Nott, late Chief
Justice of the Court of Claims, and annotations by Judge Nott and by
Cephas Brainerd of New York Bar.
1909
INTRODUCTORY NOTE
The twelfth of February, 1909, was the hundredth anniversary of the
birth of Abraham Lincoln. In New York, as in other cities and towns
throughout the Union, the day was devoted to commemoration exercises,
and even in the South, in centres like Atlanta (the capture of which in
1864 had indicated the collapse of the cause of the Confederacy),
representative Southerners gave their testimony to the life and
character of the great American.
The Committee in charge of the commemoration in New York arranged for a
series of addresses to be given to the people of the city and it was my
privilege to be selected as one of the speakers. It was an indication of
the rapid passing away of the generation which had had to do with the
events of the War, that the list of orators, forty-six in all, included
only four men who had ever seen the hero whose life and character they
were describing.
In writing out later, primarily for the information of children and
grandchildren, my own address (which had been delivered without notes),
I found myself so far absorbed in the interest of the subject and in the
recollections of the War period, that I was impelled to expand the paper
so that it should present a more comprehensive study of the career and
character of Lincoln than it had been possible to attempt within the
compass of an hour's talk, and should include also references, in
outline, to the constitutional struggle that had preceded the contest
and to the chief events of the War itself with which the great War
President had been most directly concerned.
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