s to decent families and tends to undermine
them.

We can understand, then, how it happened in many cases that highland
families founded by well-informed and thrifty pioneers deteriorated
into illiterate and idle triflers, all run down at heels. Lincoln's
family is an apt illustration. His grandfather sold his Virginia farms
for seventeen thousand dollars and bought large tracts of land in
Kentucky. But Abraham Lincoln's father set up housekeeping in a shed,
later built a log hut of one room without doors or windows (although he
was a carpenter by trade), then moved to another cabin a little better,
tired of it, moved over into Indiana, and made his family spend the
winter in a half-faced camp, where they were saved from freezing by
keeping up a great log fire in front of the lean-to through days and
nights when the temperature was far below zero. The Lincolns were not
mountaineers, but they were of the same stock, and were subjected to
much the same vicissitudes.

So the southern highlanders languished in isolation, sunk in a Rip Van
Winkle sleep, until aroused by the thunder-crash of the Civil War. Let
John Fox tell the extraordinary result of that awakening.--

"The American mountaineer was discovered, I say, at the beginning
of the war, when the Confederate leaders were counting on the
presumption that Mason and Dixon's Line was the dividing line
between the North and South, and formed, therefore, the plan of
marching an army from Wheeling, in West Virginia, to some point on
the Lakes, and thus dissevering the North at one blow.

"The plan seemed so feasible that it is said to have materially
aided the sale of Confederate bonds in England. But when Captain
Garnett, a West Point graduate, started to carry it out, he got no
farther than Harper's Ferry. When he struck the mountains, he
struck enemies who shot at his men from ambush, cut down bridges
before him, carried the news of his march to the Federals, and
Garnett himself fell with a bullet from a mountaineer's squirrel
rifle at Harper's Ferry.

"Then the South began to realize what a long, lean, powerful arm of
the Union it was that the southern mountaineer stretched through
its very vitals; for that arm helped hold Kentucky in the Union by
giving preponderance to the Union sympathizers in the Blue-grass;
it kept the east Tennesseans loyal to the man; it made West