The Union might well have been saved and slavery extinguished without his assistance; but the life of no other American has revealed with anything like the same completeness the peculiar moral promise of genuine democracy.

He shows us by the full but unconscious integrity of his example the kind of human excellence which a political and social democracy may and should fashion; and its most grateful and hopeful aspect is, not merely that there is something partially American about the manner of his excellence, but that it can be fairly compared with the classic types of consummate personal distinction.
To all appearance nobody could have been more than Abraham Lincoln a man of his own time and place.

Until 1858 his outer life ran much in the same groove as that of hundreds of other Western politicians and lawyers.

Beginning as a poor and ignorant boy, even less provided with props and stepping-stones than were his associates, he had worked his way to a position of ordinary professional and political distinction.

He was not, like Douglas, a brilliant success.