Project Gutenberg's The Boys' Life of Abraham Lincoln, by Helen Nicolay

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Title: The Boys' Life of Abraham Lincoln

Author: Helen Nicolay

Posting Date: September 21, 2008 [EBook #1815]
Release Date: July, 1999

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE BOYS' LIFE OF ABRAHAM LINCOLN ***

Produced by Dianne Bean

THE BOYS' LIFE OF ABRAHAM LINCOLN

by Helen Nicolay

I. A PRESIDENT'S CHILDHOOD

Abraham Lincoln's forefathers were pioneers--men who left their homes to
open up the wilderness and make the way plain for others to follow them.
For one hundred and seventy years, ever since the first American Lincoln
came from England to Massachusetts in 1638, they had been moving
slowly westward as new settlements were made in the forest. They faced
solitude, privation, and all the dangers and hardships that beset men
who take up their homes where only beasts and wild men have had homes
before; but they continued to press steadily forward, though they lost
fortune and sometimes even life itself, in their westward progress.
Back in Pennsylvania and New Jersey some of the Lincolns had been men of
wealth and influence. In Kentucky, where the future President was born
on February 12, 1809, his parents lived in deep poverty Their home was
a small log cabin of the rudest kind, and nothing seemed more
unlikely than that their child, coming into the world in such humble
surroundings, was destined to be the greatest man of his time. True to
his race, he also was to be a pioneer--not indeed, like his ancestors,
a leader into new woods and unexplored fields, but a pioneer of a nobler
and grander sort, directing the thoughts of men ever toward the right,
and leading the American people, through difficulties and dangers and a
mighty war, to peace and freedom.

The story of this wonderful man begins and ends with a tragedy, for his
grandfather, also named Abraham, was killed by a shot from an Indian's
rifle while peaceably at work with his three sons on the edge of their
frontier clearing. Eighty-one years later the President himself met
death by an assassin's bullet. The murderer of one was a savage of the