ith my grateful
acknowledgments to both you and them for the very flattering terms in
which the request is communicated, I transmit you the copies. The copies I
send you are as reported and printed by the respective friends of Senator
Douglas and myself, at the time--that is, his by his friends, and mine by
mine. It would be an unwarrantable liberty for us to change a word or
a letter in his, and the changes I have made in mine, you perceive, are
verbal only, and very few in number. I wish the reprint to be precisely as
the copies I send, without any comment whatever.

Yours very truly,

A. LINCOLN.

AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH

TO J. W. FELL,

SPRINGFIELD, December 20, 1859.

J. W. FELL, Esq.

MY DEAR SIR:--Herewith is a little sketch, as you requested. There is not
much of it, for the reason, I suppose, that there is not much of me. If
anything be made out of it, I wish it to be modest, and not to go beyond
the material. If it were thought necessary to incorporate anything from
any of my speeches I suppose there would be no objection. Of course it
must not appear to have been written by myself.

Yours very truly, A. LINCOLN

------

I was born February 12, 1809, in Hardin County, Kentucky. My parents
were both born in Virginia, of undistinguished families--second families,
perhaps I should say. My mother, who died in my tenth year, was of a
family of the name of Hanks, some of whom now reside in Adams, and others
in Macon County, Illinois. My paternal grandfather, Abraham Lincoln,
emigrated from Rockingham County, Virginia, to Kentucky about 1781 or
1782, where a year or two later he was killed by the Indians, not in
battle, but by stealth, when he was laboring to open a farm in the forest.
His ancestors, who were Quakers, went to Virginia from Berks County,
Pennsylvania. An effort to identify them with the New England family
of the same name ended in nothing more definite than a similarity of
Christian names in both families, such as Enoch, Levi, Mordecai, Solomon,
Abraham, and the like.

My father, at the death of his father, was but six years of age, and he
grew up literally without education. He removed from Kentucky to what is
now Spencer County, Indiana, in my eighth year. We reached our new home
about the time that State came into the Union. It was a wild region, with
many bears and other wild animals still in the woods. There I grew up.
There were some schools, so called, but no qualificatio