K>\yi:cxi>Mi:*:f.u i ? ' C ■,Cc<3C. CL5<^C^ cSC: -[■XL dC .=. c^ mc od _<^ ^ :<^C? C<< «ccc ■ IT cr: 3 '^^■^>^'^^'%»^'%»'%>'%><% ^'^'%.'%.<%--%'%. J3i i I LIBRARY OF CONGRESS, I UNITED STATES OP AMERICA, f C<-CC€' 3. c<- c k ' c < '^i . ^^^.^c: €^' c c: c; cH- ^^ oc 'c^' <: *'- CF CC: C <«3:<:: cn^ FTJBLISHED BT JC.BUTTBJ;, 48 FRAI^KLIK ST. 1530112:, ABRAHAM LINCOLN, OF ILLINOIS. Abraham Lincoln was born in Hardin county, Kentucky, February 12, 1809, and is now 51 years old. His parents were born in Virginia, and Averc of very moderate circum- stances. His paternal grandfather, Abraham Lincoln, emigra- ted from Rockingham county, Va., to Kentucky, about 1781, '82, where, a year or two later, he was killed by Indians. His ancestors, who were respectable members of the Society of Friends, went to Virginia from Berks county, Pennsylvania. Thomas, the father of the present subject, by the early death of his father, and very narrow circumstances of his mother, even in childhood, was a wandering, laboring boy, and grew up literally without education. He married Nancy Hanks, mother of the present subject, in 1806. The family removed from Kentucky to Spencer county, in Indiana, in the autumn of 1816, Abraham being then in his eighth year. Mr. Lincoln received a limited education. Probably six months in all, of the rudest sort of schooling, comprehends the whole of his technical education. He was in turn a farm laborer, a common workman in a saw-mill, and a boatman on the Wabash and Mississippi rivers. Thus hard work and plenty of it, the rugged experiences of aspiring poverty, the wild sports and rude games of a newly and thinly peopled forest region — the education born of the log-cabin,^ the rifle, the axe, and the plough, combined with the reflections of an original and vigorous mind, eager in the pursuit of knowledge by every available means, and developing a character of equal resource and firmness, made him the man he has since proved himself At twenty-one he pushed further west into Illinois, which has for the last thirty years been his home, living always near, and, for some years past, in Springfield, the State Capital. He worked on a farm, as a hired man, his first year in Illi- 4 ABEAHAM LINCOLN. nois ; the next year he was a clerk in a store ; then volun- teered for the Black-Hawk war, and was chosen a caj^tain by his company ; the next year he was an unsuccessful candi- date for the Legislature ; he was chosen the next, and served four sessions with eminent usefulness and steadily increasing reputation ; studied law, meantime, and took his place at the bar ; was early recognized as a most effective and con- vincing advocate, before the people, of Whig principles and the Protective policy, and of their illustrious embodiment, Henry Clay ; was a Whig candidate for Elector in nearly or quite every Presidential contest from 1836 to 1852, inclusive ; was chosen to the Thirtieth Congress, from the Central Dis- trict of Illinois, in 1846, and served to its close, but was not a candidate for re-election ; and in 1849, measurably with- drew from politics and devoted himself to the practice of his profession until the Nebraska Bill, of 1854, called him again into tlie political arena. He was the candidate of the Whigs for United States Senator before the Legislature chosen that year ; but they were not a majority of the body ; so he de- clined, and urged his friends to support Judge Trumbull, the candidate of the anti-Nebraska Democrats, who was thus elected. In the gallant and memorable Presidential contest of 1856, Mr. Lincoln's name headed the Fremont Electoral Ticket of Illinois. In 1858, he was unanimously designated by the Republican State Convention to succeed Mr. Douglas in the Senate ; and thereupon canvassed the State against Mr. Douglas, with an ability in which logic, art, eloquence, and thorough good-nature were alike conspicuous, and which gave him a national reputation. Mr. Douglas secured a pre- dominance in the Legislature and was elected, though Mr. Lincoln had the larger popular vote. In personal appearance Mr. Lincoln is long, lean, and wiry. In motion he has a great deal of the elasticity and awkward- ness which indicate the rough training of his early life. His face is genial looking. His hair is dark, tinged with gray, a good forehead, small eyes, a long nose, and a large mouth, which is probably the most expressive feature of his face. His height is six feet three inches. He is a man of the Peo- ple, raised by his own genius and integrity from the humblest to the highest position, having made himself an honored name, as a lawyer, an advocate, a popular orator, a states- man, and a man. /CL-'Z^-i^ PITBLISHED BT J^C, BUTTaS, 48 i'RAITKLTN BT I^T YOHX, HANNIBAL HAMLIN OF MAINE. Hannibal Hamlin was born in Paris, Oxford county, Maine, August 27tli, 1809, and is now in the fifty-first year of his age. He is by profession a lawyer, hut for the last twenty-four years has spent most of the time in political life. From 1836 to 1840, he was a member of the legislature of Maine, and for three of those years was Speaker of its House of Representatives. In 1843 he was elected a member of Congress, and re-elected for the following term. In 1847 he was again a member of the House of Representatives of the State Legislature. He was elected to the United States Senate, May 26th, 1848, for four years, to fill a vacancy oc- casioned by the death of John Fairfield. He was re-elected for the full term in the same body, July 25th, 1851, and elected Governor of Maine, January 7th, 1857, resigning his seat in the Senate, and being inaugurated Governor the same day. On the 16th of the same montli he was again elected to the United States Senate, for six years, which office he ac- cepted, and resigned the ofiice of Governor. He is now a United States Senator from Maine, and a member of the Committee on Commerce and on the District of Columbia. This record is an evidence of the confidence with which he has always been regarded by his fellow-citizens In Maine. Up to the time of the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska bill, in 1854, Mr. Hamlin was a member of the Democratic party. That act he regarded as a proof that the party with which he had been all his life connected, no longer deserved the name of democratic, and was treacherous to the princi- ples he had so long cherished. He