... A single, easy, simple sentence
... contains a chapter of history that, in some instances, has taken days
of labor to verify and which must have cost the author months of
investigation to acquire.... Commencing with this address as a political
pamphlet, the reader will leave it as an historical work, brief, complete,
profound, truthful--which will survive the time and occasion that called
it forth and be esteemed hereafter, no less for its intrinsic worth than
its unpretending modesty." [Footnote: Pamphlet edition with notes and
prefaces by C. C. Nott and Cephas Brainerd, September, 1860. Quoted in
Nicolay and Hay, "Abraham Lincoln," 2:225.]
His first wide fame grew from a speech which he delivered on October 16,
1854, in Peoria, the city that had grown on the Illinois River by the side
of La Salle's Fort Crevecoeur. "When the white man governs himself," he
said there, "that is self-government; but when the white man governs
himself and also governs another man, that is more than self-government--
that is despotism.
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