lves of the
opportunity to abolish slavery, others to extinguish the claim of
reserved sovereignty to the States, and a portion were favorable to
both of these extremes and to the consolidation of power in the central
Government; but a larger number than either and perhaps more than all
combined were for maintaining the Constitution and Union unimpaired.

The President, while opposed to all innovating schemes, had the happy
faculty of so far harmonizing and reconciling his differing friends as
to keep them united in resisting the secession movement.

Abraham Lincoln was in many respects a remarkable man, never while
living fully understood or appreciated. An uncultured child of the
frontiers, with no educational advantages, isolated in youth in his
wilderness home, with few associates and without family traditions, he
knew not his own lineage and connections. Nor was this singular in the
then condition of unsettled frontier life. His grandfather, with Daniel
Boone, left the settled part of Virginia, crossed the Alleghany
mountains, penetrated the "dark and bloody ground," and took up his
residence in the wilds of Kentucky near the close of the Revolutionary
war. There was little intercourse with each other in the new and
scattered settlements destitute of roads and with no mail facilities for
communication with relatives, friends, and the civilized world east of
the mountains. Abraham Lincoln, the grandfather of the President, was a
nephew of Daniel Boone, and partook of the spirit of his brave and
subsequently famous relative. But his residence in his secluded home was
brief. He was killed by the Indians when his son Thomas, the father of
President Lincoln, was only six years old. Four years later the
fatherless boy lost his mother. Left an orphan, this neglected child,
without kith or kindred for whom he cared or who cared for him, led a
careless, thriftless life, became a wandering pioneer, emigrated from
Kentucky when the President was but seven years old, took up his
residence for several years in the remote solitudes of Indiana, and
drifted at a later day to Illinois. This vagrant life, by a shiftless
father, and without a mother or female relative to keep alive and
impress upon him the pedigree and traditions of his family, left the
President without definite knowledge of his origin and that of his
fathers. The deprivation he keenly felt. I heard him say on more than
one occasion that when he laid down his offic