His political life began with a defeat for the Illinois Legislature in 1830, but he was returned in 1834, 1836, 1838, and declined re-election in 1840, preferring to study law and prepare for his future.  “Honest Abe” he has been called, and throughout Illinois that characteristic was the prominent one known of him.  From this time his rise was rapid.  Sent to the Congress of the nation, he seldom spoke, but when he did his terse though simple expression always won him a hearing.  His simplicity and frankness was deceptive to the political leaders, and from its very fearlessness often defeated them.

His famous debates with Senator Douglas, the “Little Giant,” spread his reputation from one end of the country to the other, and at their close there was no question as to Lincoln’s position in the North, or on the vital question of the day.

The spirit of forbearance he carried with him to the White House, “with malice toward none, with charity for all.”  This was the spirit that carried him through the four awful years of the war.  The martyr’s crown hovered over him from the outset.  The martyr’s spirit was always his.  The burden of the war always rested on his shoulders.  The fathers, sons and brothers, the honored dead of Gettysburg, of Antietam, all lay upon his mighty heart.

He never forgot his home friends, and when occasionally one dropped in on him, the door was always open.  They frequently had tea in the good old-fashioned way, and then Lincoln listened to the news of the village, old stories were retold, new ones told, and the old friendships cemented by new bonds.

Then came the end, swift and sudden, and gloom settled upon the country; for in spite of ancestry, self-education, ungainly figure, ill-fitting clothes, the soul of the man had conquered even the stubborn South, while the cold-blooded North was stricken to the heart.  The noblest one of all had been taken.

THE RACE QUESTION IN AMERICA

BY

DR. P. THOMAS STANFORD

Author of the “Tragedy of the negro in America”

As a member of the negro race, I myself have suffered as a child whose parents were born in slavery, deprived of all influences of the ennobling life, made obedient to the will of the white man by the lash and chain, and sold to the highest bidder when there was no more use for them.

The first negro fact for white thought is—­that my clients, the colored people here in America, are not responsible for being here any more than they are responsible for their conditions of ignorance and poverty.  They suddenly emerge from their prison house poor, without a home, without food or clothing, and ignorant.  Now the enemies of God and of the progress of civilization in our country are to-day introducing a system of slavery with which they hope to again enslave the colored people.  To carry out their evil designs they retain able politicians, lawyers and newspapers to represent them, such as Senator Tillman, the Hon. John Temple Graves of Georgia and the Baltimore Sun, and they are trying the negro on four counts which allege that the race is ignorant, cannot be taught, is lazy and immoral.