The year 1859 was one of his ebb tides. In the previous year the rising
tide, which had mounted high during his success on the circuit, reached
its crest The memory of his failure at Washington was effaced. At
Freeport he was a more powerful genius, a more dominant personality,
than he had ever been. Gradually, in the months following, the high wave
subsided. During 1859 he gave most of his attention to his practice.
Though political speech-making continued, and though he did not impair
his reputation, he did nothing of a remarkable sort. The one literary
fragment of any value is a letter to a Boston committee that had invited
him to attend a "festival" in Boston on Jefferson's birthday. He
avowed himself a thoroughgoing disciple of Jefferson and pronounced the
principles of Jefferson "the definitions and axioms of free society."
Without conditions he identified his own cause with the cause of
Jefferson, "the man who in the concrete pressure of a struggle for
national independence by a single people, had the coolness, forecast and
capacity to introduce into a merely revolutionary document, an abstract
truth, applicable to all men and all times, and so to embalm it
there that today and in all coming days, it shall be a rebuke and
a stumbling-block to the very harbingers of reappearing tyranny and
oppression."(1)

While the Boston committee were turning their eyes toward this great new
phrase-maker of the West, several politicians in Illinois had formed a
bold resolve. They would try to make him President. The movement had two
sources--the personal loyalty of his devoted friends of the circuit, the
shrewdness of the political managers who saw that his duel with Douglas
had made him a national figure. As one of them said to him, "Douglas
being so widely known, you are getting a national reputation through
him." Lincoln replied that he did not lack the ambition but lacked