A contemporary read on Lincoln mid-stream.

According to the New York Herald, “Lincoln was baffling. The more one gazed on him, the less easy it became to reckon what would be the end of his teachings. He was democracy beyond Cromwell or Napoleon, so completely modern that his like was not to be found in the past, a character so externally uncouth, so pathetically simple, so unfathomably penetrating, so irresolute and yet so irresistible, so bizarre, grotesque, droll, wise and perfectly beneficent…

“It will take a new school of historians to do justice to this eccentric addition to the world’s gallery of heroes.”