n to comprehend something of
the power of the man.

He delivered that inaugural address as if he had been delivering
inaugural addresses all his life. Firm, resonant, earnest, it announced
the coming of a man; of a leader of men; and in its ringing tones and
elevated style, the gentlemen he had invited to become members of his
political family--each of whom thought himself a bigger man than his
master--might have heard the voice and seen the hand of a man born to
command. Whether they did or not, they very soon ascertained the fact.
From the hour Abraham Lincoln crossed the threshold of the White House
to the hour he went thence to his death, there was not a moment when he
did not dominate the political and military situation and all his
official subordinates.

Always courteous, always tolerant, always making allowance, yet always
explicit, his was the master-spirit, his the guiding hand; committing to
each of the members of his cabinet the details of the work of his own
department; caring nothing for petty sovereignty; but reserving to
himself all that related to great policies, the starting of moral forces
and the moving of organized ideas.

I want to say just here a few words about Mr. Lincoln's relation to the
South and the people of the South.

He was, himself, a Southern man. He and all his tribe were Southerners.
Although he left Kentucky when but a child, he was an old child; he
never was very young; and he grew to manhood in a Kentucky colony; for
what was Illinois in those days but a Kentucky colony, grown since
somewhat out of proportion? He was in no sense what we in the South used
to call "a poor white." Awkward, perhaps; ungainly, perhaps, but
aspiring; the spirit of a hero beneath that rugged exterior; the soul of
a prose poet behind those heavy brows; the courage of a lion back of
those patient, kindly aspects; and, long before he was of legal age, a
leader. His first love was a Rutledge; his wife was a Todd. Let the
romancist tell the story of his romance. I dare not. No sadder idyl can
be found in all the short and simple annals of the poor.

We know that he was a prose poet; for have we not that immortal prose
poem recited at Gettysburg? We know that he was a statesman; for has not
time vindicated his conclusions? But the South does not know, except as
a kind of hearsay, that he was a friend; the one friend who had the
power and the will to save it from itself. He was the one man in public
life