Excerpts from Lincoln books

From 'Did Lincoln Own Slaves? And Other Frequently Asked Questions About Abraham Lincoln' by Gerald Prokopowicz

A question that acknowledges that in Kentucky, this is the kind of information that would further endear the Great Emancipator to us:

Could he dunk a basketball?

He probably could have ... but he never tried, since it was not until 1891 that James Naismith nailed the first peak baskets to the gym balcony in the Springfield, Massachusetts, YMCA. We can only speculate whether the Great Emancipator would also have been a great rebounder. Physically, he had the tools. At about 6-feet-4, he was certainly tall enough. ... He was strong enough too, with arms and shoulders that were powerfully developed by years of chopping trees in the forests of Indiana. One day late in the Civil War, after visiting soldiers at a military hospital, Lincoln amused onlookers by picking up a heavy ax, swinging it a few times at a nearby log, and then holding it by the end of the handle parallel to the ground, with his arm outstretched. After he set the ax down and walked away, several young soldiers tried to imitate him and found that none could hold the ax steady in that position.

From 'Land of Lincoln' by Andrew Ferguson

The author takes a trip to the Abraham Lincoln birthplace at Hodgenville:

The Park Service ranger on duty noticed me jotting in my notebook. "You understand, this is the symbolic cabin," he said.

"I'm sorry?" I said.

"That's what we call it now. A long time ago, you would've come here and we would have said it was the real thing. Then we used to say, well, it might be the real thing, it might not be." He turned his hand palm up and then palm down. "Now we say it's symbolic." ...

"It was a show called History's Mysteries. For the first time in seventy-five years, the Park Service agreed to let scientists remove core samples from the cabin's logs. It didn't take more than a week to prove that the cabin dated from the 1850s, more than forty years after Lincoln was born."

"So the thing is ... a fake?"

"Not a fake," the ranger said. He looked offended. "Symbolic."

From 'Lincoln the Lawyer' by Brian Dirck

Those who have read the "notes for a law lecture" usually focus on the document's final paragraph in which Lincoln addressed the vexing matter of legal ethics and what he called the "vague popular belief that lawyers are necessarily dishonest."

Lincoln found this puzzling, pointing out that Americans who denounced lawyers for their duplicity often entrusted those same lawyers with high public office. Nevertheless, he wanted his fellow attorney to avoid ethical impropriety.

"Resolve to be honest at all events," he admonished, "and if in your own judgment you cannot be an honest lawyer, resolve to be honest without being a lawyer. Choose some other occupation, rather than the one in the choosing of which you do, in advance, consent to be a knave."

From 'Team of Rivals' by Doris Kearns Goodwin

Lincoln was not a complete unknown to his rivals. By 1860, his path had crossed with each of them in different ways. Seward had met Lincoln twelve years before at a political meeting. The two shared lodging that night, and Seward encouraged Lincoln to clarify and intensify his moderate position on slavery. Lincoln had met Bates briefly, and had sat in the audience in 1847 when Bates delivered his mesmerizing speech at the River and Harbor Convention. Chase had campaigned for Lincoln and the Republicans in Illinois in 1858, though the two men had never met.

There was little to lead one to suppose that Abraham Lincoln, nervously rambling the streets of Springfield that May morning, who scarcely had a national reputation, certainly nothing to equal any of the other three, who had served but a single term in Congress, twice lost bids for the Senate, and had no administrative experience whatsoever, would become the greatest historical figure of the nineteenth century.