, standing like a tower,
Our children shall behold his fame,
The kindly-earnest, brave, foreseeing man;
Sagacious, patient, dreading praise, not blame;
New birth of our new soil, the first American."

On the ticket with Lincoln, the Republicans had placed, as a sop to such
pro-slavery sentiment as still existed at the North, a southerner and
state rights Democrat named Andrew Johnson. By one of those singular
chances of history, Johnson's origin and early years had been very much
like Lincoln's. He, too, was born of a "poor white" family; first seeing
the light in North Carolina about six weeks before Abraham Lincoln
opened his eyes in that rude log cabin in Kentucky. His condition was,
if anything, even more hopeless and degraded than Lincoln's, and if any
one had prophesied that these two ignorant and poverty-stricken children
would one day rise, side by side, to the greatest position in the
Republic, he would have been regarded, and justly, as a hopeless madman.
But not even to a madman did any such wild idea occur. "Poor whites"
were despised throughout the South, even by the slaves; if there was, in
the whole United States, any law of caste, it was against these ignorant
and shiftless people; and Andrew Johnson, at the age of fifteen, was
little better than a young savage. He had never gone to school, he had
never seen a book. But one day, he heard a man reading aloud, and the
wonder of it quickened a new purpose within him. He induced a friend to
teach him the alphabet, and then, borrowing the book, he laboriously
taught himself to read. So there was something more than "poor white" in
him, after all.

By the time he was eighteen, he had had enough of his shiftless
surroundings, and struck out for himself, journeyed across the mountains
to Greenville, Tennessee, met there a girl of sixteen named Eliza
McCardle, and, with youth's sublime improvidence, married her! As it
happened, he did well, for his wife had a fair education, and night
after night taught him patiently, until he could read fairly well and
write a little. I like to think of that family group, so different from
most, and to admire that girl-wife teaching her husband the rudiments of
education.

Already, as a result of his lowly birth and the class prejudice he
everywhere encountered, young Johnson had conceived that hatred of the
ruling class at the South which was to influence his after life so
deeply. He had a certain rude eloquence which a