Читать книгу Why We Love Lincoln онлайн

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It is doubtful, after all, whether Lincoln’s son, who became rich, dined with kings and queens, and came to be president of the hundred-million-dollar Pullman Company, ever in his comfortable and successful career once felt half the sense of life in its deepest, grandest moods that thrilled his gaunt father facing that fearful winter.

Let the discouraged American, whose heart grows faint in the presence of “bad luck,” think of that rude frontiersman, to whom hardship brought only strength and renewed courage. In spite of everything, the sources of a man’s success are within him, and none can stay him but himself. Lincoln knew famine, and cold, and wandering. But he did not pity himself. Axe in hand, he confronted his fate in that smitten country with as great a soul as when he faced the armed Confederacy and saw his country riven and bleeding.

In the spring of 1831 Denton Offut hired Lincoln to go with him on a boat, with a load of stock and provisions, to New Orleans, and, after many adventures, in which his strength and ingenuity saved boat and cargo several times, he again found himself at the mouth of the Mississippi.