dent," and was always a
man among men, the honored servant of the people.

From a five-dollar fee before a justice of the peace, he had risen to a
five-thousand-dollar fee before the Supreme Court of Illinois. From a
study of "Dilworth's Spelling Book" in his seventh year, he had risen to
write, in his fifty-seventh year, his second Inaugural, which is the
greatest utterance of man, and yet all of his days in school added
together are less than one year. His pioneer life had given him a vein
of humor which became his "Life-preserver" in times of stress; it had
also given him a love for human liberty that was unaffected. He felt
that the enslavement of some men was but the advance guard, the miner
and sapper, of the enslavement of all men.

From a poor captain of volunteers in the scandalous little Black Hawk
War, where he jokingly said he "bled, died, and came away," although he
never had a skirmish nor saw an Indian, he had risen to the chief
command in a war that numbered three thousand battles and skirmishes and
cost three billion dollars. Having no ancestry himself, being able to
trace his line by rumor and tradition only as far back as his
grandfather, he became, like George Washington, the Father of his
Country. Born of a father who could not write his name, he himself had
written the Proclamation of Emancipation, the fourth great state paper
in the history of the Anglo-Saxon race,--the others being Magna Charta,
the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. If we accept the
statement of Cicero that the days on which we are saved should be as
illustrious as the days on which we are born, then Lincoln the Savior
must always remain coordinate with Washington, the Father of his
country. Jackson was "Old Hickory," Taylor was "Old Rough," and there
have been various names given to the other Presidents, but Washington
and Lincoln were the only ones whom the American people styled "Father."

Child of the American soil, cradled and nursed in the very bosom of
nature, he loved his country with the passion with which most men love
their human mothers. He could not bear the thought of one iota of
detraction from her honor, her dignity or her welfare. Against her
dismemberment he was willing to fight to the end of his second
administration or till the end of time. He might tolerate anything else
except disunion,--even the right of some of his fellowmen to enslave
others. Of every concession which he made during his