The Gettysburg Address and Other Writings

By Abraham Lincoln

Abraham Lincoln is a near legendary figure in American history, and the dimensions of his legend assure many shapes based on the historical reality of his achievements. He was the quintessential self-made man who rose from humble origins to become the chief executive of his nation. He was a political idealist whose dedication to ensuring liberty and equality for all resulted in his assassination. And, as the documents collected in this volume attest, he was, although largely self-educated, the author of some of the most eloquent and insightful addresses, speeches, and correspondence in American letters of the nineteenth century.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Fall River Press
• Release date: Jun 21, 2011
• ISBN: 9781435136984

Abraham Lincoln

Abraham Lincoln was a store owner, postmaster, county surveyor, and lawyer, before sitting in both the House of Representatives and Senate. He was our 16th President, being elected twice, and serving until his assassination in 1865. He is best known for leading the United States through the Civil War, and his anti-slavery stance.

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THE

GETTYSBURG

ADDRESS

and Other Writings

aa

ABRAHAM LINCOLN

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Compilation © 2010 by Fall River Press

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher.

Cover design by Patrice Kaplan

Cover art © Smithsonian Institution/Corbis (Lincoln’s hat); Manuscript Division/

Library of Congress (handwriting); © Duncan Walker/iStockphoto (flag background)

Book design by Mary McAdam Keane

Fall River Press

122 Fifth Avenue

New York, NY 10011

ISBN: 978-1-4351-3698-4

CONTENTS

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Introduction

Foreword

Short Autobiography

Addresses, Lectures, and Other Writings

Address Before the Young Men’s Lyceum of Springfield, Illinois

Notes on the Practice of Law

Fragments on Government

Fragments on Slavery

Fragment on Sectionalism

A House Divided Speech at Springfield, Illinois

On Slavery and Democracy

Speech at Columbus, Ohio

Speech at Cincinnati, Ohio

Lecture on Discoveries, Inventions, and Improvements

On the Divine Will

The Emancipation Proclamation

To the Workingmen of Manchester, England

Opinion on the Draft

Proclamation of Thanksgiving

The Gettysburg Address

Lecture on Liberty at the Sanitary Fair in Baltimore

Reply to the Committee of the National Union Convention

Reply to the Delegation from the National Union League

Address to the 164th Ohio Regiment

Address to the 166th Ohio Regiment

Address to the 148th Ohio Regiment

Reply to a Committee of the Colored People of Baltimore on the Presentation of a Bible

Response to a Serenade

Address to the 140th Indiana Regiment

On Reconstruction

Inaugural Addresses

First Inaugural Address

Second Inaugural Address

Letters

To George Robertson, August 15, 1855

To Joshua F. Speed, August 24, 1855

To James N. Brown, October 18, 1858

To Henry L. Pierce and Others, April 6, 1859

To Horace Greeley, August 22, 1862

To Andrew Johnson, March 26, 1863

To James C. Conkling, August 26, 1863

To Edwin M. Stanton, February 5, 1864

To Albert G. Hodges, April 4, 1864

To Charles D. Robinson, August 17, 1864

To Isaac M. Schermerhorn, September 12, 1864

To Henry W. Hoffman, October 10, 1864

To Mrs. Lydia Bixby, November 21, 1864

Afterword

My Childhood’s Home I See Again

INTRODUCTION

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ABRAHAM LINCOLN IS A NEAR-LEGENDARY FIGURE IN AMERICAN history, and the dimensions of his legend assume many shapes based on the historical reality of his achievements. He was the quintessential self-made man who rose from humble origins to become the chief executive of his nation. He was a political idealist whose dedication to ensuring liberty and equality for all resulted in his assassination. And, as the documents collected in this volume attest, he was, although largely self-educated, the author of some of the most eloquent and insightful addresses, speeches, and correspondence in American letters of the nineteenth century.

