With Malice Toward None: A Biography of Abraham Lincoln

by Stephen B. Oates

As winter came on, Lincoln sank into a profound depression about the way Mary’s people had rejected him. In despair, he remarked that one d was enough to spell God. But it took two d’s to spell Todd.

Lincoln loved to romp with his boys, to lie on the hall floor and tickle and toss them in the air. He spoiled them with unabashed pride, chuckled at their mischief, never took his hand to them.

“‘A house divided against itself cannot stand.’ “I believe this government cannot endure, permanently half slave and half free.

“This is a world of compensations; and he who would be no slave, must consent to have no slave. Those who deny freedom to others, deserve it not for themselves.”

Lincoln’s message created a sensation—for it contained the first emancipation proposal a President had ever submitted to Congress in the history of the Republic

Harriet Beecher Stowe defended Lincoln, too, for she thought him a noble and effective President with a singular talent for literary expression; there were passages in his state papers, she declared, that ought “to be inscribed in letters of gold.”