Quotes About Lincoln

They'd also considered themselves distinct enough from the rest of the Blacks in the country to have met with Lincoln during the war in an effort to have themselves declared a separate class and thus eligible for the rights inherent in such a designation, but the effort had failed.

So astonishing was his physique that another man unabashedly described young Abraham Lincoln as "a cross between Venus and Hercules.

No drunken, saddened, addled, enraged citizens of Richmond so much as attacks Lincoln with their fists.

Lincoln ( he prefers to go by just his last name. No one calls him "Abe", which he loathes. Few call him "Mr. President". His wife actually calls him "Mr. Lincoln", and his two personal secretaries playfully refer to him as "the Tycoon") paces the upper deck of the steamboat River Queen, his face lit now and again by distant artillery.

Viewed from the genuine abolition ground, Mr. Lincoln seemed tardy, cold, dull and indifferent; but measuring him by the sentiment of his country, a sentiment he was bound as a statesman to consult, he was swift, zealous, radical and determined.

There was nothing in all Douglas's powerful effort that appealed to the higher instincts of human nature, while Lincoln always touched sympathetic cords. Lincoln's speech excited and sustained the enthusiasm of his audience to the end.

The openness of rural Nebraska certainly influenced me. That openness, in a way, fosters the imagination. But growing up, Lincoln wasn't a small town. It was a college town. It had record stores and was a liberal place.

Every Republican president starting with Lincoln - and for almost 100 years thereafter - generally supported tariffs, while Democrats tended to promote free trade.

There are certain historical figures of such importance that we need to know everything about them, which is why books about Napoleon, Lincoln, Julius Caesar, Joan of Arc, Queen Elizabeth I, and the great religious founders continue to proliferate; these lives require constant reevaluation and interpretation.

Yet, to the wigwam audience in Decatur, Lincoln presented a strange figure. He didn't seem euphoric, or triumphant, or even pleased. To the contrary, said a man named Johnson, observing from the convention floor, "I then thought him one of the most diffident and worst plagued men I ever saw.

Indeed, the empathy Lincoln received from the Speed family was probably unlike anything he had experienced before. He knew the kindness of friends and strangers, but never from quite such a warm, bright, well-read, and close-knit group.

No element of Mr. Lincoln's character," declared his colleague Henry Whitney, "was so marked, obvious and ingrained as his mysterious and profound melancholy." His law partner William Herndon said, "His melancholy dripped from him as he walked.

As decisively as Lincoln left the rural life, he left the Baptist church as well. In New Salem he became widely known as an infidel. He rejected eternal damnation, innate sin, the divinity of Jesus, and the infallibility of the Bible.

Perhaps," observes James McPherson, "McClellan's career had been too successful. He had never known . . . the despair of defeat or the humiliation of failure. He had never learned the lessons of adversity and humility." Lincoln had clearly learned those lessons.

Did you know that Lincoln liked popcorn, and oysters, and a good strong cup of coffee?

Some have deplored Lincoln's indifference to Christianity. But it was not religion, it was religiosity that put him off.

Lincoln is properly remembered as a champion of democracy, but there was a good bit of Otto von Bismarck in him as well.

In March 1861 alone—Lincoln's first month in office—the U.S. Senate would receive for its advice and consent some sixty pages of names submitted for civilian and military appointments ranging from secretary of state to surveyor-general of Minnesota.

While attending to the customary tasks of assembling a cabinet, rewarding political loyalists with federal appointments, and drafting an inaugural address alone—he employed no speechwriters—Lincoln was uniquely forced to confront the collapse of the country itself, with no power to prevent its disintegration. Bound to loyalty to the Republican party platform on which he had run and won, he could yield little to the majority that had in fact voted against him.

Lincoln must have welcomed the chance that evening to escape from such friends, if only to submit to a final fitting for the recently delivered inaugural suit from the Chicago tailors Titsworth & Brother.

When a grizzled yeoman worker appeared one morning to complain that as a state legislator many years earlier, in hard times, young Lincoln had inexcusably voted to raise his government salary from two to all of four dollars a day," Lincoln listened to the reproach calmly. "Now, Abe, I want to know what in the world made you do it?" demanded the old Democrat. With deadpan seriousness, Lincoln explained: "I reckon the only reason was that we wanted the money.

The very day after Lincoln's election, an obscure Springfield neighbor named Henry Fawcett dispatched a note begging the president-elect to let him "go with you to the White House as your Body Servant." Fawcett, who listed among his qualifications his experience ringing a local church bell when Lincoln won the nomination, offered "to carry your Messages and so forth…even Shaving you as well.

Soon thereafter, Lincoln glimpsed another "mysterious" and, he feared, "ominous" vision in his own bedroom mirror. While reclining on a lounge, he glanced up to notice a "double-image of himself in the looking-glass," one clear, the other pallid. For a moment, it was vivid; then it vanished—at first, two Lincolns side by side, then none at all.

Lincoln likely concluded—was, as Jackson had put it, "fallacious" in its justifications and, "in direct violation of their duty as citizens of the United States, contrary to the laws of their country, subversive of its Constitution, and having for its object the destruction of the Union." As Jackson had bluntly concluded: "Disunion by armed force is treason.