Men of Our Times; Or, Leading Patriots of the Day: Being narratives of the lives and deeds of statesmen, generals, and orators. Including biographical sketches and anecdotes of Lincoln, Grant, Garrison, Sumner, Chase, Wilson, Greeley, Farragut, Andrew, Colfax, Stanton, Douglass, Buckingham, Sherman, Sheridan, Howard, Phillips and Beecher.Stowe, Harriet Beecher
History
Men of Our Times; Or, Leading Patriots of the Day: Being narratives of the lives and deeds of statesmen, generals, and orators. Including biographical sketches and anecdotes of Lincoln, Grant, Garrison, Sumner, Chase, Wilson, Greeley, Farragut, Andrew, Colfax, Stanton, Douglass, Buckingham, Sherman, Sheridan, Howard, Phillips and Beecher.
Stowe, Harriet Beecher
United States -- Biography; United States -- History -- Civil War, 1861-1865 -- Biography
It is interesting to notice how, in the recent struggle that has
convulsed our country and tried our republican institutions, so many
of the men who have held the working oar have been representative men
of the people. To a great extent they have been men who have grown up
with no other early worldly advantages than those which a democratic
republic offers to every citizen born upon her soil. Lincoln from the
slave states, and Chase and Henry Wilson in the free, may be called the
peculiar sons of Democracy. That hard Spartan mother trained them early
on her black broth to her fatigues, and wrestlings, and watchings, and
gave them their shields on entering the battle of life with only the
Spartan mother's brief--"With this, or upon this."
Native force and Democratic institutions raised Lincoln to the highest
seat in the nation, and to no mean seat among the nations of the earth;
and the same forces in Massachusetts caused that State, in an hour of
critical battle for the great principles of democratic liberty, to
choose Henry Wilson, the self-taught, fearless shoemaker's apprentice
of Natick, over the head of the gifted and graceful Everett, the
darling of foreign courts, the representative of all the sentiments and
training which transmitted aristocratic ideas have yet left in Boston
and Cambridge. All this was part and parcel of the magnificent drama
which has been acting on the stage of this country for the hope and
consolation of all who are born to labor and poverty in all nations of
the world.
Henry Wilson, our present United States Senator, was born at
Farmington, N. H., Feb. 12, 1818, of very poor parents. At the age
of ten he was bound to a farmer till he was twenty-one. Here he had
the usual lot of a farm boy--plain, abundant food, coarse clothing,
incessant work, and a few weeks' schooling at the district school in
winter.
In these ten years of toil, the boy, by twilight, firelight, and on
Sundays, had read over one thousand volumes of history, geography,
biography and general literature, borrowed from the school libraries
and from those of generous individuals.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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