Lincoln thanks John Van Dyke for his kind notice of him in Philadelphia convention. "When you meet Judge Dayton present my respects, and tell him I think him a far better man than I for the position he is in, and that I shall support both him and Colonel Fremont most cordially." Abraham Lincoln to John Van Dyke, 27 June 1856, CW, 2:346.

'It would have been easier for us, I think, had we got McLean," Lincoln writes Trumbull. Horace White, The Life of Lyman Trumbull (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1913), 69.