IES.

I know of no abler and more candid life of Calhoun than that of Von
Holst. Although deficient in incidents, it is no small contribution to
American literature, apparently drawn from a careful study of the
speeches of the great Nullifier. If the author had had more material to
work upon, he would probably have made a more popular work, such as Carl
Schurz has written of Henry Clay, and Henry Cabot Lodge of Daniel
Webster and Alexander Hamilton. In connection read the biographies of
Clay, Webster, and Jackson; see Wilson's History of the Rise and Fall of
the Slave Power, also Benton's Thirty Years of Congressional History,
and Calhoun's Speeches.

ABRAHAM LINCOLN.

1809-1865.

CIVIL WAR: PRESERVATION OF THE UNION.

In the year 1830, or thereabouts, a traveller on the frontier
settlements of Illinois (if a traveller was ever known in those dreary
regions) might have seen a tall, gaunt, awkward, homely, sad-looking
young man of twenty-one, clothed in a suit of brown jean dyed with
walnut-bark, hard at work near a log cabin on the banks of the river
Sangamon,--a small stream emptying into the Illinois River. The man was
splitting rails, which he furnished to a poor woman in exchange for some
homespun cloth to make a pair of trousers, at the rate of four hundred
rails per yard. His father, one of the most shiftless of the poor whites
of Kentucky, a carpenter by trade, had migrated to Indiana, and, after a
short residence, had sought another home on a bluff near the Sangamon
River, where he had cleared, with the assistance of his son, about
fifteen acres of land. From this he gained a miserable and
precarious living.

The young rail-splitter had also a knack of slaughtering hogs, for
which he received thirty cents a day. Physically he had extraordinary
strength, and no one could beat him in wrestling and other athletic
exercises. Mentally, he was bright, inquiring, and not wholly
illiterate. He had learned, during his various peregrinations, to read,
write, and cipher. He was reliable and honest, and had in 1828 been
employed, when his father lived in Indiana, by a Mr. Gentry, to
accompany his son to New Orleans, with a flat-boat of produce, which he
sold successfully.

It is not my object to dwell on the early life of Abraham Lincoln. It
has been made familiar by every historian who has written about him, in
accordance with the natural curiosity to know the beginnings of
illustrious men; and the more hum