Between the day when he left his father's cabin and launched his canoe
on the head waters of the Sangamon River to begin life on his own
account, and the day of his first inauguration, lay full thirty years
of toil, self-denial, patience; often of effort baffled, of hope
deferred; sometimes of bitter disappointment. Even with the natural gift
of great genius, it required an average lifetime and faithful,
unrelaxing effort to transform the raw country stripling into a fit
ruler for this great nation.

Almost every success was balanced--sometimes overbalanced--by a seeming
failure. He went into the Black Hawk war a captain, and through no fault
of his own came out a private. He rode to the hostile frontier on
horseback, and trudged home on foot. His store "winked out." His
surveyor's compass and chain, with which he was earning a scanty living,
were sold for debt. He was defeated in his first attempts to be
nominated for the legislature and for Congress; defeated in his
application to be appointed Commissioner of the General Land Office;
defeated for the Senate, when he had forty-five votes to begin with, by
a man who had only five votes to begin with; defeated again after his
joint debates with Douglas; defeated in the nomination for
Vice-President, when a favorable nod from half a dozen politicians would
have brought him success.

Failures? Not so. Every seeming defeat was a slow success. His was the
growth of the oak, and not of Jonah's gourd. He could not become a
master workman until he had served a tedious apprenticeship. It was the
quarter of a century of reading, thinking, speech-making, and law-making
which fitted him to be the chosen champion in the great Lincoln-Douglas
debates of 1858. It was the great moral victory won in those debates
(although the senatorship went to Douglas), added to the title "Honest