David Herbert Donald

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.

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.

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.

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.