Abe Lincoln’s Words

By this time, 150 years ago, Abraham Lincoln was preparing to go to his first inauguration and to celebrate his fifty-second birthday on February 12th.

Lincoln, the barefoot boy who read by candlelight, split fence rails, studied law and became a circuit lawyer, was the rock star of his day. Thousands came out to hear him speak and speak he did.
Any speech writer would give his eyeteeth to be able to write the words that Lincoln wrote and spoke during the Douglas debates, at Gettysburg.

Carl Sandburg, noted for poetry, wrote a biography of Lincoln, in fact, considered the best. He writes about a Lincoln we did not study in school. The man who loved to tell jokes and had great punch line timing. The man who loved the ladies. The ambitious and sometimes downright sneaky politician who wanted it all and the people who helped put him in the White House.

Sandburg’s volumes tell the story of the backwoods common man who became the extraordinaire.

Lincoln quotes are famous. “The Lord prefers common-looking people. That is why he makes so many of them.”

And in response to another politician calling him two-faced, he said, “if I were two-faced would I be wearing this one?”
One of his most famous political responses was “you can fool some of the people all the time, and all the people some of the time, but you can not fool all of the people all the time.”

Now those quotes came from the same man who in his first inauguration speaks of the impending threat of civil war and says, “We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.”