for himself and his posterity.

Only one step more remained to be taken. Jefferson and the leading
statesmen of his day held fast to the idea that the enslavement of the
African was socially, morally and politically wrong. The new school
was founded exactly upon the opposite idea; and they resolved, first,
to distract the democratic party, for which the Supreme Court had now
furnished the means, and then to establish a new government, with
negro slavery for its corner-stone, as socially, morally, and
politically right.

As the Presidential election drew on, one of the great traditional
parties did not make its appearance; the other reeled as it sought to
preserve its old position, and the candidate who most nearly
represented its best opinion, driven by patriotic zeal, roamed the
country from end to end to speak for union, eager, at least, to
confront its enemies, yet not having hope that it would find its
deliverance through him. The storm rose to a whirlwind; who would
allay its wrath? The most experienced statesmen of the country had
failed; there was no hope from those who were great after the flesh:
could relief come from one whose wisdom was like the wisdom of little
children?

The choice of America fell on a man born west of the Alleghenies, in
the cabin of poor people of Hardin county, Kentucky--ABRAHAM LINCOLN.

His mother could read, but not write; his father would do neither; but
his parents sent him, with an old spelling-book, to school, and he
learned in his childhood to do both.

When eight years old he floated down the Ohio with his father on a
raft, which bore the family and all their possessions to the shore of
Indiana; and, child as he was, he gave help as they toiled through
dense forests to the interior of Spencer County. There, in the land of
free labor, he grew up in a log-cabin, with the solemn solitude for
his teacher in his meditative hours. Of Asiatic literature he knew
only the Bible; of Greek, Latin, and mediaeval, no more than the
translation of AEsop's Fables; of English, John Bunyan's Pilgrim's
Progress. The traditions of George Fox and William Penn passed to him
dimly along the lines of two centuries through his ancestors, who were
Quakers.

Otherwise his education was altogether American. The Declaration of
Independence was his compendium of political wisdom, the Life of
Washington his constant study, and something of Jefferson and Madison
reached him through Henry Clay, whom he