31 Quotes by 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.

Maybe I will write a memoir, perhaps I’ll do some essays, or maybe I will write a mystery story.

At the beginning, Lincoln was so inexperienced he had reverence for military expertise, not realizing that there wasn’t any military expertise, that the most anybody had commanded up to that point had been somebody, some troops in the Mexican War, and it had been years ago.

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.

Lincoln was not a good impromptu speaker; he was at his best when he could read from a carefully prepared manuscript, though maybe a teleprompter could have helped that!

I’m not sure Lincoln would fare well if he were a presidential candidate today.

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.

I was able to sit at Lincoln’s side and see how he thought and how he acted, and how he felt about what was going on around him. I felt the pressures that were on him. You can see what people were writing to him, how they were nudging him.