om fought on the
Southern side in the Civil War. One Abraham Lincoln, grandfather of
the President and apparently a grandson of Samuel, crossed the
mountains from Virginia in 1780 and settled his family in Kentucky, of
which the nearer portions had recently been explored. One morning four
years later he was at work near his cabin with Mordecai, Josiah, and
Thomas, his sons, when a shot from the bushes near by brought him down.
Mordecai ran to the house, Josiah to a fort, which was close to them.
Thomas, aged six, stayed by his father's body. Mordecai seized a gun
and, looking through the window, saw an Indian in war paint stooping to
pick up Thomas. He fired and killed the savage, and, when Thomas had
run into the cabin, continued firing at others who appeared among the
bushes. Shortly Josiah returned with soldiers from the fort, and the
Indians ran off, leaving Abraham the elder dead. Mordecai, his
heir-at-law, prospered. We hear of him long after as an old man of
substance and repute in Western Illinois. He had decided views about
Indians. The sight of a redskin would move him to strange excitement;
he would disappear into the bushes with his gun, and his conscience as
a son and a sportsman would not be satisfied till he had stalked and
shot him. We are further informed that he was a "good old man."
Josiah also moved to Illinois, and it is pleasant to learn that he also
was a good old man, and, as became a good old man, prospered pretty
well. But President Lincoln and his sister knew neither these
excellent elders nor any other of their father's kin.

And those with whom the story of his own first twenty-one years is
bound up invite almost as summary treatment. Thomas Lincoln never
prospered like Mordecai and Josiah, and never seems to have left the
impress of his goodness or of anything else on any man. But, while
learning to carpenter under one Joseph Hanks, he married his employer's
niece Nancy, and by her became the father first of a daughter Sarah,
and four years later, at the farm near Hodgensville aforesaid, of
Abraham, the future President. In 1816, after several migrations, he
transported his household down the Ohio to a spot on the Indiana shore,
near which the village of Gentryville soon sprang up. There he abode
till Abraham was nearly twenty-one. When the boy was eight his mother
died, leaving him in his sister's care; but after a year or so Thomas
went back alone to Kentucky and, after br