Some pioneer communities carried with them the institution of slavery; and in the slave State of Kentucky Lincoln was born.  He remained there only a short time, and we have every reason to suppose that wherever he might have grown to maturity his very mental and moral fiber would have spurned the doctrine and practice of human slavery.  And yet so subtle is the influence of birth and custom, that we can trace one lasting effect of this early and brief environment.  Though he ever hated slavery, he never hated the slaveholder.  This ineradicable feeling of pardon and sympathy for Kentucky and the South played no insignificant part in his dealings with grave problems of statesmanship.  He struck slavery its death-blow with the hand of war, but he tendered the slaveholder a golden equivalent with the hand of friendship and peace.

His advancement in the astonishing career which 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.  He was both ambitious and successful, but his ambition was moderate and his success was slow.  And because his success was slow, his ambition never outgrew either his judgment or his powers.  From the day when he left the paternal roof and launched his canoe on the head waters of the Sangamon River to begin life on his own account, to the day of his first inauguration, there intervened full thirty years of toil, of study, self-denial, patience; often of effort baffled, of hope deferred; sometimes of bitter disappointment.  Given the natural gift of great genius, given the condition of favorable environment, it yet required an average lifetime and faithful unrelaxing effort to transform the raw country stripling into a competent ruler for this great nation.

Almost every success was balanced—­sometimes overbalanced by a seeming failure.  Reversing the usual promotion, he went into the Black Hawk War a captain and, through no fault of his own, came out a private.  He rode to the hostile frontier on horseback, and trudged home on foot.  His store “winked out.”  His surveyor’s compass and chain, with which he was earning a scanty living, were sold for debt.  He was defeated in his first campaign for the legislature; defeated in his first attempt to be nominated for Congress; defeated in his application to be appointed commissioner of the General Land Office; defeated for the Senate in the Illinois legislature of 1854, when he had forty-five votes to begin with, by Trumbull, who had only five votes to begin with; defeated in the legislature of 1858, by an antiquated apportionment, when his joint debates with Douglas had won him a popular plurality of nearly four thousand in a Democratic State; defeated in the nomination for Vice-President on the Fremont ticket in 1856, when a favorable nod from half a dozen wire-workers would have brought him success.