Americans in the mid-nineteenth century could point to plenty of examples, real as well as mythical, of self-made men who by dint of “industry, prudence, perseverance, and good economy” had risen “to competence, and then to affluence.”32 With the election of Abraham Lincoln they could point to one who had risen from a log cabin to the White House. “I am not ashamed to confess that twenty five years ago I was a hired laborer, mauling rails, at work on a flat-boat—just what might happen to any poor man’s son!”
