Nothing in their works seems done hastily or at random; every line is written for the eye of the connoisseur and is shaped after some conception of ideal beauty. No literature places those fine qualities in which the writers of democracies are naturally deficient in bolder relief than that of the ancients; no literature, therefore, ought to be more studied in democratic times (II, i, 15).
Lincoln himself is, then, in De Tocqueville’s sense an aristocratic writer, even to the point of finding his sources in the past. The man who had had from youth the “peculiar ambition” of being “truly esteemed of my fellow men, by rendering myself worthy of their esteem” (p. 57), could have no quarrel with the fundamental idea of aristocracy. For he was himself an exemplification of Jefferson’s contention, set out in his correspondence with Adams (October 28, 1813), that aristocracy and democracy, the rule by the best and the rule by the people, have been made compatible in the United States, that the citizens in free election can and will—as he said, “in general,” and as we must say, on occasion—choose from among themselves the “natural aristoi,” the best by nature. The Gettysburg Address is the utterance of such an aristos, a man at the same time excellent in the antique sense and good in the common understanding.