This volume contains, complete and unabridged, the Address Before the Young Men’s Lyceum of Springfield, Illinois (1838), which emphasized a theme Lincoln was to return to repeatedly, namely, the capacity of a people to govern themselves; the First Inaugural Address (1861)

in which he appealed to the people of an already divided union for sectional harmony; the Letter to Mrs Bixby (1864), expressing Lincoln’s regrets over the wartime deaths of her five sons and many more.