Yet, though he hated
slavery, he never hated the slave-holder. His feeling of pardon
and sympathy for Kentucky and the South played no unimportant
part in his dealings with grave problems of statesmanship. It is
true that he struck slavery its death blow with the hand of war,
but at the same time he offered the slaveowner golden payment
with the hand of peace.
Abraham Lincoln was not an ordinary man. He was, in truth, in the
language of the poet Lowell, a "new birth of our new soil." His
greatness did not consist in growing up on the frontier. An
ordinary man would have found on the frontier exactly what he
would have found elsewhere--a commonplace life, varying only with
the changing ideas and customs of time and place. But for the man
with extraordinary powers of mind and body--for one gifted by
Nature as Abraham Lincoln was gifted, the pioneer life with its
severe training in self-denial, patience and industry, developed
his character, and fitted him for the great duties of his after
life as no other training could have done.
His advancement in the astonishing career that carried him from
obscurity to world-wide fame--from postmaster of New Salem
village to President of the United States, from captain of a
backwoods volunteer company to Commander-in-Chief of the Army and
Navy, was neither sudden nor accidental, nor easy.
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