(Washington: Government Printing Office, 1866).

VERY SCARCE FIRST EDITION. In Bancroft’s words: “The Assassination of Lincoln, who was so free from malice, has, by some mysterious influence, struck the country with solemn awe, and hushed, instead of exciting, the passion for revenge. It seems as if the just had died for the unjust. When I think of the friends I have lost in this war---and every one who hears me has, like myself, lost some of those whom he most loved---there is no consolation to be derived from victims on the scaffold, or from anything but the established union of the regenerated nation.
In his character Lincoln was through and through an American...Douglas, his rival, said of him: “Lincoln is the honestest man I ever knew”...the habits of his mind were those of meditaton and inward thought, rather than of action. He delighted to express his opinions by an apothegm, illustrate themby a parable, or drive them home by a story. He was skillful in analysis, discerned with precision the central idea on which a question turned, and knew how to disengage it and present it by itself in a few homely, stron old English words that would be intelligible to all....”
Bancroft’s speech on Lincoln is one of the finest to have come out of the Congress. This first edition copy in fine condition is unusual for its import and its condition. Item #31970

First edition. With a fine steel-engraved portrait of Lincoln engraved by the Treasury Department as frontispiece. 8vo, in the original brown, pebbled and blind-stamped cloth, with gilt tooled lettering block on the upper cover. 69, including appendix pp. A fine and bright copy, the work is typically found with heavy foxing but in this copy it is only modestly so on the endpapers, flies and prelims, otherwise the book is nearly completely free of the usual foxing, the brown cloth is not faded and the binding is firm, a little cosmetic wear to the cloth in a short section of the outside hinges near the foot of the spine.