David Herbert Donald > Quotes

“Lincoln's Gettysburg Address was 272 words and he delivered it under three minutes. He labored on it for days. The "featured speaker," Edward Everett, rambled on for two hours. Most people don't even remember his name, never mind what he said.”
― David Herbert Donald, Lincoln

“Lincoln seems to have had the unusual notion that a public servant’s first duty is to help people,”
― David Herbert Donald, Lincoln

“If slavery was justified on the ground that masters were white while slaves were black, Lincoln warned, “By this rule, you are to be slave to the first man you meet, with a fairer skin than your own.” If it was defended on the ground that masters were intellectually the superiors of blacks, the same logic applied: “By this rule, you are to be slave to the first man you meet, with an intellect superior to your own.” The”
― David Herbert Donald, Lincoln

“For the first time in American history citizens began to feel that the occupant of the White House was their representative. They referred to him as Father Abraham, and they showered him with homely gifts: a firkin of butter, a crate of Bartlett pears, New England salmon.”
― David Herbert Donald, Lincoln

“His closing promise of survival for “government of the people, by the people, for the people” may have had its origin in Daniel Webster’s 1830 speech calling the American government “made for the people, made by the people, and answerable to the people,” but more probably he derived it from a sermon of Theodore Parker, to which Herndon had called his attention, defining democracy as “a government of all the people, by all the people, for all the people.”
― David Herbert Donald, Lincoln

“Douglas claimed that in his New Salem days Lincoln “could ruin more liquor than all the boys of the town together”—a charge that was not merely inaccurate but singularly inappropriate from a senator known to have a fondness for drink—and Lincoln jeered that Douglas’s popular-sovereignty doctrine was “as thin as the homeopathic soup that was made by boiling the shadow of a pigeon that had starved to death.”
― David Herbert Donald, Lincoln

“Lincoln seems to have had the unusual notion that a public servant’s first duty is to help people, rather than to follow bureaucratic regulations.”
― David Herbert Donald, Lincoln

“Lincoln could not help making a painful comparison of their careers: “With me, the race of ambition has been a failure—a flat failure;”
― David Herbert Donald, Lincoln

“At Charleston, three days later, he was on more hospitable ground. Many in Coles County had known Thomas Lincoln and his family, and some enthusiasts spread a gigantic painting, eighty feet long, across the main street, showing OLD ABE THIRTY YEARS AGO, on a Kentucky wagon pulled by three yoke of oxen. Democrats countered with a banner, captioned “Negro Equality,” which depicted a white man standing with a Negro woman, and a mulatto boy in the background. Republicans found this so offensive that they tore it down before allowing the debate to begin.”
― David Herbert Donald, Lincoln

“Up early on Friday, May 18, the day when nominations were to be made, he passed some time playing “fives”—a variety of handball—with some other men in a vacant lot next to the Illinois State Journal office.”
― David Herbert Donald, Lincoln

“It would stink in the land to have it said that an appropriation of $20,000 for furnishing the house had been overrun by the President when the poor freezing soldiers could not have blankets,” he went on. The White House “was furnished well enough—better than any house they had ever lived in.”
― David Herbert Donald, Lincoln

“one Republican wrote, the people “think that God tried his best when he made Mr Lincoln”
― David Herbert Donald, Lincoln

“Kansas, Lincoln responded, “I can not enter the ring on the money basis—first, because, in the main, it is wrong; and secondly, I have not, and can not get, the money.”
― David Herbert Donald, Lincoln

“Were an election for President to be held tomorrow, Old Abe would, without the special aid of any of his friends, walk over the course, without a competitor to dispute with him the great prize which his masterly ability, no less than his undoubted patriotism and unimpeachable honesty, have won.”
― David Herbert Donald, Lincoln

“the state never voted for a Whig candidate for President,”
― David Herbert Donald, Lincoln

