e-holder. His feeling of pardon and sympathy for Kentucky and the
South played no unimportant part in his dealings with grave problems of
statesmanship. It is true that he struck slavery its death blow with
the hand of war, but at the same time he offered the slaveowner golden
payment with the hand of peace.

Abraham Lincoln was not an ordinary man. He was, in truth, in the
language of the poet Lowell, a "new birth of our new soil." His
greatness did not consist in growing up on the frontier. An ordinary
man would have found on the frontier exactly what he would have found
elsewhere--a commonplace life, varying only with the changing ideas and
customs of time and place. But for the man with extraordinary powers of
mind and body--for one gifted by Nature as Abraham Lincoln was gifted,
the pioneer life with its severe training in self-denial, patience and
industry, developed his character, and fitted him for the great duties
of his after life as no other training could have done.

His advancement in the astonishing career that carried him from
obscurity to world-wide fame--from postmaster of New Salem village to
President of the United States, from captain of a backwoods volunteer
company to Commander-in-Chief of the Army and Navy, was neither sudden
nor accidental, nor easy. He was both ambitious and successful, but
his ambition was moderate, and his success was slow. And, because his
success was slow, it never outgrew either his judgment or his powers.
Between the day when he left his father's cabin and launched his
canoe on the headwaters of the Sangamon River to begin life on his own
account, and the day of his first inauguration, lay full thirty years of
toil, self-denial, patience; often of effort baffled, of hope deferred;
sometimes of bitter disappointment. Even with the natural gift of great
genius it required an average lifetime and faithful unrelaxing effort,
to transform the raw country stripling into a fit ruler for this great
nation.

Almost every success was balanced--sometimes overbalanced, by a seeming
failure. He went into the Black Hawk war a captain, and through no
fault of his own, came out a private. He rode to the hostile frontier
on horseback, and trudged home on foot. His store "winked out." His
surveyor's compass and chain, with which he was earning a scanty
living, were sold for debt. He was defeated in his first attempts to
be nominated for the legislature and for Congress; defeated in his
a