always himself, and his humanity is so large that he appeals to us all. Not indeed, as a mere Sundayschool hero, or as a conventional "example to the young "they little understand him who would thus tell his story-but as a man of like passions with us all, a man more responsive than others to some, at least, of the claims and possibilities of life, more burdened than others by destiny.

In these pages I have tried to bring the reader to a position from which he may see this tall figure in what has seemed to me to be its most striking and characteristic aspect. His own public and private utterances, the more important of which are now accessible to all, read with the history of the time will supplement this volume with much significant material which could not be included in it. But here, I trust, the reader may find the man, Abraham Lincoln, whom to know was to love.

It was in 1637-the year of Hampden's refusal to pay ship-money-that three brothers of the name of Lincoln sailed from Bristol to settle in the colony of Massachusetts. A century and a half later, while the colonists, under the leadership of a Virginian soldier, were still engaged in declaring their independence of the Mother-country, one of the descendants of these brothers crossed the mountains that separated Virginia from the rich Indian lands to the westward, The Lincolns, then, may fairly be described as among the foremost of American

pioneers.

During that interval of a century and a half, Abraham Lincoln's ancestors-all belonging to the

independent working-class, as distinguished from mere wage-earners-had sojourned first in one colony and then in another, slowly but steadily moving South and West. In Pennsylvania they had prospered, and one of them, at least, was associated with the Quakers of that State. In some brief autobiographical notes Lincoln remarks that his ancestors, when they left Berks County, Pennsylvania, and removed into Virginia, were Quakers. The allusion has significance, not merely because it is the only reference to any religious body in these notes, but because it suggests an interesting spiritual affiliation to which we shall refer again later.

John Lincoln's "Quakerism "—it is not clear that he was actually a member of the Society of Friends -did not prevent one of his sons from serving in the Revolutionary War; nor, in spite of the traditions of Penn's friendship with the Red-men, could it save another from death at the hands of the Indians.

This Abraham Lincoln, the elder, sold his Virginian farm, and about 1781, took the Wilderness-trail for Kentucky. He was one of the first 20,000 of those who crossed the Cumberland Ridge, attracted by the fertility of a country whose Indian name of "the dark and bloody land" so well suggests the years of its conquest and settlement under Boone and other leaders as adventurous as he.1

Abraham Lincoln took with him a wife and three sons when he crossed the mountains, and all shared together for some seven years in the hardships of that

1 One of these pushed on beyond the borders of Kentucky into the country of the Illinois, "the land of full-grown men,” and with almost incredible daring and determination captured it from its British rulers to become in future years the home of one of the greatest of American statesmen.

wild life. Then, as they were at work on their clearing outside the friendly shelter of Hughes Station, they were surprised by Indians, the father being killed and the others only narrowly escaping.

Old Abraham Lincoln may have been a prosperous settler, but in the nature of things he could leave but little property behind him, beyond certain wide tracts of uncleared land, a couple of horses, a few head of cattle, some tools, guns, and the simplest of household necessaries. And these passed, by the prevailing law of Virginia, to his eldest son, Mordecai.

His widow removed further westward into what is now the centre of the State, and here her youngest son, Tom, early inured to labour, and without any of the advantages of education, became in due time a country carpenter. Round - faced and compact in build, with grey eyes, a prominent nose, and coarse black hair, he grew to be a favourite among his neighbours, for his kindly good-nature, companionableness, and honesty. He seems to have been endowed with some of the best qualities of the pioneer, and to have possessed an obstinacy of purpose, a slow, sturdy determination, and personal rectitude, which have been too easily forgotten. He was probably of a lethargic temperament; there is a tradition that he was at times subject to fits of depression, and that at rare intervals, and under extreme provocation, he exhibited a certain violence of unrestrained passion. His choice of two noble women as his successive partners in life, indicates some corresponding quality of character.1 But he belonged to a class which could not thrive in the

1 See H. M. Jenkin's, "The Mother of Lincoln " (Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, for July 1900).

Southern States, the class of free labourers and artizans. In the North he would doubtless have become, if not as prosperous as other men of equal skill and rectitude -for he seems to have had less than the average of ambition—yet free at least from actual poverty or dependence upon others. No man in his condition of life need, at that time, have remained really poor in the North. But in the South it was different. Slavery and independent labour could not prosper side by side; and as the gentry of Virginia brought their "property" into Kentucky, the descendants of the first hardy settlers either rose upon the new flood into affluence, were swept on before it further West, or, if they remained, sank into insignificance and social ostracism as "crackers " or "poor white trash."

During Thomas Lincoln's youth a great change came over the new land. He had been born in 1778, a year after his more successful contemporary, Henry Clay, whose name is so intimately associated with all the fortunes of Kentucky. Clay came over the mountains twenty years later, when the population of Kentucky already numbered nearly 200,000, onefifth of whom were slaves. Almost immediately, he became prosperous as an eloquent lawyer in courts whose principal business was the settlement of conflicting land claims. In those twenty years, Kentucky had passed out of the hands of the pioneers. Other men with other manners were taking the places of the old frontier leaders with their coon-skin caps, their tasselled shirts, their moccasins and fringed leggings; their long rifles, powder-horns and axes; their bold, free manners, their rough honesty and justice, and their vices of cruelty and dissipation. The trickster

and land-speculator had followed so fast upon their heels, that they had often been unable to retain for themselves the very lands they had won and cleared at so much peril. With these came also the lawyer and the judge, the surveyor, and the landed gentry.

Much of the old social system disappeared with the passing of the frontiersman. But even when buffalo and Red-skin had become little more than legends, when the women of Kentucky were ceasing to treasure Indian scalps among their trophies, and the towns of Lexington and Louisville were centres of social and even literary interest, whisky-drinking and boisterous merriment still ruled at all festivities, and personal prowess was the surest path to popularity.

A little before midsummer, 1806, this noisy mirthmaking seems to have found full scope at the wedding of Thomas Lincoln and his first-cousin, Nancy Hanks. The rude fare and roaring fun associated by tradition with this occasion, even if they could be transferred to this cold type and paper by the pen of a Rabelais, might only obscure the two figures whom we see but dimly in its midst the young carpenter and his bride. From this distance she looks pathetically out of place at that noisy wedding feast, given by the well-to-do guardian of this, the youngest member of a large and impoverished family of orphans.

A mystery has always hung over the name and story of Nancy Hanks,1 There is, however, clear documentary evidence that Nancy was the youngest child of Joseph Hanks of Nelson County, Kentucky, whose wife was Nanny" Shipley, daughter of Robert Shipley of Amelia County, Virginia, probably

1 See Appendix A.