“It seeks to explain rather than to judge.”
― David Herbert Donald, Lincoln

“But, he added, in a rare moment of self-revelation, “such belong not to the family of the lion, or the tribe of the eagle.”
― David Herbert Donald, Lincoln

“should be present on the day the House was organized. If Etheridge persisted in his scheme, the President remarked grimly, he would “be carried out on a chip,” and he promised to have a troop of soldiers ready to assist.”
― David Herbert Donald, Lincoln

“Soberly he warned that in a country like America, where there was no prescriptive right, the future of democratic government depended upon the willingness of its citizens to admit moral limits to their political powers.”
― David Herbert Donald, Lincoln Reconsidered: Essays on the Civil War Era

“Like many of his contemporaries, Lincoln was troubled by what he perceived as the rapid rate of change in American life. Canals and railroads were bringing about a transportation revolution; the population was swiftly spreading across the continent; immigration was beginning to seem a threat to American social cohesion; sectionalism was becoming ever more divisive as the controversy over slavery mounted; the political battles of the Jackson era had destroyed the national political consensus.”
― David Herbert Donald, Lincoln

“tall, lank, awkward; dressed in a loose, ill-fitting black frock coat, with black trousers, ill-fitting and somewhat baggy at the knees.”
― David Herbert Donald, Lincoln

“have historians”
― David Herbert Donald, Lincoln Reconsidered: Essays on the Civil War Era

“guaranties [sic]”
― David Herbert Donald, Lincoln

“Sumner’s mind keeping the peace abroad was connected with freeing the slaves at home. Repeatedly he tried to convince Lincoln that by issuing an emancipation proclamation he could kill Confederate chances of recognition in Europe.”
― David Herbert Donald, Charles Sumner and the Rights of Man

“Unsuccessful in turning Lee’s army, Grant then moved east, only to encounter Lee again at Spotsylvania, where between May 10 and 19 more than 17,500 Union soldiers were killed or wounded. Over a period of two weeks the Army of the Potomac lost nearly 32,000 men, and thousands more were missing.”
― David Herbert Donald, Lincoln

“If “persons and property, are held by no better tenure than the caprice of a mob,” “if the laws be continually despised and disregarded,” Lincoln warned, citizens’ affection for their government must inevitably be alienated.”
― David Herbert Donald, Lincoln

“Lincoln replied that his strategy was just right, but he added tartly: “Please look over the despatches you may have rece[i]ved from here... and discover, if you can, that there is any idea in the head of any one here, of ‘putting our army South of the enemy’ or of [’]following him to the death’ in any direction.” “I repeat to you,” the President insisted, “it will neither be done nor attempted unless you watch it every day, and hour,”
― David Herbert Donald, Lincoln

“The information Lincoln wormed out of Pinkerton convinced the President that Antietam had not been a great victory but a lost opportunity, squandered by the high command of the Army of the Potomac. While he did not get any evidence from Pinkerton that McClellan was disloyal, his suspicions grew as the detective ingenuously poured out a story of wasted chances. He came to suspect that the leaders of the Army of the Potomac had only a halfhearted commitment to crushing the Confederacy. There was little reliable evidence to justify this belief,”
― David Herbert Donald, Lincoln

“It was probably the President’s quiet influence that caused Grant to give up his plan, ardently urged on him by Sherman, to avoid the political atmosphere in Washington by having his headquarters in the West; instead, he set up his command near the Army of the Potomac,”
― David Herbert Donald, Lincoln

“Young Lincoln disagreed with his father over religion. In 1823, Thomas Lincoln and his wife joined the Little Pigeon Creek Baptist Church, as did his daughter Sarah soon afterward; but Abraham made no move toward membership. Indeed, as his stepmother said, “Abe had no particular religion— didn’t think of these question[ s] at that time, if he ever did.”

Though Abraham did not belong to the church, he attended the sermons, and afterward, climbing on a tree stump, he would rally the other children around him and repeat— or sometimes parody— the minister’s words.”
― David Herbert Donald, Lincoln