The Reminiscences of Carl Schurz, May 19, 1860
I had the honor of being appointed a member of the committee that was sent to Springfield to carry to Mr. Lincoln the official announcement of his nomination. At every railway station we passed in daylight we were received with demonstrations of joy. Mr. Lincoln received us in the parlor of his modest frame house – a rather bare-looking room ; in the center the customary Kttle table with a white marble top, and on it the silver-plated ice-water pitcher and the family Bible or the photograph albiun; and some chairs and a sofa ranged along the walls. There the Republican candidate for the Presidency stood, tall and ungainly in his black suit of apparently new but ill-fitting clothes, his long tawny neck emerging gauntly from his turn-down collar, his melancholy eyes sunken deep in his haggard face. Most of the members of the committee had never seen him before, and gazed at him with surprised curiosity. He certainly did not present the appearance of a statesman as people usually picture it in their imagination. Standing up with folded hands, he quietly, without visible embarrassment or emotion, listened to the dignified little speech addressed to him by Mr. Ashmim, the president of the Convention, and then he responded with a few appropriate, earnest, and well-shaped sentences, expressing his gratitude for the confidence reposed in him, and his doubts of his own abilities, and his trust in a helping Providence. Then followed some informal talk, partly of a jovial kind, in which the hearty simplicity of Lincoln’s nature shone out, and after the usual hand-shaking the committee took its leave. One of its members, Mr. Kelley of Pennsylvania, remarked to me as we passed out of the house : ” Well, we might have done a more brilliant thing, but we could hardly have done a better thing.” I heard similar utterances from other members in which, however, an undertone of resignation and of suppressed doubt was perceptible. Some of them, who were entirely unused to Western men and Western ways, and who, on this occasion, saw Mr. Lincoln for the first time, could not quite conceal their misgivings as to how this single-minded man, this child of nature, would bear himself in the contact with the great world and in the face of the large and complicated problems, for grappling with which he had apparently so scant an equipment.
Quoted in Carl Schurz, The Reminiscences of Carl Schurz. Vol. II: 1852-1863 (New York: McClure Co., 1907), p. 188.