United States or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
It brought to a head a cloud of floating opposition and dearly defined an issue involving the central proposition in Lincoln's theory of the government. The Constitution of the United States, in its detailed provisions, is designed chiefly to meet the exigencies of peace. With regard to the abnormal conditions of war, it is relatively silent.
The singular originality of this position, sweeping aside as vain both participants in the new political duel, was quite lost on the little world in which Lincoln lived. For after-time it has the interest of a bombshell that failed to explode. It is the dawn of Lincoln's intellect.
"I would that his hands Abraham Lincoln's hands might be laid upon all who complain and cavil and criticise, and think of the little things in life: I would that his spirit might possess their spirit!" He stopped again. They marvelled and were awed, for never in all his days had such speech broken from this man. "Good-by, Stephen," he said, when they thought he was not to speak again.
Contempt for lowly beginnings, abhorrent as it is to any honest mind, would to Lincoln's mind have probably been inconceivable, but he lacked that interest in ancestry which is generally marked in his countrymen, and from talk of his nearer progenitors he seems to have shrunk with a positive sadness of which some causes will soon be apparent.
Then there was poor old one-armed Uncle Job Slade who used to get drunk, but he had told Tom about "them confounded rebels and traitors" of Lincoln's time, and when he had died in the Soldiers' Home they had buried him with the Stars and Stripes draped over his coffin.
A sound public opinion is the best embattlement of any home front. So Lincoln set out to help in forming it. War on a national scale was something entirely new to both sides, and especially unwelcome to many people in the North, though the really loyal North was up at Lincoln's call.
He not only cherished no resentment against men who had intentionally and even maliciously injured him, but he seems at times to have gone out of his way to do them a service. This is, perhaps, his greatest distinction. Lincoln's magnanimity is the final proof of the completeness of his self-discipline.
Grateley and Hooper, the solicitors in whose firm Ralph Denham was clerk, had their office in Lincoln's Inn Fields, and there Ralph Denham appeared every morning very punctually at ten o'clock.
Though the number of volunteers was small, their proportion to the regular army was large. That night Lincoln's call and Douglas's endorsement were sent over the wires. Next morning the two documents were published in every daily paper north of Mason and Dixon's line. The call for volunteer soldiers was in the South greeted with a howl of derision. They knew how the arsenals had been stripped.
The deepest impressions of life are apt to be received very early, and it is certain that the influences which are felt previous to seventeen years of age have much to do with the formation of the character. If, then, we go back to the period named, we can tell with sufficient accuracy what were the circumstances of Lincoln's early life.
Word Of The Day