.

"The name of Abraham Lincoln will be cherished, so long as we have a history, as one of the wisest, purest and noblest magistrates, as one of the greatest benefactors to the human race, that have ever lived. So much firmness with such gentleness of heart, so much logical acuteness with such almost childlike simplicity and ingenuousness of nature, so much candor to weigh the wisdom of others, with so much tenacity to retain his own judgment, were rarely before united in one individual. Never was such vast political power placed in purer hands; never did a heart remain more humble and unsophisticated after the highest prizes of earthly ambition had been obtained."

-J. LOTHROP MOTLEY.

A

I

LINCOLN-FORTUNE'S FAVORITE

BRAHAM LINCOLN was well born, and the auspicious conditions into which he came at his birth were prophetic of the generous favors of fortune during all his life.

ANCESTRY

He was favored in the two lines of lineage which united in his wonderful personality. Both of those ancestral lines were of high-grade and each possessed qualities for which he was distinguished. The Lincoln line of lineage from its earliest history moved conspicuously upon a high plane, never lost, never broken and never joined in any unfavorable alliance.

The hardships of pushing back the wooded wilderness and redeeming the virgin soil for the use of man; the dangers of encounters with hostile savages; the struggle for daily bread, together with powerful religious influences, served to keep that line of lineage upon a lofty plane. The course which it followed extended from the Atlantic's rocky coast, westward through New England and across the Alleghenies and the mountains of Virginia, to the verdant valleys of KentuckyAbraham Lincoln's native state. And the dangers and hardships through which the rugged heroes of that line were called to pass, were calculated to produce the toughened fibre of Abraham Lincoln's giant frame and his superb moral stamina.

Soon after the Lincolns reached Kentucky, Abraham Lincoln-grandfather of the great President—was shot and instantly killed by a hostile Indian. This tragedy was wit

nessed by his youngest son, a lad of but six years of age, who was with his father at the time. Two older sons, who had accompanied their father to his work, witnessed the tragedy from a distance, and knowing that the attack indicated that other savages were lurking in the vicinity, fled, one to the nearby cabin for his rifle, and the other to the settlement for help. But the boy kept his faithful vigil close beside his father's lifeless form.

The Indian, as he approached his victim, saw the lad; and as he stooped to bear him as a trophy to his fellow savages, a well-aimed bullet from the cabin terminated his life. The boy thus rescued was Thomas Lincoln who became the father of Abraham Lincoln, the honored ruler and saviour of the nation.

Under the old English law of primogeniture, which was then in force in Kentucky, the large estate of Thomas Lincoln's father was inherited by the eldest son; and Thomas became dependent upon his widowed mother who was unable to contribute adequately to his needs. Little is known of his life until he became a man and found employment at day labor in a Kentucky frontier settlement.

A typical frontiersman was Thomas Lincoln, of stalwart form, and of fine qualities of heart and mind; as brave and fearless as had been his father; and as amiable and gentle as was his mother. He was tall and of great width of shoulders, with neck, chest and limbs fitted to grapple with the heavy tasks of the timbered wilderness, and subdue it into beauty and productiveness.

By common consent he became the arbiter of difficulties among his neighbors, for he was ever wise and fair in his judgments and fearless and effective in maintaining the verdicts he so frequently was called upon to render. These qualities were in Thomas Lincoln united with a childlike piety and humble trust in God. He was not learned in scholarship or books, but he was well and widely educated in the lessons of early pioneer experience and in Christian faith and life.

Judge H. C. Whitney tells us that, "William G. Greene, who spent one day with Thomas Lincoln and felt interested to make a study of him, avers that he was a man of great native reasoning powers and fine social magnetism, reminding him of his illustrious son. He describes him as 'very stoutly built, about five feet ten inches high, and weighing nearly two hundred pounds.' His desire was to be on terms of amity and sociability with every one."'1

William Eleroy Curtis has this to say of him: "He must have had good stuff in him, for when he was twenty-five years old he had saved enough from his wages to buy a farm in Hardin county. Local tradition represents him to have been 'an easy going man, slow to anger, but when aroused a formidable adversary.''

Mrs. Caroline Hanks Hitchcock says: "He had been forced from his boyhood to shift for himself in a young and undeveloped country. He is known to have been a man who in spite of this wandering life contracted no bad habits. He was temperate and honest, and his name is recorded in more than one place in the records of Kentucky. He was a churchgoer, and if tradition may be believed, a stout defender of his peculiar religious views. He held advanced ideas of what was already an important public question in Kentucky, the right to hold Negroes as slaves. One of his old friends has said of him that he was 'just steeped full of notions about the wrongs of slavery and the rights of men, as explained by Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Paine.' These facts show that he must have been a man of some natural intellectual attainment.

"Considering the disadvantages under which he labored, he had a very good start in life when he became engaged to Nancy Hanks. He had a trade and owned a farm which he had bought in 1803 in Buffalo, and also owned land in Elizabethtown. If all the conditions of his life be taken into con1 Lincoln the Citizen, pp. 6-10.

2 The True Abraham Lincoln, p. 18.

sideration, it is not true, as has been said, that Thomas Lincoln was at this time a shiftless and purposeless man.'

993

Indeed in every needed quality Thomas Lincoln was fitted to become the father of the one who, in his day, was both the Moses and the Joshua to deliver an enslaved race from the house of bondage, and to lead them into the land of promise. No excesses of his own, or of his ancestors, mingled weakening poison in the blood which flowed throughout his stalwart frame. He possessed qualities of body and mind that constitute the richest heritage which any man can give to posterity.

And that those noble qualities might, with certainty, be inherited by his offspring, it was provided that when Thomas Lincoln stood at the hymeneal altar, Nancy Hanks should stand beside him, and then and there plight with him her solemn marriage troth. She was his superior in every high quality. In charm of personality, exuberance of spirits, and deep religious experience she was unequalled in all that frontier region. She was of worthy and distinguished ancestry, extending back through brave and brawny pioneers to the famous early heroes of Virginia.

"The roots of the husband's ancestral tree reached down to Puritan England, and on the part of the wife, to the days when a King of Britain confronted Imperial Rome."

Nicolay and Hay, President Lincoln's private secretaries, in their great work, write of Nancy Hanks as she appeared at the time of her marriage, as follows: "All accounts represent her as a handsome young woman of twenty-three, of appearance and intellect superior to her lowly fortunes. She could read and write, a remarkable accomplishment in her circle, and even taught her husband to form the letters of his

Noah Brooks says of Nancy Hanks that she "was a woman of great force of character and passionately fond of

8 Nancy Hanks, pp. 56-58.

Abraham Lincoln, A History, Vol. I., p. 24.