‘This Is Going to Be the Most Important Election Since 1860’

[David Lockmiller]

Endearing Lincoln to the voters was his remarkable unselfishness. “Among the great civilians of the day,” William O. Stoddard noted in 1862, “the greatest and strongest, our good Chief Magistrate, is great and strong chiefly because the people have perfect faith in him that he has no ambition, no selfish lust of power, nor any hope for the future unconnected with the welfare of his country.” In addition, people identified with Lincoln. “He is the most perfect representative of the purely American character now in public life,” Stoddard maintained. “This is why the mutual understanding between him and the people is so perfect. This it is which enables him to exercise powers which would never by any possibility be entrusted to another man, though his equal in other respects. The people know that they can trust their great chief, and so they bid him ‘see to it that the Republic suffers no detriment.’” In early 1864, Harriet Beecher Stowe noted that of all “the many accusations which in hours of ill-luck have been thrown out upon Lincoln, it is remarkable that he has never been called self-seeking, or selfish. When we were troubled and sat in darkness, and looked doubtfully towards the presidential chair, it was never that we doubted the good-will of our pilot – only the clearness of his eyesight. But Almighty God has granted to him that clearness of vision which he gives to the truehearted, and enabled him to set his honest foot in that promised land of freedom which is to be the patrimony of all men, black and white – and from henceforth nations shall rise up to call him blessed.” A frustrated Wendell Phillips said “Lincoln had won such loving trust from the people that it was impossible to argue anything against him.”

Abraham Lincoln: A Life, Vol. Two, p. 728, by Professor Michael Burlingame.