Our American Holidays: Lincoln's Birthday. Various
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ADDRESS ON THE BATTLEFIELD OF GETTYSBURG
REMARKS TO NEGROES IN THE STREETS OF RICHMOND
SECOND INAUGURAL ADDRESS, MARCH 4, 1865
PREFACE
An astounding number of books have been written on Abraham Lincoln. Our Library of Congress contains over one thousand of them in well-nigh every modern language. Yet, incredible as it may seem, no miner has until to-day delved in these vast fields of Lincolniana until he has brought together the most precious of the golden words written of and by the Man of the People. Howe has collected a few of the best poems on Lincoln; Rice, Oldroyd and others, the elder prose tributes and reminiscences. McClure has edited Lincoln's yarns and stories; Nicolay and Hay, his speeches and writings. But each successive twelfth of February has emphasized the growing need for a unification of this scattered material.
The present volume offers, in small compass, the most noteworthy essays, orations, fiction and poems on Lincoln, together with some fiction, with characteristic anecdotes and "yarns" and his most famous speeches and writings. Taken in conjunction with a good biography, it presents the first succinct yet comprehensive view of "the first American." The Introduction gives some account of the celebration of Lincoln's Birthday and of his principal biographers.
NOTE
The Editor and Publishers wish to acknowledge their indebtedness to Houghton, Mifflin & Company; the McClure Company, R. S. Peale and J. A. Hill Co.; Charles Scribner's Sons; Dana Estes Company; Mr. David McKay, Mr. Joel Benton, Mr. C. P. Farrell and others who have very kindly granted permission to reprint selections from works bearing their copyright.
INTRODUCTION
Abraham Lincoln, sixteenth President of the United States, was born at Nolin Creek, Kentucky, on Feb. 12, 1809. As the following pages contain more than one biographical sketch it is not necessary here to touch on the story of his life. Lincoln's Birthday is now a legal holiday in Connecticut, Delaware, Illinois, Minnesota, New Jersey, New York, North Dakota, Pennsylvania, Washington (state) and Wyoming, and is generally observed in the other Northern States.
In its inspirational value to youth Lincoln's Birthday stands among the most important of our American holidays. Its celebration in school and home can not be made too impressive. "Rising as Lincoln did," writes Edward Deems, "from social obscurity through a youth of manual toil and poverty, steadily upward to the highest level of honor in the world, and all this as the fruit of earnest purpose, hard work, humane feeling and integrity of character, he is an example and an inspiration to youth unparalleled in history. At the same time he is the best specimen of the possibilities attainable by genius in our land and under our free institutions."
In arranging exercises for Lincoln's Birthday the teacher and parent should try not so much to teach the bare facts of his career as to give the children a sense of Lincoln's actual personality through his own yarns and speeches and such accounts as are given here by Herndon, Bancroft, Mabie, Tarbell, Phillips Brooks and others. He should show them Lincoln's greatest single act—Emancipation—through the eyes of Garfield and Whittier. He should try to reach the children with the thrill of an adoring sorrow-maddened country at the bier of its great preserver; with such a passion of love and patriotism as vibrates in the lines of Whitman, Brownell and Bryant, of Stoddard, Procter, Howe, Holmes, Lowell, and in the throbbing periods of Henry Ward Beecher. His main object should be to make his pupils love Lincoln. He should appeal to their national pride with the foreign tributes to Lincoln's greatness; make them feel how his memory still works through the years upon such contemporary poets as Gilder, Thompson, Markham, Cheney and Dunbar; and finally through the eyes of Harrison, Whitman, Ingersoll, Newman and others, show them our hero set in his proud, rightful place in the long vista of the ages.
In order to use the present volume with the best results it is advisable for teacher and parent to gain a more consecutive view of Lincoln's life than is offered here.
The standard biography of Lincoln is the monumental one in ten large volumes by Nicolay and Hay, the President's private secretaries. This contains considerable material not found elsewhere, but since its publication in 1890 much new matter has been unearthed, especially by the enterprise of Miss Ida Tarbell, whose "Life" in two volumes contains the essentials of the larger official work, is well balanced, and written in a simple, vigorous style perfectly adapted to the subject. If only one biography of Lincoln is to be read, Miss Tarbell's will, on the whole, be found most satisfactory.
The older Lives, written by Lincoln's friends and associates, such as Lamon and Herndon, make up in vividness and the intimate personal touch what they necessarily lack in perspective. Arnold's Life deals chiefly with the executive and legislative history of Lincoln's administration. The Life by the novelist J. G. Holland deals popularly with his hero's personality. The memoirs by Barrett, Abbott, Howells, Bartlett, Hanaford and Power were written in the main for political purposes.
Among the later works there stand out Morse's scholarly and serious account (in the American Statesmen series) of Lincoln's public policy; the vivid portrayal of Lincoln's adroitness as a politician by Col. McClure in Abraham Lincoln and Men of War Times; Whitney's Life on the Circuit with Lincoln, with its fund of entertaining anecdotes; Abraham Lincoln, an Essay by Carl Schurz; James Morgan's "short and simple annals" of Abraham Lincoln The Boy and the Man; Frederick Trevor Hill's brilliant account of Lincoln the Lawyer, the result of much recent research; the study of his personal magnetism in Alonzo Rothschild's Lincoln, Master of Men; and The True Abraham Lincoln by Curtis—a collection of sketches portraying Lincoln's character from several interesting points of view. Abraham Lincoln The Man of the People by Norman Hapgood is one of most recent and least conventional accounts. It is short, vigorous, vivid, and intensely American.
Among the many popular Lives for young people are: Abraham Lincoln, the Pioneer Boy, by W. M. Thayer; Abraham Lincoln, The Backwoods Boy, by Horatio Alger, Jr.; Abraham Lincoln, by Charles Carleton Coffin; The True Story of Abraham Lincoln The American, by E. S. Brooks; The Boy Lincoln, by W. O. Stoddard; and—most important of all—Nicolay's Boy's Life of Abraham Lincoln.
R. H. S.
I
A BIRDSEYE VIEW OF LINCOLN
ABRAHAM LINCOLN'S AUTOBIOGRAPHY
The following autobiography was written by Mr. Lincoln's own hand at the request of J. W. Fell of Springfield, Ill., December 20, 1859. In the note which accompanied it the writer says: "Herewith is a little sketch, as you requested. There is not much of it, for the reason, I suppose, that there is not much of me."
"I was born February 12, 1809, in Hardin Co., Ky. My parents were both born in Virginia, of undistinguished families—second families, perhaps I should say. My mother, who died in my tenth year, was of a family of the name of Hanks, some of whom now reside in Adams Co., and others in Mason Co., Ill. My paternal grandfather, Abraham Lincoln, emigrated from Rockingham Co., Va.,