Quotes from David Herbert Donald

Maybe I will write a memoir, perhaps I'll do some essays, or maybe I will write a mystery story.

Well, it seems to me Lincoln, I suppose, is kind of a model of a particular sort of presidency, a presidency that first of all is elected by a minority of the votes.

But I have tried to go over it very carefully, not merely what the evidence is, but with psychoanalysts and psychologists, and I think we're just about all agreed that Lincoln and Speed did not have a homosexual relationship.

The more I have studied Lincoln, the more I have followed his thought processes, the more I am convinced that he understood leadership better than any other American president.

In Lincoln's day a President's religion was a very private affair. There were no public prayer meetings, no attempts to woo the Religious Right. Few of Lincoln's countrymen knew anything at all of his religious beliefs.

Douglas claimed that in his New Salem days Lincoln "could ruin more liquor than all the boys of the town together"—a charge that was not merely inaccurate but singularly inappropriate from a senator known to have a fondness for drink—and Lincoln jeered that Douglas's popular-sovereignty doctrine was "as thin as the homeopathic soup that was made by boiling the shadow of a pigeon that had starved to death.

Lincoln's Gettysburg Address was 272 words and he delivered it under three minutes. He labored on it for days. The "featured speaker," Edward Everett, rambled on for two hours. Most people don't even remember his name, never mind what he said.

His closing promise of survival for "government of the people, by the people, for the people" may have had its origin in Daniel Webster's 1830 speech calling the American government "made for the people, made by the people, and answerable to the people," but more probably he derived it from a sermon of Theodore Parker, to which Herndon had called his attention, defining democracy as "a government of all the people, by all the people, for all the people.

For the first time in American history citizens began to feel that the occupant of the White House was their representative. They referred to him as Father Abraham, and they showered him with homely gifts: a firkin of butter, a crate of Bartlett pears, New England salmon.

If slavery was justified on the ground that masters were white while slaves were black, Lincoln warned, "By this rule, you are to be slave to the first man you meet, with a fairer skin than your own." If it was defended on the ground that masters were intellectually the superiors of blacks, the same logic applied: "By this rule, you are to be slave to the first man you meet, with an intellect superior to your own." The

Lincoln seems to have had the unusual notion that a public servant's first duty is to help people

Lincoln seems to have had the unusual notion that a public servant's first duty is to help people, rather than to follow bureaucratic regulations.

one Republican wrote, the people "think that God tried his best when he made Mr Lincoln

Lincoln could not help making a painful comparison of their careers: "With me, the race of ambition has been a failure—a flat failure;

Were an election for President to be held tomorrow, Old Abe would, without the special aid of any of his friends, walk over the course, without a competitor to dispute with him the great prize which his masterly ability, no less than his undoubted patriotism and unimpeachable honesty, have won.

Kansas, Lincoln responded, "I can not enter the ring on the money basis—first, because, in the main, it is wrong; and secondly, I have not, and can not get, the money.

It would stink in the land to have it said that an appropriation of $20,000 for furnishing the house had been overrun by the President when the poor freezing soldiers could not have blankets," he went on. The White House "was furnished well enough—better than any house they had ever lived in.

Up early on Friday, May 18, the day when nominations were to be made, he passed some time playing "fives"—a variety of handball—with some other men in a vacant lot next to the Illinois State Journal office.

should be present on the day the House was organized. If Etheridge persisted in his scheme, the President remarked grimly, he would "be carried out on a chip," and he promised to have a troop of soldiers ready to assist.

the state never voted for a Whig candidate for President

Lincoln replied that his strategy was just right, but he added tartly: "Please look over the despatches you may have rece[i]ved from here... and discover, if you can, that there is any idea in the head of any one here, of 'putting our army South of the enemy' or of [']following him to the death' in any direction." "I repeat to you," the President insisted, "it will neither be done nor attempted unless you watch it every day, and hour

Without even being aware that he was abandoning his original strategy, Grant developed a new plan for simultaneous massive attacks on the Confederate heartland by all the Union armies.

Like many of his contemporaries, Lincoln was troubled by what he perceived as the rapid rate of change in American life. Canals and railroads were bringing about a transportation revolution; the population was swiftly spreading across the continent; immigration was beginning to seem a threat to American social cohesion; sectionalism was becoming ever more divisive as the controversy over slavery mounted; the political battles of the Jackson era had destroyed the national political consensus.

If "persons and property, are held by no better tenure than the caprice of a mob," "if the laws be continually despised and disregarded," Lincoln warned, citizens' affection for their government must inevitably be alienated.