Much of what we know about Lincoln’s early life comes from a short autobiographical essay that he wrote to be circulated during his campaign stump for the presidential election of 1860. He was born on February 12, 1809 in Hardin County, Kentucky (in a log cabin, as popular accounts emphasize). His family worshipped as Baptists, and it was partly their church’s opposition to slavery, which was allowed in Kentucky, that resulted in the Lincolns moving to Indiana when Abraham was nine. Abraham’s formal education was limited to A.B.C. schools, which he attended for a total of less than two years. He spent most of his childhood clearing land and helping out on his father’s farm. In 1830, the family moved to Macon County, Illinois where Abraham split rails for fencing that staked out the boundaries of the Lincoln’s ten-acre farm. Three decades later, Rail-splitter Abe expressed amusement at how his humble roots became fodder for political propagandists: These are, or are supposed to be, the rails about which so much is being said just now, though these are far from being the first or only rails ever made by A[braham].

Striking out on his own that year, Lincoln eventually settled in New Salem, Illinois, where he joined a local volunteer militia to defend his town against forced reclamation as tribal property in the short-lived Black Hawk War. Although his unit never saw action, Lincoln was so well-liked locally that he was elected captain, in which capacity he served for three months. Convinced that he could translate his popularity into popular votes, Lincoln ran for the state Legislature in 1832 but was soundly trounced. Two years later, he ran for the Legislature on the Whig ticket and was elected. He would be re-elected another five successive two-year terms.

The enthusiasm and zeal with which the young legislator approached his new position can be gauged from one of Lincoln’s earliest recorded public speeches, Address Before the Young Men’s Lyceum of Springfield, Illinois, delivered in January of 1838. We find ourselves in the peaceful possession, of the fairest portion of the earth, as regards extent of territory, fertility of soil, and salubrity of climate, he writes in exuberant praise of America. We find ourselves under the government of a system of political institutions, conducing more essentially to the ends of civil and religious liberty, than any which the history of former times tell us. Lincoln was a student of Henry Clay, one of the founders of America’s Whig Party, and the leading exponent of the American System, which was defined in part by ambitious efforts to develop and support the nation’s infrastructure through tariffs levied on foreign imports that encouraged citizens to buy American-made goods. Lincoln’s optimism about his country notwithstanding, the tariff system ultimately caused dissension between the northern and southern states, sowing seeds of discord that came to fruition during his presidency.

Lincoln’s Democratic opponent for his Legislature seat, John T. Stuart, was so impressed with how the young legislator handled his campaign that he encouraged Lincoln to study law. Lincoln obtained his law license in 1836 and moved to Springfield where, in 1837, he and Stuart became partners. Lincoln married Stuart’s cousin, Mary Todd, in 1842. Their union produced four children, only one of whom lived to adulthood.

In 1846, Lincoln was elected to the United States House of Representatives where he served only one term before resuming his law practice. He returned to the political arena in 1854 when the Kansas-Nebraska Act was passed, repealing the limits imposed on slave ownership established by the Missouri Compromise in 1820. The Kansas-Nebraska act left the decision of whether or not to allow slavery up to the popular sovereignty of the people of any new American territory. The main architect of the popular sovereignty doctrine was Stephen Douglas, a Democratic representative from Illinois who vigorously supported the Dred Scott Decision of the United States Supreme Court and its ruling that Congress had no right to prohibit slavery in federal territories. In 1858 Lincoln, who had shifted his allegiance from the Whig Party to the newly created Republican party in 1856, challenged Douglas for his seat in the Senate. The two staged a series of debates between August 21 and October 15 of that year that have achieved legendary status in American political history, with Lincoln promoting the sovereignty of the republic and Douglas the democratic freedoms guaranteed to the people. Lincoln’s famous ‘A House Divided’ Speech, in which he proclaims "this government cannot endure, permanently half slave and half free," is the fullest articulation of his stand on the issues of slavery and the Union prior to the debates.

Although Lincoln lost the election, the debates thrust him into the national spotlight as a powerful orator and helped to clarify slavery as an issue whose many ramifications threatened to divide the nation. Lincoln and Douglas took their rivalry to the 1860 presidential election where Lincoln emerged victorious to become the nation’s sixteenth president. His resolve to keep the republic united was tested even before his inauguration. Less than two months after his election win, South Carolina seceded from the Union. By February 9, 1861, eleven of thirteen seceding states had declared themselves the Confederate States of America and chosen Jefferson Davis as their president. With the firing on Fort Sumter on April 12, 1861, little more than a month after Lincoln’s inauguration, the American Civil War began.

