honored from boyhood. For the
rest, from day to day, he lived the life of the American people,
walked in its light, reasoned with its reason, thought with its power
of thought, felt the beatings of its mighty heart, and so was in every
way a child of nature, a child of the West, a child of America.

At nineteen, feeling impulses of ambition to get on in the world, he
engaged himself to go down the Mississippi in a flatboat, receiving
ten dollars a month for his wages, and afterwards he made the trip
once more. At twenty-one he drove his father's cattle as the family
migrated to Illinois, and split rails to fence in the new homestead in
the wild. At twenty-three he was a captain of volunteers in the Black
Hawk war. He kept a store. He learned something of surveying, but of
English literature he added to Bunyan nothing but Shakespeare's plays.
At twenty-five he was elected to the legislature of Illinois, where he
served eight years. At twenty-seven he was admitted to the bar. In
1837 he chose his home in Springfield, the beautiful centre of the
richest land in the State. In 1847 he was a member of the national
Congress, where he voted about forty times in favor of the principle
of the Jefferson proviso. In 1849 he sought, eagerly but
unsuccessfully, the place of Commissioner of the Land Office, and he
refused an appointment that would have transferred his residence to
Oregon. In 1854 he gave his influence to elect from Illinois, to the
American Senate, a Democrat, who would certainly do justice to Kansas.
In 1858, as the rival of Douglas, he went before the people of the
mighty Prairie State, saying, "This Union cannot permanently endure
half slave and half free; the Union will not be dissolved, but the
house will cease to be divided"; and now, in 1861, with no experience
whatever as an executive officer, while States were madly flying from
their orbit, and wise men knew not where to find counsel, this
descendant of Quakers, this pupil of Bunyan, this offspring of the
great West, was elected President of America.

He measured the difficulty of the duty that devolved upon him, and was
resolved to fulfil it. As on the eleventh of February, 1861, he left
Springfield, which for a quarter of a century had been his happy home,
to the crowd of his friends and neighbors, whom he was never more to
meet, he spoke a solemn farewell: "I know not how soon I shall see you
again. A duty has devolved upon me, greater than that which has