Word: lincolnisms
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...month later, when news reached Douglass at his home in Rochester, N.Y, that Lincoln had been assassinated, he was overcome with grief. Later that day, he gave a short impromptu speech. "Though Abraham Lincoln dies, the Republic lives," he said, adding that the martyred President had "made us kin," uniting blacks and whites. He elaborated on Lincoln's legacy 11 years later, at the unveiling of the Freedmen's Monument in Washington, offering a tender verdict from the perspective of someone who had been converted. If you judge him from the point of view of a pure abolitionist, Douglass said...
...Lincoln's political resume was meager, his learning derided, and his election considered a stroke of luck. And yet the prairie lawyer from Springfield would emerge the undisputed captain of his distinguished Cabinet, earning the respect of colleagues who had originally disdained him, and become, as Whitman wrote, "the grandest figure yet, on all the crowded canvas of the Nineteenth Century...
...turned out, unbeknownst to the country at the time, Lincoln was a towering political genius--not because he had mastered the traditional rules of the game, but because he possessed a remarkable array of emotional strengths that are rarely found in political life. He had what we would call today a first-class emotional intelligence...
...appreciate the magnitude of Lincoln's political success, it helps to understand just how slight a figure he appeared to be when he arrived in Washington. "Never did a President enter upon office with less means at his command," Harvard professor James Russell Lowell wrote in 1863. "All that was known of him was that he was a good stump-speaker, nominated for his availability--that is, because he had no history." His entire national political experience consisted of a single term in Congress that had come to an end nearly a dozen years earlier and two failed Senate races...
...played a central role in the formation of the Republican Party. Edward Bates was a widely respected elder statesman from Missouri, a former Congressman whose opinions on national matters were still widely sought. All three men, knowing they were better educated, more experienced and more qualified than Lincoln, were stunned when he received the Republican nomination and went on to win the election...