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LIFE OF ABRAHAM LINCOLN.

CHAPTER I.

IT is necessary that every American should have an indisputable grandfather, in order to be represented in the Revolutionary period by actual ancestral service, or connected with it by ancestral reminiscence. Further back than a grandfather few can go with satisfaction. Everything lies wrapt in colonial obscurity and confusion; and you have either to claim that the Smiths came over in the Mayflower, or that the Joneses were originally a Huguenot family of vast wealth and the gentlest blood; or that the Browns are descended from the race of Powhattan in the direct line; or you are left in an extremely embarrassing uncertainty as to the fact of great-grandparents.

We do not find it profitable to travel far into the past in search of Abraham Lincoln's ancestry. There is a dim possibility that he is of the stock of the New England Lincolns, of Plymouth colony; but the noble science of heraldry is almost obsolete in this country, and

are meagre.

none of Mr. Lincoln's family seems to have been aware of the preciousness of long pedigrees, so that the records The first that is known of his forefathers is that they were Quakers, who may have assisted in those shrewd bargains which honest William Penn drove with the Indians, for we find them settled at an early day in the old county of Berks, in Pennsylvania, where doubtless some of their descendants yet remain. Whether these have fallen away from the calm faith of their ancestors is not a matter of history, but it is certain that the family from which the present Abraham Lincoln derives his lineage, long ago ceased to be Quaker in everything but its devout Scriptural names. es. His grandfather, (anterior to whom is incertitude, and absolute darkness of names and dates,) was born in Rockingham county, Virginia, whither part of the family had emigrated from Pennsylvania; and had four brothers, patriarchially and apostolically named Isaac, Jacob, John, and Thomas; himself heading the list as Abraham Lincoln.

The descendants of Jacob and John, if any survive, still reside in Virginia; Thomas settled in the Cumberland region, near the adjunction of North Carolina, Tennessee, and Virginia, and very probably his children's children may there be found. Late in the last century, Abraham, with his wife and five children, removed from Rockingham to Kentucky, at a time when the border was the scene of savage warfare between the Indians and the whites, and when frontier life was

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