When I read a book I have the habit of highlighting certain passages I find interesting or useful. After I finish the book I’ll type up those passages and put them into a note on my phone. I’ll keep them to comb through every so often so that I remember what that certain book was about. That’s what these are. So if I ever end up lending you a book, these are the sections that I’ve highlighted in that book. Enjoy!
Through these fresh sources, we see Lincoln liberated from his familiar frock coat and stovepipe hat. We see him late at night relaxing at Sewards’s house, his long legs stretched before a blazing fire, talking of many things besides the war.
Conkling told Lincoln that Seward was in trouble. If Seward was not nominated on the first ballot, Conckling predicted, Lincoln would be the nominee. Having tasted so many disappointments, he saw no benefit in letting his hopes run wild. “Well Conckling,” he said slowly, pulling his long frame up from the settee, “I believe I will go back to my office and practice law.”
Any man’s son may become the equal of any other man’s son.
These four men, and thousands more, were not searching for a mythical pot of gold at the edge of the western rainbow, but for a place where their dreams and efforts would carve them a place in a fast-changing society.
With a brilliant marriage and excellent prospects in his chosen profession, he could look ahead with confidence.
Of the four rivals, Seward alone kept parents into his adulthood, Chase was only eight when he lost his father. Bates was eleven. Both of their lives, like Lincoln’s were molded by loss.
Years later, Lincoln wrote a letter of condolence to Fanny McCullough, a young girl who had lost her father in the Civil War. “It is with deep grief that I learn of the death of your kind and brave Father; and especially, that it is affecting your young heart beyond what is common in such cases. In this sad world of ours, sorrow comes to all; and, to the young, it comes with bitterest agony, because it takes them unawares. The older have learned to ever expect it.
The great mass of men are utterly unconscious, that their minds were capable improvement. To liberate the mind from this false and underestimate of itself, it is the great task which printing came into the world to perform.
He confessed that he had thought her love only “an incident” among his many passions, when, in truth, it was “the chief good” of his life.
Love is the whole history of woman and but an episode in the life of man.
In these early years however, Lincoln paid the slavery issue less attention than Seward or Chase, believing that so long as slavery could be restricted to places where it already existed, it would gradually become extinct.
Humor can be marvelously therapeutic. It can deflate without destroying; it can instruct while it entertains; it saves us from our pretensions; and it provides an outlet for feeling taht expressed another way would be corrosive.
Lincoln’s fears that marriage might hinder his ambitions proved unfounded.
Lincoln maintained that children should be allow to grow up without a batter of rules and restrictions. “It is my pleasure that my children are free–happy and unrestrained by paternal tyranny. Love is the chain whereby to lock a child to its parent.”
Lincoln to Mary, “When you were here I thought you hindered me some in attending to business; but now, having nothing but business–no variety–it has grown exceedingly tasteless to me…I hate to stay in this old room by myself.
Lincoln relished the convivial life he shred with the lawyers who battled one another fiercely during the day, only to gather as friends in the taverns at night.
One of Lincoln’s favorite anecdotes sprang from the early days just after the Revolution. Shortly after the peace was signed, the story began, the Revolutionary War hero Ethan Allen “had occasion to visit England,” where he was subjected to considerable teasing banter. The British would make “fun of the Americans and General Washington in particular and one day they got a picture of General Washington” and displayed it prominently in the outhouse so Mr. Allen could not miss it. When he made no mention of it, they finally asked him if he’d seen the Washington picture. Mr. Allen said, “he thought that it was a very appropriate [place] for an Englishman to keep it. Why they asked, for said Mr. Allen there is nothing that will make an Englishman shit so quick as the sight of general Washington.
Another story, relayed years later by John Usher, centered on a man “who had a great veneration for Revolutionary relics.” Learning that an old woman still possessed a dress that “she had worn in teh Revolutionary War,” he traveled to her house and asked to see it. She took the dress from a bureau and handed it to him. He was so excited that he brought the dress to his lips and kissed it. “The practical old lady rather resented such foolishness over an old piece of wearing apparel and she said: ‘Stranger if you want to kiss something old you had better kiss my ass. It is sixteen years older than that dress.’
Miss Haines’s school held the girls to a strict routine. They rose at 6 am to study for an hour and a half before breakfast and prayers. A brisk walk outside, with no skipping permitted, preceded classes in literature, French, latin, English grammar, science, elocution, piano, and dancing. At midafternoon, they were taken out once again for an hour-long walk. In the evenings, they attended study hall, where, “without [the teacher’s] permission,” one student recalled, “we could hardly breather.” Only on weekends, when they attended recitals or the theater , was the routine relaxed.
Unimaginable as it might seem, after Stanton’s bearish behavior, at their next encounter six years later, Lincoln would offer Stanton “the most powerful civilian post within his gift” – the post of secretary of war. Lincoln’s choice of Stanton would reveal, as would his subsequent dealings with Trumbull and Judd, a singular ability to transcend personal vendetta, humiliation, or bitterness.
His dignity restored, Chase promised to consider the contingent Treasury off “under the advice of friends.”
He understood the “differences in the Cabinet on the slavery question” and welcomed their suggestions after they heard what he had to say; but he wanted them to know that he “had resolved upon this step, and had not called them together to ask their advice.”
Lincoln answered that he had thought about this, but “it was not my way to promise what I was not entirely sure that I could perform.”
Opposition came from the expected sources: none of this surprised Lincoln. Analyzing the range of editorial opinion, he “said he had studied the matter so long that he knew more about it than they did.”
I might perhaps, talk amusing to your for half an hour,” but as president, “every word is so closely noted” that he must avoid any “trivial” remarks.
Lincoln merely asserted that he would rather let “Chase have his own way in these sneaking tricks than getting into a snarl with him by refusing him what he asks.”
[While speaking to a crowd] “Do we dream?” marveled Brooks, “or do we actually hear with our own ears loyal Marylanders cheering favor of immediate emancipation and a loyal crowd of Baltimoreans applauding to the echo the most radical utterances?”
The next week, Lincoln related a peculiarly pleasant dream. He was at a party, he told Hay, and overheard one of the guests say of hi, “He is a very common-looking man.” In the dream, he relished his reply: “The Lord prefers common-looking people that is reason he makes so many of them.
Lincoln was on such terms with the managers of two of the theaters that he could go in privately by the stage door, and slip into the stage boxes without being seen by the audience. More than anything else, Stoddard remarked how “the drama by drawing his mind into other channels of thought, afforded him the most entire relief.
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