out.

[Illustration: Abraham Lincoln in 1861 _From a Photograph by M B
Brady_]

I was a young fellow of two and thirty, of boundless optimism and my full
share of self-confidence, no end of physical endurance and mental vitality,
having some political as well as newspaper experience. It never crossed my
fancy that I could fail.

I met resistance with aggression, answered attempts at bullying with
scorn, generally irradiated by laughter. Yet was I not wholly blind to
consequences and the admonitions of prudence; and when the call for a
Liberal Republican Convention appeared I realized that if I expected to
remain a Democrat in a Democratic community, and to influence and lead a
Democratic following, I must proceed warily.

Though many of those proposing the new movement were familiar
acquaintances--some of them personal friends--the scheme was in the air, as
it were. Its three newspaper bellwethers--Samuel Bowles, Horace White and
Murat Halstead--were especially well known to me; so were Horace Greeley,
Carl Schurz and Charles Sumner, Stanley Matthews being my kinsman, George
Hoadley and Cassius M. Clay next-door neighbors. But they were not the men
I had trained with--not my "crowd"--and it was a question how far I might
be able to reconcile myself, not to mention my political associates, to
such company, even conceding that they proceeded under good fortune with a
good plan, offering the South extrication from its woes and the Democratic
Party an entering wedge into a solid and hitherto irresistible North.

Nevertheless, I resolved to go a little in advance to Cincinnati, to have a