McClure's Magazine, Vol. 6, No. 4, March, 1896

Transcriber's Note: The Table of Contents and the list of illustrations were added by the transcriber.
From an ambrotype taken in Springfield, Illinois, on August 13, 1860, and now owned by Mr. William H. Lambert of Philadelphia, through whose courtesy we are allowed to reproduce it here. This ambrotype was bought by Mr. Lambert from Mr. W.P. Brown of Philadelphia. Mr. Brown writes of the portrait: This picture, along with another one of the same kind, was presented by President Lincoln to my father, J. Henry Brown, deceased (miniature artist), after he had finished painting Lincoln's picture on ivory, at Springfield, Illinois. The commission was given my father by Judge Read (John M. Read of the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania), immediately after Lincoln's nomination for the Presidency. One of the ambrotypes I sold to the Historical Society of Boston, Massachusetts, and it is now in their possession. The miniature referred to is now owned by Mr. Robert T. Lincoln. It was engraved by Samuel Sartain, and circulated widely before the inauguration. After Mr. Lincoln grew a beard, Sartain put a beard on his plate, and the engraving continued to sell extensively. While Mr. Brown was in Springfield painting the miniature he kept a journal, which Mr. Lambert also owns and which he has generously put at our disposal. It will be found on page 400.

HE first twenty-six years of Abraham Lincoln's life have been traced in the preceding chapters. We have seen him struggling to escape from the lot of a common farm laborer, to which he seemed to be born; becoming a flatboatman, a grocery clerk, a store-keeper, a postmaster, and finally a surveyor. We have traced his efforts to rise above the intellectual apathy and the indifference to culture which characterized the people among whom he was reared, by studying with eagerness every subject on which he could find books,—biography, state history, mathematics, grammar, surveying, and finally law. We have followed his growth in ambition and in popularity from the day when, on a keg in an Indiana grocery, he debated the contents of the Louisville Journal with a company of admiring elders, to the time when, purely because he was liked, he was elected to the State Assembly of Illinois by the people of Sangamon County. His joys and sorrows have been reviewed from his childhood in Kentucky to the day of the death of the woman he loved and had hoped to make his wife. These twenty-six years form the first period of Lincoln's life. It was a period of makeshifts and experiments, ending in a tragic sorrow; but at its close he had definite aims, and preparation and experience enough to convince him that he dared follow them. Law and politics were the fields he had chosen, and in the first year of the second period of his life, 1836, he entered them definitely.