon my imagination so deeply as
the struggle here at Trenton, New Jersey. The crossing of the river, the
contest with the Hessians, the great hardships endured at that time, all
fixed themselves on my memory more than any single Revolutionary event;
and you all know, for you have all been boys, how these early impressions
last longer than any others. I recollect thinking then, boy even though I
was, that there must have been something more than common that these men
struggled for. I am exceedingly anxious that that thing that something
even more than national independence, that something that held out a
great promise to all the