ection with the important
transactions of his age, the higher will his reputation stand in the
opinion of the lettered class. But the men of study and research are
never numerous; and it is principally as a man of action that the
world at large will regard him. It is the story of his objective life
that will forever touch and hold the heart of mankind. His birthright
was privation and ignorance--not peculiar to his family, but the
universal environment of his place and time; he burst through those
enchaining conditions by the force of native genius and will: vice had
no temptation for him; his course was as naturally upward as the
skylark's; he won, against all conceivable obstacles, a high place in
an exacting profession and an honorable position in public and private
life; he became the foremost representative of a party founded on an
uprising of the national conscience against a secular wrong, and thus
came to the awful responsibilities of power in a time of terror and
gloom. He met them with incomparable strength and virtue. Caring for
nothing but the public good, free from envy or jealous fears, he
surrounded himself with the leading men of his party, his most
formidable rivals in public esteem, and through four years of
stupendous difficulties he was head and shoulders above them all in
the vital qualities of wisdom, foresight, knowledge of men, and
thorough comprehension of measures. Personally opposed, as the
radicals claim, by more than half of his own party in Congress, and
bitterly denounced and maligned by his open adversaries, he yet bore
himself with such extraordinary discretion and skill that he obtained
for the government all the legislation it required, and so imprest
himself upon the national mind that without personal effort or
solicitation he became the only possible candidate of his party for
reelection, and was chosen by an almost unanimous vote of the
electoral colleges....

To these qualifications of high literary excellence, and easy
practical mastery of affairs of transcendent importance we must add,
as an explanation of his immediate and world-wide fame, his possession
of certain moral qualities rarely combined in such high degree in one
individual. His heart was so tender that he would dismount from his
horse in a forest to replace in their nest young birds which had
fallen by the roadside; he could not sleep at night if he knew that a
soldier-boy was under sentence of death; he could not,