Dear brother:—­Your letter of the 22d is just received.  Your proposal about selling the east forty acres of land is all that I want or could claim for myself; but I am not satisfied with it on Mother’s account—­I want her to have her living, and I feel that it is my duty, to some extent, to see that she is not wronged.  She had a right of dower (that is, the use of one-third for life) in the other two forties; but, it seems, she has already let you take that, hook and line.  She now has the use of the whole of the east forty, as long as she lives; and if it be sold, of course she is entitled to the interest on all the money it brings, as long as she lives; but you propose to sell it for three hundred dollars, take one hundred away with you, and leave her two hundred at 8 per cent., making her the enormous sum of 16 dollars a year.  Now, if you are satisfied with treating her in that way, I am not.  It is true that you are to have that forty for two hundred dollars, at Mother’s death, but you are not to have it before.  I am confident that land can be made to produce for Mother at least $30 a year, and I can not, to oblige any living person, consent that she shall be put on an allowance of sixteen dollars a year.

Yours, etc.,
A. Lincoln.

1852

Eulogy on Henry Clay, delivered in the state house at Springfield,
Illinois, July 16, 1852.

On the fourth day of July, 1776, the people of a few feeble and oppressed colonies of Great Britain, inhabiting a portion of the Atlantic coast of North America, publicly declared their national independence, and made their appeal to the justice of their cause and to the God of battles for the maintenance of that declaration.  That people were few in number and without resources, save only their wise heads and stout hearts.  Within the first year of that declared independence, and while its maintenance was yet problematical, while the bloody struggle between those resolute rebels and their haughty would-be masters was still waging,—­of undistinguished parents and in an obscure district of one of those colonies Henry Clay was born.  The infant nation and the infant child began the race of life together.  For three quarters of a century they have travelled hand in hand.  They have been companions ever.  The nation has passed its perils, and it is free, prosperous, and powerful.  The child has reached his manhood, his middle age, his old age, and is dead.  In all that has concerned the nation the man ever sympathized; and now the nation mourns the man.

The day after his death one of the public journals, opposed to him politically, held the following pathetic and beautiful language, which I adopt partly because such high and exclusive eulogy, originating with a political friend, might offend good taste, but chiefly because I could not in any language of my own so well express my thoughts: