Abraham Lincoln was not an ordinary man.  He was, in truth, in the language of the poet Lowell, a “new birth of our new soil.”  His greatness did not consist in growing up on the frontier.  An ordinary man would have found on the frontier exactly what he would have found elsewhere—­a commonplace life, varying only with the changing ideas and customs of time and place.  But for the man with extraordinary powers of mind and body, for one gifted by Nature as Abraham Lincoln was gifted, the pioneer life, with its severe training in self-denial, patience, and industry, developed his character, and fitted him for the great duties of his after life as no other training could have done.

[Illustration:  LINCOLN’S HOME AFTER HIS MARRIAGE]

His advancement in the astonishing career that carried him from obscurity to world-wide fame—­from postmaster of New Salem village to President of the United States, from captain of a backwoods volunteer company to Commander-in-chief of the army and navy—­was neither sudden nor accidental nor easy.  He was both ambitious and successful, but his ambition was moderate, and his success was slow.  And, because his success was slow, it never outgrew either his judgment or his powers.  Between the day when he left his father’s cabin and launched his canoe on the head waters of the Sangamon River to begin life on his own account, and the day of his first inauguration, lay full thirty years of toil, self-denial, patience; often of effort baffled, of hope deferred; sometimes of bitter disappointment.  Even with the natural gift of great genius, it required an average lifetime and faithful, unrelaxing effort to transform the raw country stripling into a fit ruler for this great nation.

Almost every success was balanced—­sometimes overbalanced—­by a seeming failure.  He went into the Black Hawk war a captain, and through no fault of his own came out a private.  He rode to the hostile frontier on horseback, and trudged home on foot.  His store “winked out.”  His surveyor’s compass and chain, with which he was earning a scanty living, were sold for debt.  He was defeated in his first attempts to be nominated for the legislature and for Congress; defeated in his application to be appointed Commissioner of the General Land Office; defeated for the Senate, when he had forty-five votes to begin with, by a man who had only five votes to begin with; defeated again after his joint debates with Douglas; defeated in the nomination for Vice-President, when a favorable nod from half a dozen politicians would have brought him success.

Failures?  Not so.  Every seeming defeat was a slow success.  His was the growth of the oak, and not of Jonah’s gourd.  He could not become a master workman until he had served a tedious apprenticeship.  It was the quarter of a century of reading, thinking, speech-making, and law-making which fitted him to be the chosen champion in the great Lincoln-Douglas debates of 1858.  It was the great moral victory won in those debates (although the senatorship went to Douglas), added to the title “Honest Old Abe,” won by truth and manhood among his neighbors during a whole lifetime, that led the people of the United States to trust him with the duties and powers of President.