Lincoln's New Salem

Foreword

Foreword T HIS is an American classic. It is a book written from tbe heart about the turning point in a great life. It was at New Salem that Abraham Lincoln for the first time learned to live with people. This was the first organized community in which he had a part. He learned here that there was great satisfaction in enjoying the good will and friendship of his neighbors. He also learned that if they liked and respected you, they would vote for you. Carl Sandburg reminds us that in 1831, the year twenty-twa-year old Abraham Lincoln floated a canoe down the Sangamon River to New Salem, it was a place of promise. All towns in this frontier state then were places of promise. New Salem had but a dozen families for its popUlation; two hundred miles north on the shore of Lake Miehigan in that same year was Chicago with a population of about the same size. Sandburg points out that both communities "had water transportation, outlets, tributary territory, yet one was to be only a phantom hamlet of memories and v't LINCOLN'S NEW SALEM ghosts, a windswept hilltop kept as cherished haunts are kept." Though New Salem "winked out," Illinois became a place of promise to Abraham Lincoln, and today, one hundred and forty-two years after he came to this state, the man and the place have become inseparable. -Benjamin Platt Thomas (1902-1956) was one of the great Lincoln students of the twentieth century. His one-volume biography of the Sixteenth President, published in 1952, is the best work of its kind and is universally acclaimed and accepted as the authoritative , compact work on the subject. He was the Executive Secretary of the Abraham Lincoln Association from 1932 to 1936 and in that position helped lay the groundwork for the Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, which was completed by his successors. His Portrait f01' Posterity: Lincoln and his Biographers, (1947), is a charming book and unique in the field of Lincolniana. Benjamin Thomas was meticulous in his research and inspired in his writing. He was a friend of all who traveled along the Lincoln trail. Lincoln's New Salem was originally issued as a publication of the Abraham Lincoln Association in 1934; reprinted in 1939, 1944, and 1947; and revised with the help of the late Harry E. Pratt and issued in a new edition in 1954 and reprinted in 1961 and 1966. This is the eighth edition of the work to be published. RALPH G. NEWMAN ...