Page:Samuel Scoville -Abraham Lincoln, His Story.djvu/62

 Like Franklin, Lincoln possessed in an extraordinary degree the power of persuasion. Can anything be more appealing, more frank, more void of offense, than his appeal to the South in his First Inaugural Address?

Like Franklin, too, Lincoln possessed the tact of a true statesman. The night of Lee's surrender at Appomattox there was a wild time in Washington. A band serenaded the President, playing various patriotic airs, such as "Columbia" and "The Star-Spangled Banner." When Lincoln was called upon to speak he turned to the bandmaster and said: "Play 'Dixie' now. It's ours again."

Another secret of Abraham Lincoln's strength as a speaker was the fact that he had saturated his mind with the two great masterpieces of English literature, the King James' Version of the Bible and Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress. Lincoln read and reread, again and again, both