changed his politics, in a speech in the Senate, on the Nebraska bill, and thenceforward gave his support to the Republican party, of which he has ever since continued a faithful and distinguished leader. Mr. Hamlin is a man of dignified presence, of solid abili- ties, of unflinching integrity, and great executive talent. KEPUBLICAN PLATFORM. REPUBLICAN PLATFOEM PUT FORTH AT CinCAGO, MAT 18, 1860. Eesolved, That we, the delegated representatives of the Repub- lican Electors of the United States, in convention assembled, in the discharo-e of the duty we owe to our constituents and our country, unite in the following declarations: 1 . That the history of the nation, during the last four years, has fully established the propriety and necessity of the organization and perpetuation of the Republican party, and that the causes wdiich called it into existence are permanent in their nature, and now, more than ever before, demand its peaceful and constitutional triumph. 2. That the maintenance of the principles promulgated in the Declaration of Independence, and embodied in the Federal Consti- tution, is essential to the preservation of our republican institutions; that the Federal Constitution, the rights of the States, and the Union of the States, must and shall be preserved ; and that we reassert "these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights ; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed." 3. That to the Union of the States this nation owes its unprece- dented increase in population; its surprising development of ma- terial resources ; its rapid augmentation of Avealth ; its happiness at home and its honor abroad ; and we hold in abhorrence all schemes for disunion, come from whatever source ifcey may ; and we congrat- ulate the country that no Republican member of Congress has ut- tered or countenanced a threat of disunion, so often made by Demo- cratic members of Congress without rebuke, and with applause from their political associates ; and we denounce those threats of disunion, in case of a popular overthrow of their ascendency, as denying the vital principles of a free government, and as an avowal of contem- plated treason, Avhich it is the imperative duty of an indignant peo- ple strongly to rebuke and forever silence. 4. That the maintenance inviolate of the rights of the States, and especially the right of each State to order and control its own do- mestic institutions according to its own judgment exclusively, is REPUBLICAN PLATFORM. 7 essential to that balance of power on wliieli the perfection and en- durance of our political faith depends ; and wo denounce the lawless invasion, by armed force, of any State or Territory, no matter under what pretext, as among the gravest of crimes. 5. That the present Democratic Administration lias far exceeded our worst apprehensions in its measureless subserviency to the ex- actions of a sectional interest, as is especially evident in its desperate exertions to force the infamous Lecompton Constitution upon tlie protesting people of Kansas — in construing the personal relation between master and servant to involve an unqualified property in persons — in its attempted enforcement everywhere, on land and sea. through the intervention of Congress and the Federal Courts, of the extreme pretensions of a purely local interest, and in its general and unvarying abuse of the power intrusted to it by a confiding people. G. That the people justly view with alarm the reckless extrava- gance which pervades every department of the Federal Government ; that a return to rigid economy and accountability is indispensable to arrest the system of plunder of the public treasury by favored parti- sans ; while the recent startling developments of fraud and corrup- tion at the Federal metropolis show that an entire change of admin- istration is imperatively demanded. 7. That the new dogma, that the Constitution, of its own force, carries slavery into any or all the Territories of the United States, is a dangerous jiolitical heresy, at variance with the explicit provisions of that instrument itself, with contemporaneous exposition, and with legislative and judicial precedent, is revolutionary in its tendency and subversive of the peace and harmony of the country. 8. That the normal condition of all the territory of the United States is that of freedom ; that as our republican fathers, when they abolished slavery in all our national territory, ordained that no person should be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law, it becomes our duty, by legislation, whenever such legislation is necessary, to maintain this provision of the Constitution against all attempts to violate it ; and we deny the authority of Congress, of a Territorial Legislature, or of any individuals, to give legal ex- istence to slavery in any Territory of the United States. 9. That we brand the recent re-opening of the African slave-trade, under the cover of our national flag, aided by perversions of judicial power, as a crime against humanity, a burning shame to our country and age ; and we call upon Congress to take prompt and efficient measures for the total and final suppression of that execrable traffic. 10. That in their recent vetoes, by their Federal Governors, of the acts of the Legislatures of Kansas and Nebraska, prohibiting slavery in those Territories, we find a practical illustration of the boasted Democratic principle of non-intervention and popular sovereignty, embodied in the Kansas and Nebraska bill, and a demonstration of the deception and fraud involved therein. 11. That Kansas should, of right, be immediately admitted as a 8 REPUBLICAN PLATFORM. State, under the constitution recently formed and adopted by her people, and accepted by the House of Representatives. 12. That while providing revenue for the support of the General Government by duties upon imposts, sound policy requires such an adjustment of these imposts as to encourage the development of the industrial interests of the whole country; and we commend that policy of national exchanges which secures to the working men liberal wages, to agriculture remunerating prices, to mechanics and manufacturers an adequate reward for their skill, labor, and enter- prise, and to the nation commercial prosperity and independence. 13. That we protest against any sale or alienation to others of the public lands h