Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811–1896)
From The Lincoln Anthology: Great Writers on His Life and Legacy from 1860 to Now
As the country gears up for an election campaign in the midst of civil war, the author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin records her impressions of President Lincoln.
. . . The brilliant courts of Europe levelled their opera-glasses at the phenomenon. Fair ladies saw that he had horny hands and disdained white gloves. Dapper diplomatists were shocked at his system of etiquette; but old statesmen, who knew the terrors of that passage, were wiser than court ladies and dandy diplomatists, and watched him with a fearful curiosity, simply asking, “Will that awkward old backwoodsman really get that ship through? If he does, it will be time for us to look about us.”Sooth to say, our own politicians were somewhat shocked with his state-papers at first. Why not let us make them a little more conventional, and file them to a classical pattern? “No,” was his reply, “I shall write them myself. The people will understand them.” . . .
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