This is one of those books that give testament to the truth just because a book is old doesn't mean it doesn't deserve a place on the shelf. I discovered this hidden treasure while visiting a small-town library where often, to maintain a semblance of completeness to their shelves, it is required for them to keep books donated to the library when it first opened a century earlier.
Browsing their shelves, I picked it up; I saw the copyright of 1866; I connected it to the year 1865 (when Lincoln was assassinated); and being the history buff I am, knew I had to discover what the people of that era said of the man we only know from the past.
I was not disappointed. I discovered why Abraham Lincoln was Abraham Lincoln. Prior to reading this wonderful study of his life, I was only familiar with the generic record one would learn in school. Yes, he was president during the American Civil War, but why would that fact make him more significant than Woodrow Wilson (president during WWI), Franklin Roosevelt (president during WWII), or any president who presided over wartime. This is not to diminish any of the other presidents and their service. Each man has his own place. It is merely to state Abraham Lincoln was clearly a man called to the purpose for what his life became, and this excellent book demonstrates that reality. I learned a lot.
What still stuns me about the book (outside of its treatise on Lincoln from the people who knew him in his time) was the reality that I held in my hands not merely a book from that era, a physical object from his time; but that I held something in my hands that was older and more lasting than anything else I knew in my own existence. One hundred and forty-five years. It outlasted all the buildings erected, all the roads laid, all the people who were born. Everything else from that time period was good, but the book was still there. Books outlast everything.
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