inheritance and marriage he was rich in lands, and, let it be said in respectful sorrow, rich also in slaves, so far as slaves breed riches rather than curses. At the age of fourteen he refused a commission as a midshipman in the British Navy. At the age of nineteen he was military inspector with the rank of major. At the age of twentyone he was selected by the British Governor of Virginia as Commissioner to the French ports. At the age of twenty-two he was colonel of a regiment, and was thanked by the House of Burgesses in Virginia. Early in life he became an observer of form and ceremony. Always strictly just, according to prevailing principles, and ordering at his death the emancipation of his slaves, he was a general and a statesman rather than a philanthropist ; nor did he seem to be inspired, beyond the duties of patriotism, to any active sympathy with Human Rights. In the ample record of what he wrote or said there is no word of adhesion to the great ideas of the Declaration. Such an origin — such an early life—such opportunities—such a condition such a character, were all in contrast with the origin, the early life, the opportunities, the condition, and the character of him whom we commemorate to-day.

Abraham Lincoln was born, and until he became President, always lived in a part of the country which at the period of the Declaration of Independence was a savage wilderness. Strange but happy Providence, that a voice from that savage wilderness, now fertile in men, was inspired to uphold the pledges and promises of the Declaration! The Unity of the Republic on the indestructible foundation of Liberty and Equality was vindi

cated by the citizen of a community, which had no existence when the Republic was formed.

His family may be traced to a Quaker stock in Pennsylvania, but it removed first to Virginia, and then, as early as 1780, to the wilds of Kentucky, which at that time was only an outlying territory belonging to Virginia. His grandfather and father both lived in peril from the Indians, and the former perished by their hands. The future President was born in a log-house of Kentucky. His mother could read but not write. His father could do neither, except so far as to sign his name rudely, like a noble of Charlemagne. Trial, privation, and laborentered into his early life. Only at seven years of age was he able to go to school for a very brief period, carrying with him Dilworth's Spelling Book, which was one of the three books that formed the family library. Shortly afterwards his father turned his back upon that slavery which disfigured Kentucky, and placing his poor effects on a raft which his son had helped him construct, set his face towards Indiana, which was guarded against slavery by the famous Ordinance for the Northwestern Territory. In this painful journey the son, who was only eight years old, bore his share of the burdens. On reaching the chosen home in a land of Liberty, the son aided the father in building the cabin, composed of logs fastened together by notches, and filled in with mud, where for twelve years afterwards he grew in character and in knowledge, as in stature, learning to write as well as to read, and especially enjoying Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, Æsop's Fables, Weems's Life of Washington, and the Life

of Clay. At the age of twelve he lost his mother. At the age of nineteen he became a hired hand at $10 a month on a flatboat, laden with stores for the plantations on the Mississippi, and in this way he floated down that lordly river to New Orleans, little dreaming that only a few years later, iron-clad navies would float on that same lordly river at his command.

In 1830, the father removed to Illinois, transporting his effects in wagons drawn by oxen, and the future President, who was then twenty-one years of age, drove one of the teams. Another cabin was built in primitive rudeness, and the future President split the rails for the fence to enclose the lot. These rails have become classical in our history, and the name of rail-splitter has been more than the degree of a college. Not that the splitter of rails is especially meritorious, but because the people are proud to trace aspiring talent to humble beginnings, and because they found in this tribute a new opportunity of vindicating the dignity of free labor, and of repelling the insolent pretensions of Slavery.

His youth was now spent, and at the age of twenty-one, he left his father's house to begin the world for himself. A small bundle, a laughing face, and an honest heart; these were his visible possessions, together with that unconscious character and intelligence, which his country afterwards learned to prize. In the long history of "worth depressed," there is no instance of such a contrast between the depression and the triumph-unless, perhaps, his successor as President may share with him this distinction. No Academy, no University, no Alma Mater of science or

learning had nourished him. No government had taken him by the hand and given to him the gift of opportunity. No inheritance of land or money had fallen to him. No friend stood by his side. He was alone in poverty; and yet not all alone. There was God above, who watches all, and does not desert the lowly. Simple in life and manners, and knowing nothing of form or ceremony, with a village schoolmaster for six months as his only teacher, he had grown up in companionship with the people, with nature, with trees, with the fruitful corn, and with the stars. While yet a child, his father had borne him away from a soil wasted by Slavery, and he was now the citizen of a Free State, where Free Labor had been placed under the' safeguard of irreversible compact and fundamental law. And thus closed the youth of the future President, happy at least that he could go forth under the day-star of Liberty.

The hardships of youth were still continued in early manhood. He labored as a hired hand on a farm, and then a second time he measured the winding Mississippi to New Orleans in a flatboat. At the call of the Governor of Illinois for troops against the Indian Chief Black Hawk, he sprang forward with patriotic ardor, and was the first to enlist at the recruiting station in his neighborhood. The choice of his associates made him captain. After the war he became a surveyor, and down to his death retained a practical and scientific knowledge of this business. In 1834, he was elected to the Legislature of Illinois, and two years later he was admitted to the practice of the law. He was now twenty-seven years old, and, under

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the benignant influence of Republican Institutions, he had already entered upon the double career of a lawyer and a legislator, with the gates of the Future opening on their hinges before him.

How well he served in these two characters I need not stop to tell. It is enough if I exhibit the stages of his advance, that you may understand how he became the representative of his country at so grand a moment of history. It is needless to say that his opportunities of study as a lawyer must have been small, but he was industrious in each individual case, and thus daily added to his stores of professional experience. Faithful in all things, most conscientious in his conduct at the bar, so that he could not be unfair to the other side, and admirably sensitive to the behests of justice, so that he could not argue on the wrong side, he acquired a name for honesty, which, beginning with the community in which he lived, became proverbial throughout his State; while his genial, mirthful, overflowing nature, apt at anecdote and story, made him a favorite companion where he was personally known. His opinions on public questions were early fixed, under the example and teachings of Henry Clay, and he never departed from them, though constantly tempted, or pressed by local majorities, speaking in the name of a false democracy. It is interesting to know that thus early he espoused those two ideas, which entered so largely into the terrible responsibilities of his latter years, I mean the Unity of the Republic, and the supreme value of Liberty. He did not believe that