that went back to his boyhood. He says of himself: "My mind is something
like a piece of steel; it is very hard to scratch anything on it and
almost impossible after you have got it there to rub it out."

Lincoln's correspondence has been preserved with what is probably
substantial completeness. The letters written by him to friends,
acquaintances, political correspondents, individual men of one kind or
another, have been gathered together and have been brought into print
not, as is most frequently the case, under the discretion or judgment of
a friendly biographer, but by a great variety of more or less
sympathetic people. It would seem as if but very few of Lincoln's
letters could have been mislaid or destroyed. One can but be impressed,
in reading these letters, with the absolute honesty of purpose and of
statement that characterises them. There are very few men, particularly
those whose active lives have been passed in a period of political
struggle and civil war, whose correspondence could stand such a test.
There never came to Lincoln requirement to say to his correspondent,
"Burn this letter."




III

THE FIGHT AGAINST THE EXTENSION OF SLAVERY


In 1856, the Supreme Court, under the headship of Judge Taney, gave out
the decision of the Dred Scott case. The purport of this decision was
that a negro was not to be considered as a person but as a chattel; and