LINCOLN
AND
THE SLEEPING SENTINEL

Illustrations

Introduction

ITHOUT any attempt at biographical details or an appreciation, a few chief facts in Abraham Lincoln’s great career may be helpfully recalled to the minds of readers. His ancestors were Quakers in Berks County, Pennsylvania. His parents, born in Virginia, were influenced by the current of migration across the Alleghanies, and were carried first to Kentucky and afterward to Indiana.

It was in Hardin County, Kentucky, that Abraham Lincoln was born, February 12, 1809, the child of these humble settlers. Compared with the opportunities of the present-day boy, his chances seemed desperate indeed. His attendance at a regular school covered hardly more than a year. Nearly all the education which, among other gifts, enriched him with such a mastery of the English tongue he acquired painfully by himself. It was a question of necessities, of aiding to wrest a livelihood from a new country that confronted the boy, and so we find him at work, and at nineteen entering a larger world of practical affairs by helping to guide a flat-boat down the Mississippi to New Orleans. What he had to do was done so faithfully that his employer promoted him to be a clerk, and gave him charge of a store and mill at New Salem, Illinois.

The first public recognition of Lincoln’s character came in his election as captain of a company in the war against Black Hawk and his band of rebellious Indians in 1832. This was followed by his appointment as postmaster at New Salem, Illinois, which gave him better opportunities for study—opportunities so well improved that he was admitted to practise as a lawyer in 1836. He began his professional career at Springfield, Illinois. Law and politics were almost inseparable, and as Lincoln rose in his profession, and became noted for the shrewd common-sense and the dry humor of his speeches at public meetings, he gained more and more prominence as a leading member of the old Whig party in Illinois.

The next steps were natural ones—repeated elections to the Legislature of Illinois, and then a nomination for Congress, which led to his election in 1847. At Washington he made his mark particularly as an opponent of slavery. Then followed, in 1858, his selection as a candidate for the United States Senate against Stephen A. Douglas, which involved a series of historic debates over the slavery question. The popular voice was for Lincoln, but the Legislature elected Douglas. From this contest Lincoln emerged with a standing which finally brought to him the Republican nomination for the presidency over William H. Seward in the stormy days of 1860.

Lincoln’s great career as the sixteenth President of the United States, from 1861 to 1865, is not to be entered upon in this outline of facts. His superhuman part in preserving the Union, his Proclamation of Emancipation in 1863, his second election in 1864, and his assassination at the close of the Civil War are among our great historical landmarks. It was on April 15, 1865, that death placed him beside Washington in the Pantheon of American history.

These bare facts of President Lincoln’s life are set down here as an outline record to accompany the true story of “Lincoln and the Sleeping Sentinel,” which is now published in a separate book for the first time. Brief as this summary is, it is diffuse in comparison with the autobiography written by Lincoln in 1857, which reads:

“Born, February 12, 1809, in Hardin County, Kentucky.

“Education defective.

“Profession a lawyer.

“Have been a captain of volunteers in the Black Hawk War.

“Postmaster at a very small office; four times a member of the Illinois Legislature, and was a member of the lower House of Congress.”

Had Lincoln finished his autobiography in 1865 he would have written with the same modest reticence.

For four years, while Register of the Treasury, L. E. Chittenden was in close personal and official relations with President