requests from New England friends
for speeches, and I find that before returning to the West, he spoke
at the following places: Providence, R.I., Manchester, N.H., Exeter,
N.H., Dover, N.H., Concord, N.H., Hartford, Conn., Meriden, Conn.,
New Haven, Conn., Woonsocket, R.I., Norwalk, Conn., and Bridgeport,
Conn. I am quite sure that coming and going he passed through
Boston merely as an unknown traveller."

Mr. Lincoln writes to his wife from Exeter, N.H., March 4, 1860, as
follows:

"I have been unable to escape this toil. If I had foreseen it, I
think I would not have come East at all. The speech at New York,
being within my calculation before I started, went off passably well
and gave me no trouble whatever. The difficulty was to make nine
others, before reading audiences who had already seen all my ideas
in print."[1]

An edition of Mr. Lincoln's address was brought into print in September,
1860, by the Young Men's Republican Union of New York, with notes by
Charles C. Nott (later Colonel, and after the war Judge of the Court of
Claims in Washington) and Cephas Brainerd. The publication of this
pamphlet shows that as early as September, 1860, the historic importance
and permanent value of this speech were fairly realised by the national
leaders of the day. In the preface to the reprint, the editors say:

"The address is characterised by wisdom, truthfulness and learning
...From the first line to the last--from his premises to his
conclusion, the speaker travels with a swift, unerring directness
that no logician has ever excelled. His argument is complete and is
presented without the affectation of learning, and without the
stiffness which usually accompanies dates and details ...A single
simple sentence contains a chapter of history that has taken days of
labour to verify, and that must have cost the author months of
investigation to acquire. The reader may take up this address as a
political pamphlet, but he will leave it as an historical
treatise--brief, complete, perfect, sound, impartial truth--which
will serve the time and the occasion that called it forth, and which
will be esteemed hereafter no less for its unpretending modesty than
for its intrinsic worth."[2]

Horace White, who was himself present at the Chicago Convention, writes
(in 1909) as follows:

"To anybody looking back at the Republica