The Words of Abraham Lincoln: Speeches, Letters, Proclamations, and Papers of Our Most Eloquent President

"The only use of selections is to deter those readers who will never appreciate the original, and thus save them from wasting their time on it, and to send all the others on the original as quickly as possible." C. S. Lewis (The Quotable Lewis, #447) As a layman, I appreciated this book. Most of my Lincoln literary experience centered on the pithy Gettysburg Address, selected sound bytes from his inaugural addresses, and the omnipresent apocryphal jokes. This collection takes us beyond the superficial Lincoln, and initiates us into the world of his mind. I was surprised how prodigious Lincoln was. His earliest speeches bear the stamp of genius. His Lyceum speech is a masterwork in the rough. It reminds me of many high school valedictory speeches, to be sure. But you hear genius whispering behind the flaws, much like the early demo-tapes of the Beatles. It was a blessing--finally!--to read the Lincoln Douglas debates. Although we only get Lincolns responses, we can logically infer the points from Lincoln's responses. These speeches rank with the Federalist Papers in significance, and are the produce of one backwards hick philosopher as opposed to the troika Hamilton, Madison and Jay. In this intellectual crucible we see the Great Lincoln emerge. Constantly, Lincoln refers back to the Declaration of Independence's assertion that all mean are created equal. He won the election because he won the hearts of the people by referring back to this great document, and the common-sense understanding of the plain meaning of the words. Parenthetically, his argument would have been that much stronger if he had cited Jefferson's early draft of the Declaration: "[King George] has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating it's most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating and carrying them into slavery in another hemispere, or to incure miserable death in their transportation hither. this piratical warfare, the opprobium of infidel powers, is the warfare of the Christian king of Great Britain. [determined to keep open a market where MEN should be bought and sold,] he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or to restrain this execrable commerce [determining to keep open a market where MEN should be bought and sold]: and that this assemblage of horrors might want no fact of distinguished die, he is now exciting those very people to rise in arms among us, and to purchase that liberty of which he had deprived them, by murdering the people upon whom he also obtruded them: thus paying off former crimes committed against the liberties of one people, with crimes which he urges them to commit against the lives of another." This book includes several of Lincoln's war-time telegraphs. My favorite is the one to McClellan,: "I have just read your dispatch about sore-tongued and fatigued horses. Will you pardon me for asking what the horses