f the Army

XXXVII

The 14th of April--Celebration at Fort Sumter--Last Cabinet
Meeting--Lincoln's Attitude toward Threats of Assassination--Booth's
Plot--Ford's Theater--Fate of the Assassins--The Mourning Pageant

XXXVIII

Lincoln's Early Environment--Its Effect on his Character--His Attitude
toward Slavery and the Slaveholder--His Schooling in Disappointment--His
Seeming Failures--His Real Successes--The Final Trial--His
Achievements--His Place in History

Index

ABRAHAM LINCOLN

I

Ancestry--Thomas Lincoln and Nancy Hanks--Rock Spring Farm--Lincoln's
Birth--Kentucky Schools--The Journey to Indiana--Pigeon Creek
Settlement--Indiana Schools--Sally Bush Lincoln--Gentryville--Work and
Books--Satires and Sermons--Flatboat Voyage to New Orleans--The Journey
to Illinois

Abraham Lincoln, the sixteenth President of the United States, was born
in a log cabin in the backwoods of Kentucky on the 12th day of February
1809. His father, Thomas Lincoln, was sixth in direct line of descent
from Samuel Lincoln, who emigrated from England to Massachusetts in 1638.
Following the prevailing drift of American settlement, these descendants
had, during a century and a half, successively moved from Massachusetts
to New Jersey, from New Jersey to Pennsylvania, from Pennsylvania to
Virginia, and from Virginia to Kentucky; while collateral branches of the
family eventually made homes in other parts of the West. In Pennsylvania
and Virginia some of them had acquired considerable property and local
prominence.

In the year 1780, Abraham Lincoln, the President's grandfather, was able
to pay into the public treasury of Virginia "one hundred and sixty
pounds, current money," for which he received a warrant, directed to the
"Principal Surveyor of any County within the commonwealth of Virginia,"
to lay off in one or more surveys for Abraham Linkhorn, his heirs or
assigns, the quantity of four hundred acres of land. The error in
spelling the name was a blunder of the clerk who made out the warrant.

With this warrant and his family of five children--Mordecai, Josiah,
Mary, Nancy, and Thomas--he moved to Kentucky, then still a county of
Virginia, in 1780, and began opening a farm. Four years later, while at
work with his three boys in the edge of his clearing, a party of
Indians, concealed in the brush, shot and killed him. Josiah, the second
son, ran to a neighboring fort for assistance; Mordecai, the eldest,
hurried to th