He
accepted with them the fabric of traditional American political thought
and the ordinary standards of contemporary political morality. He had
none of the moral strenuousness of the reformer, none of the
exclusiveness of a man, whose purposes and ideas were consciously
perched higher than those of his neighbors. Probably the majority of his
more successful associates classed him as a good and able man who was
somewhat lacking in ambition and had too much of a disposition to loaf.
He was most at home, not in his own house, but in the corner grocery
store, where he could sit with his feet on the stove swapping stories
with his friends; and if an English traveler of 1850 had happened in on
the group, he would most assuredly have discovered another instance of
the distressing vulgarity to which the absence of an hereditary
aristocracy and an established church condemned the American democracy.
Thus no man could apparently have been more the average product of his
day and generation. Nevertheless, at bottom, Abraham Lincoln differed as
essentially from the ordinary Western American of the Middle Period as
St.
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