Welcome to the American Story. Stories about what it is that makes America beautiful

and worthy of our love. This is Chris Flannery with the Claremont Institute.

I call this one, O Captain, my Captain.

In December 1859, Abraham Lincoln wrote a little sketch of his life for use by Republican

friends who sought to make him better known outside his home state of Illinois.

The Republican National Convention would be held in Chicago in a few months, and Lincoln was

being mentioned by some newspapers as a possible vice presidential or presidential candidate.

There is not much of it, said Lincoln, about his autobiographical sketch,

for the reason I suppose that there is not much of me.

In the race of ambition, he regarded himself as largely a failure,

especially compared with his famous rival Stephen Douglas.

But all was not failure.

Looking back in his sketch across the whole span of his adult life,

he fondly recalled a success which gave me more pleasure than any I have

had since. He was thinking of his election at the age of 23 in the spring of 1832 as a captain of volunteers from Saguen County, Illinois in the Black Hawk

War.

The 22-year-old Lincoln had arrived, as he would often say, like a piece of floating driftwood

in the village of New Salem in Sangamon County in the summer of 1831. He described himself as a strange, friendless, uneducated, penniless boy, working on

a flat boat at $10 per month.

New Salem had existed for barely three years

and had a population of about a hundred,

a handful of whom had attended college.

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