Quotes About New Salem

Six days later, the president named a postmaster for New Salem, Illinois, a twenty-four-year-old lawyer who had lost a race for the state legislature. He was a Clay man, but the post was hardly major, and Abraham Lincoln was happy to accept the appointment.

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 removal from New Salem to Springfield and his entrance into a law partnership with Major John T. Stuart begin a distinctively new period in his career.

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.

Lincoln's stature and strength, his intelligence and ambition - in short, all the elements which gave him popularity among men in New Salem, rendered him equally attractive to the fair sex of that village.