In a letter to Horace Greeley written in August of 1862, Lincoln eloquently declares the preservation of the Union as his top priority as president: "My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it. Clearly believing that the latter measure was the best for achieving his objectives Lincoln, in the Emancipation Proclamation delivered on January 1, 1863, formally declared all slaves in the Confederate States then, thenceforward, and forever free."

The letters and addresses Lincoln wrote during the war reveal him to be actively engaged in the institution of the military draft, the creation of regiments of black soldiers, and the meticulous management of the Union Army. He was also acutely aware of the tragic implications of the war’s death toll. In The Gettysburg Address, delivered on October 3, 1863, he venerates the soldiers who gave their lives in the war’s bloodiest battle with his challenge to the living to complete the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced, and to ensure that these dead shall not have died in vain. True to his word, Lincoln began implementing measures for the Reconstruction of the nation before the war’s end. He made his address On Reconstruction on April 11, 1865, two days after Confederate General Robert E. Lee’s formal surrender at Appomattox Courthouse in Virginia. This was Lincoln’s last major public address: on April 14, 1865, Lincoln was shot by John Wilkes Booth while attending an evening performance at Ford’s Theatre in Washington, D.C. He died of his wounds the following day.

The documents collected in this volume span the years 1838 to 1865— half of Lincoln’s life and nearly his entire career as a public servant. Though they comprise but a fraction of the thousands of pages of public addresses and letters that Lincoln wrote in these years, they express the essential philosophy and wisdom of a titanic figure in American history whose written words articulate both the fundamental character of the nation and the democratic principles that define America.

FOREWORD

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SHORT AUTOBIOGRAPHY

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Written at the Request of a Friend to Use in Preparing a

Popular Campaign Biography in the Election of 1860

ABRAHAM LINCOLN WAS BORN FEBRUARY 12, 1809, THEN IN HARDIN, now in the more recently formed county of Larue, Kentucky. His father, Thomas, & grand-father, Abraham, were born in Rockingham County, Virginia, whither their ancestors had come from Berks County, Pennsylvania. His lineage has been traced no farther back than this. The family were originally Quakers, though in later times they have fallen away from the peculiar habits of that people. The grand-father, Abraham, had four brothers—Isaac, Jacob, John, and Thomas. So far as known, the descendants of Jacob and John are still in Virginia. Isaac went to a place near where Virginia, North Carolina, and Tennessee, join; and his descendants are in that region. Thomas came to Kentucky, and after many years died there, whence his descendants went to Missouri. Abraham, grandfather of the subject of this sketch, came to Kentucky, and was killed by Indians about the year 1784. He left a widow, three sons, and two daughters. The eldest son, Mordecai, remained in Kentucky till late in life, when he removed to Hancock County, Illinois, where soon after he died, and where several of his descendants still reside. The second son, Josiah, removed at an early day to a place on Blue River, now within Harrison County, Indiana; but no recent information of him, or his family, has been obtained. The eldest sister, Mary, married Ralph Crume, and some of her descendants are now known to be in Breckenridge County, Kentucky. The second sister, Nancy, married William Brumfield, and her family are not known to have left Kentucky, but there is no recent information from them. Thomas, the youngest son, and father of the present subject, by the early death of his father, and very narrow circumstances of his mother, even in childhood was a wandering laboring boy, and grew up literally without education. He never did more in the way of writing than to bunglingly sign his own name. Before he was grown, he passed one year as a hired hand with his uncle Isaac on Wataga, a branch of the Holsteen River. Getting back into Kentucky, and having reached his 28th year, he married Nancy Hanks—mother of the present subject—in the year 1806. She also was born in Virginia; and relatives of hers of the name of Hanks, and of other names, now reside in Coles, in Macon, and in Adams counties, Illinois, and also in Iowa. The present subject has no brother or sister of the whole or half blood. He had a sister, older than himself, who was grown and married, but died many years ago, leaving no child. Also a brother, younger than himself, who died in infancy. Before leaving Kentucky he and his sister were sent, for short periods, to A.B.C. schools, the first kept by Zachariah Riney, and the second by Caleb Hazel.

