John G. Nicolay, The Outbreak of Rebellion

[46] Magistrate. Could the quick intelligence of the American people be otherwise than intensely curious to behold this remarkable man, whose strange career they had heard outlined in the recent election speeches? His obscure birth in the deep seclusion of the Kentucky forests; how he read Weems' Life of Washington by the flickering firelight in an humble pioneer cabin in Indiana; how, as a tall emigrantboy, he split rails to fence his father's clearing in Illinois; now, launching his solitary canoe on the Sangamon, he sought his own fortune, becoming flatboatman, postmaster, deputy county surveyor, and captain of volunteers in the Black Hawk Indian War; how, commencing with a borrowed Blackstone, he argued cases before neighborhood juries, followed itinerant Circuit Courts from county to county, and gradually became the first lawyer in his State; how in a primitive community, where politics dealt with every office from postmaster to President, he rose in public service from Representative in the Vandalia Legislature to Presidentelect of the nation.

The people had also heard how this elevation was tried by the touchstone of sleepless rivalry, of unscrupulous criticism, of a mighty political conflict of party and of principle. How, in the momentous slavery discussion of the day, he was the champion who had overcome Douglas, the hitherto victorious Philistine of the Kansas-Nebraska Bill; his matchless definition of the political injustice of slavery, applicable to all nations and ages: “When the white man governs himself, that is self-government; but when he governs himself and also governs another man, that is more than selfgovern-ment — that is despotism;” his irrefutable statement of the natural right of every man “to eat the bread, without leave of anybody else, which his own hand earns;” his prophetic statesmanship, in declaring that “the Union cannot permanently ”