Good things now come to pass

This daguerreotype is the earliest-known photograph of Abraham Lincoln, taken…

It has a high, beautiful and very healthy location upon the Iowa River, which is a bold deep stream of clear water, navigable with Steamboats during several months of each year, and commands the growing trade of a large scope of exceedingly fertile country, well timbered and watered.

With these few injunctions and the knowledge I have of your love and affection, and of the dutiful affection of all our children, I bid you a final farewell, until we meet in another and, I trust, a better world. You will find this on my person after my demise.

Nothing in this world is worth having or worth doing unless it means effort, pain, difficulty…