do what I have intended to do at some
future time, to invite you to study with me the character of Abraham
Lincoln, the impulse of his life and the causes of his death. I know
how hard it is to do it rightly, how impossible it is to do it
worthily. But I shall speak with confidence, because I speak to those
who love him, and whose ready love will fill out the deficiencies in
a picture which my words will weakly try to draw.

We take it for granted, first of all, that there is an essential
connection between Mr. Lincoln's character and his violent and bloody
death. It is no accident, no arbitrary decree of Providence. He lived
as he did, and he died as he did, because he was what he was. The more
we see of events the less we come to believe in any fate, or destiny,
except the destiny of character. It will be our duty, then, to see
what there was in the character of our great President that created
the history of his life, and at last produced the catastrophe of his
cruel death. After the first trembling horror, the first outburst of
indignant sorrow, has grown calm, these are the questions which we are
bound to ask and answer.

It is not necessary for me even to sketch the biography of Mr.
Lincoln. He was born in Kentucky fifty-six years ago, when Kentucky
was a pioneer State. He lived, as a boy and man, the hard and needy
life of a backwoodsman, a farmer, a river boatman, and, finally, by
his own efforts at self-education, of an active, respected,
influential citizen, in the half organized and manifold interests of a
new and energetic community. From his boyhood up he lived in direct
and vigorous contact with men and things, not as in older states and
easier conditions with words and theories; and both his moral
convictions and intellectual opinions gathered from that contact a
supreme degree of that character by which men knew him; that
character which is the most distinctive possession of the best
American nature; that almost indescribable quality which we call, in
general, clearness or truth, and which appears in the physical
structure as health, in the moral constitution as honesty, in the
mental structure as sagacity, and in the region of active life as
practicalness. This one character, with many sides, all shaped of the
same essential force and testifying to the same inner influences, was
what was powerful in him and decreed for him the life he was to live
and the death he was to die. We must take no smaller vi