At this time his father resided on Knob-creek, on the road from Bardstown Ky. to Nashville Tenn. at a point three, or three and a half miles South or South-West of Atherton’s ferry on the Rolling Fork. From this place he removed to what is now Spencer county Indiana, in the autumn of 1816, A. then being in his eighth year. This removal was partly on account of slavery; but chiefly on account of the difficulty in land titles in Ky. He settled in an unbroken forest; and the clearing away of surplus wood was the great task ahead. A. though very young, was large of his age, and had an axe put into his hands at once; and from that till within his twenty-third year, he was almost constantly handling that most useful instrument—less, of course, in plowing and harvesting seasons. At this place A. took an early start as a hunter, which was never much improved afterwards. (A few days before the completion of his eighth year, in the absence of his father, a flock of wild turkeys approached the new log-cabin, and A. with a rifle-gun, standing inside, shot through a crack, and killed one of them. He has never since pulled a trigger on any larger game.) In the autumn of 1818 his mother died; and a year afterwards his father married Mrs. Sally Johnston, at Elizabeth-Town, Ky—a widow, with three children of her first marriage. She proved a good and kind mother to A. and is still living in Coles Co. Illinois. There were no children of this second marriage. His father’s residence continued at the same place in Indiana, till 1830. While here A. went to A.B.C. schools by littles, kept successively by Andrew Crawford— Sweeney, and Azel W. Dorsey. He does not remember any other. The family of Mr. Dorsey now reside in Schuyler Co. Illinois. A. now thinks that the aggregate of all his schooling did not amount to one year. He was never in a college or Academy as a student; and never inside of a college or academy building till since he had a law-license. What he has in the way of education, he has picked up. After he was twenty-three, and had separated from his father, he studied English grammar, imperfectly of course, but so as to speak and write as well as he now does. He studied and nearly mastered the Six-books of Euclid, since he was a member of Congress. He regrets his want of education, and does what he can to supply the want. In his tenth year he was kicked by a horse, and apparently killed for a time. When he was nineteen, still residing in Indiana, he made his first trip upon a flatboat to New-Orleans. He was a hired hand merely; and he and a son of the owner, without other assistance, made the trip. The nature of part of the cargo-load, as it was called—made it necessary for them to linger and trade along the Sugar coast—and one night they were attacked by seven negroes with intent to kill and rob them. They were hurt some in the melee, but succeeded in driving the negroes from the boat, and then cut cable, weighed anchor, and left.

March 1st, 1830—A. having just completed his 21st year, his father and family, with the families of the two daughters and sons-in-law, of his step-mother, left the old homestead in Indiana, and came to Illinois. Their mode of conveyance was waggons drawn by ox-teams, or A. drove one of the teams. They reached the county of Macon, and stopped there some time within the same month of March. His father and family settled a new place on the North side of the Sangamon river, at the junction of the timber-land and prairie, about ten miles Westerly from Decatur. Here they built a log-cabin, into which they removed, and made sufficient of rails to fence ten acres of ground, fenced and broke the ground, and raised a crop of sown corn upon it the same year. These are, or are supposed to be, the rails about which so much is being said just now, though these are far from being the first, or only rails ever made by A.

The sons-in-law, were temporarily settled at other places in the county. In the autumn all hands were greatly afflicted with ague and fever, to which they had not been used, and by which they were greatly discouraged— so much so that they determined on leaving the county. They remained however, through the succeeding winter, which was the winter of the very celebrated deep snow of Illinois. During that winter, A. together with his step-mother’s son, John D. Johnston, and John Hanks, yet residing in Macon county, hired themselves to one Denton Offutt, to take a flatboat from Beardstown Illinois to New-Orleans; and for that purpose were to join him—Offutt—at Springfield, Ills so soon as the snow should go off. When it did go off, which was about the 1st of March, 1831—the county was so flooded as to make traveling by land impracticable; to obviate which difficulty they purchased a large canoe, and came down the Sangamon river in it. This is the time and the manner of A’s first entrance into Sangamon County. They found Offutt at Springfield, but learned from him that he had failed in getting a boat at Beardstown. This led to their hiring themselves to him at $12 per month, each; and getting the timber out of the trees and building a boat at old Sangamon Town on the Sangamon river, seven miles N.W. of Springfield, which boat they took to New-Orleans, substantially upon the old contract. It was in connection with this boat that occurred the ludicrous incident of sewing up the hogs eyes. Offutt bought thirty odd large fat live hogs, but found difficulty in driving them from where he purchased them to the boat, and thereupon conceived the whim that he could sew up their eyes and drive them where he pleased. No sooner thought of than decided, he put his hands, including A. at