Abraham Lincoln, sixteenth President of the United States, was born at
Nolin Creek, Kentucky, on Feb. 12, 1809. As the following pages
contain more than one biographical sketch it is not necessary here to
touch on the story of his life. Lincoln's Birthday is now a legal
holiday in Connecticut, Delaware, Illinois, Minnesota, New Jersey, New
York, North Dakota, Pennsylvania, Washington (state) and Wyoming, and
is generally observed in the other Northern States.
In its inspirational value to youth Lincoln's Birthday stands among
the most important of our American holidays. Its celebration in school
and home can not be made too impressive. "Rising as Lincoln did,"
writes Edward Deems, "from social obscurity through a youth of manual
toil and poverty, steadily upward to the highest level of honor in the
world, and all this as the fruit of earnest purpose, hard work, humane
feeling and integrity of character, he is an example and an
inspiration to youth unparalleled in history. At the same time he is
the best specimen of the possibilities attainable by genius in our
land and under our free institutions."
In arranging exercises for Lincoln's Birthday the teacher and parent
should try not so much to teach the bare facts of his career as to
give the children a sense of Lincoln's actual personality through his
own yarns and speeches and such accounts as are given here by Herndon,
Bancroft, Mabie, Tarbell, Phillips Brooks and others. He should show
them Lincoln's greatest single act--Emancipation--through the eyes of
Garfield and Whittier. He should try to reach the children with the
thrill of an adoring sorrow-maddened country at the bier of its great
preserver; with such a passion of love and patriotism as vibrates in
the lines of Whitman, Brownell and Bryant, of Stoddard, Procter, Howe,
Holmes, Lowell, and in the throbbing periods of Henry Ward Beecher.
His main object should be to make his pupils love Lincoln. He should
appeal to their national pride with the foreign tributes to Lincoln's
greatness; make them feel how his memory still works through the years
upon such contemporary poets as Gilder, Thompson, Markham, Cheney and
Dunbar; and finally through the eyes of Harrison, Whitman, Ingersoll,
Newman and others, show them our hero set in his proud, rightful place
in the long vista of the ages.
In order to use the present volume with the best results it is
advisable for teacher and parent to gain a more consecutive view of
Lincoln's life than is offered here.
The standard biography of Lincoln is the monumental one in ten large
volumes by Nicolay and Hay, the President's private secretaries. This
contains considerable material not found elsewhere, but since its
publication in 1890 much new matter has been unearthed, especially by
the enterprise of Miss Ida Tarbell, whose "Life" in two volumes
contains the essentials of the larger official work, is well balanced,
and written in a simple, vigorous style perfectly adapted to the
subject. If only one biography of Lincoln is to be read, Miss
Tarbell's will, on the whole, be found most satisfactory.
The older Lives, written by Lincoln's friends and associates, such as
Lamon and Herndon, make up in vividness and the intimate personal
touch what they necessarily lack in perspective. Arnold's Life deals
chiefly with the executive and legislative history of Lincoln's
administration. The Life by the novelist J. G. Holland deals popularly
with his hero's personality. The memoirs by Barrett, Abbott, Howells,
Bartlett, Hanaford and Power were written in the main for political
purposes.
Among the later works there stand out Morse's scholarly and serious
account (in the American Statesmen series) of Lincoln's public policy;
the vivid portrayal of Lincoln's adroitness as a politician by Col.
McClure in Abraham Lincoln and Men of War Times; Whitney's Life on the
Circuit with Lincoln, with its fund of entertaining anecdotes; Abraham
Lincoln, an Essay by Carl Schurz; James Morgan's "short and simple
annals" of Abraham Lincoln The Boy and the Man; Frederick Trevor
Hill's brilliant account of Lincoln the Lawyer, the result of much
recent research; the study of his personal magnetism in Alonzo
Rothschild's Lincoln, Master of Men; and The True Abraham Lincoln by
Curtis--a collection of sketches portraying Lincoln's character from
several interesting points of view. Abraham Lincoln The Man of the
People by Norman Hapgood is one of most recent and least conventional
accounts. It is short, vigorous, vivid, and intensely American.
Among the many popular Lives for young people are: Abraham Lincoln,
the Pioneer Boy, by W. M. Thayer; Abraham Lincoln, The Backwoods Boy,
by Horatio Alger, Jr.; Abraham Lincoln, by Charles Carleton Coffin;
The True Story of Abraham Lincoln The American, by E. S. Brooks; The
Boy Lincoln, by W. O. Stoddard; and--most important of all--Nicolay's
Boy's Life of Abraham Lincoln.