Abraham Lincoln Man And Statesman Classic Reprint PDF Download

Excerpt from Abraham Lincoln, Man and Statesman We are here today in praise of "arms and a man." And in praising the wisdom of the man or recounting the success of the arms it is no part of our purpose to deride those who disagreed with that man nor to taunt those who were vanquished by those arms. We are here in memory of the humblest citizen of a nation, and in honor of the greatest statesman of his time. Abraham Lincoln's life ran the whole gamut of American society. He was born into the "poor white trash" of the Southern backwoods; he was pioneer and frontiersman; he was rail-splitter and flat-boatman; he was champion wrestler, cock-pit umpire and saloon-keeper; he was merchant, surveyor and country lawyer; he was the leading lawyer and politician, the acknowledged head and the champion orator of a political party in his state; he was legislator, congressman, statesman and President; he was leader in the most remarkable war of modern times - he was the tallest figure of the nineteenth century - he was the liberator of a race and martyr to the life of his country. Abraham Lincoln was the first president of the United States who was characteristically American. One hundred years ago in what was then Hardin County, Kentucky, Abraham Lincoln was born. In the aristocratic sense of the phrase, he was a man of "no ancestry." His father was probably descended from people who came first from England to Massachusetts, thence to Virginia, thence to Kentucky. Abraham Lincoln's grandfather and namesake was a brother-in-law of Daniel Boone and was one of the pioneers of the middle West. This grandfather had been shot by the Indians when Lincoln's father, Thomas Lincoln, was about six years of age. Mordecai, brother of Lincoln's father, is reputed to have been industrious, but Thomas, the father of Abraham Lincoln, was what we might call, without exaggeration, lazy and trifling. When we consider this man's ancestry and early surroundings, we are both enlightened and confused: we are enlightened in that we can see in his humble origin the source of his sympathy for his humblest fellow-man, in his frontier life we can see the cause of his manly independence, and in his early associations we can see the foundation of his firm faith in the "plain people." - but we are confused in that we cannot rind in his immediate parentage and environment the necessary stimulus and inspiration, and from his early lack of opportunity we cannot account for the development of mental power, tact and executive ability. In these latter respects the law of cause and effect is apparently broken. His mother had been one Nancy Hanks, a woman of very humble origin and of a melancholy disposition. His father Thomas was a thriftless, ignorant fellow who loved to tell stories. He seemed to lack the instinct or ambition to settle down and build a decent home, even after he as married. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.