To Mary Todd Lincoln [1]
I have been unable to escape this toil. If I had foreseen it, I think I would not have come east at all. The speech at New York, being within my calculation before I started, went off passably well and gave me no trouble whatever. The difficulty was to make nine others, before reading audiences who had already seen all my ideas in print.
Annotation
[1] James Schouler, ``Abraham Lincoln at Tremont Temple in 1848,'' Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society, XLII (1909), 81. Robert T. Lincoln in a letter to Schouler (January 29, 1908) quoted this passage from ``a letter written by my father to my mother on March 4th [1860], at Exeter, N.H.''---ibid. Efforts to locate the original letter or a complete copy have failed. Lincoln was visiting his son Robert, who was attending Phillips Exeter Academy, and spoke at Exeter on March 3, but no adequate report of the speech has been located.
