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 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 Shakspeare'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 at 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 F