Such was the land-holding, slave-holding, office-holding aristocracy, against which the first directly and avowedly antagonistic movement was that of the Republican party. Young and weak in its first Presidential contest of 1856, the new organization gathered strength steadily; and when, on April 29, 1860, the Democratic Convention at Baltimore was rent asunder by the Secessionists, it became clear that the Republicans would have to face the threatened disruption of the Union. The Republican Convention met at Chicago and chose, in preference to the able and experienced Seward, Abraham Lincoln, of Illinois, a man who, then comparatively unknown, was to take rank as perhaps the noblest and greatest of all America’s sons. Lincoln, when asked for an account of his boyhood, said that it might be summed up in Crabbe’s famous line: “The short and simple annals of the poor.” J. G. Holland thus reviews the career of the man who led the struggle that began in 1860: “Born in the humblest and remotest obscurity, subjected to the rudest toil in the meanest offices, achieving the development of his powers by means of his own institution, he had, with none of the tricks of the demagogue, with none of the aids of wealth and social influence, with none of the opportunities for exhibiting his powers which high official position bestows, against all the combinations of genius and eminence and interest, raised himself by force of manly excellence of heart and brain into national recognition, and had become the local center of the affectionate interest and curious inquisition of thirty millions of people.” To the end of his life, Lincoln was the very incarnation of democratic simplicity. He was never at home in a drawing-room; he never could dispose gracefully his hands and feet--appendages whose size was proportionate to his huge stature. After his nomination for the Presidency, he used to answer his own bell at his little house in Springfield, Illinois. The people’s man of 1860, ABRAHAM LINCOLN! The pulse of patriotism quickens at the pronunciation of the name. The people’s plain Abe Lincoln; one of them, a commoner, of them, with them, like them. To foreign nations, he may have appeared as “President Abraham Lincoln, Chief Magistrate of the United States.” He may have been “Commander-in-Chief of the Army and Navy,” in the minds of his subordinates in those two important branches of his administration from ’61 to ’65. History may record him as the “wise, able, and philanthropical.” But his memory will last enshrined in a temple more lasting than bronze or stone--the hearts of the people.