military, and political; amid defeats and party clamor ; amid a multitude of counsellors and varying counsels ; amid the plottings of political generals and the blunders of incompetent commanders, "Honest Abe" was always "master of the position." Purity of intention, directness of purpose, patience and firmness, in every situa tion and in every emergency, ever marked his course of action. No public man, under the pressure of great responsibilities, adhered more strictly to Col. Crockett's well-known rule of "Be sure you're right, and then go ahead;" and those familiar phrases which were so often on his lips, "We must keep pegging away," and, "I have put my foot down," expressed the patient determination of a loyal but sorely tried heart. There was no Jacksonian swagger of "By the Eternal!" but there was an ever present sense of his accountability to God for his acts, and a practical reliance upon His arm of strength in all that he did, which peculiarly characterized President Lincoln. "Pray for me that I may receive the Divine assistance, without which I cannot succeed, but with which, success is certain," were his words of farewell to the assembled friends and neighbors who bade him God speed when he left his Springfield home to enter upon the duties of the Presidential chair. And again, four years later, in his second inaugural speech, which now seems to us as one of his last utterances, he thus speaks to a great people, whose sorrows he had borne, and whose success was at hand: "With malice towards none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle,

and for his widow and his orphans, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and a lasting peace among our selves and with all nations."

Such, then, was ABRAHAM LINCOLN, the natural outgrowth of free institutions. Indeed, such a character as his could not have been developed amid the deeply worn grooves and the limited influences of European society. It was as peculiarly American in all its features, as are our great mountains, prairies and watercourses; natural in growth, untrammelled in action, easy of adaptation to every varying circumstance of life, fearless in its courage, persistent in its purpose. If there is any truth in the theory that the mental characteristics of men are fashioned by the scenery amidst which they are reared, then must his life and character be taken as typical of our American genius and institutions.

It was this man, so true, so self-poised, so honest-to whom, amid all his weighty responsibilities, no fault is imputed, except that of too much kindness-whose life we now purpose to write.

CHAPTER I.

ABRAHAM LINCOLN'S BOYHOOD IN KENTUCKY.

His Ancestry. Their Residence in Pennsylvania and Virginia.-His Grandfather moves over into Kentucky.-Is killed by an Indian.-His Widow settles in Washington County. His son, Thomas Lincoln, marries and locates near Hodgenville.-Birth of Abraham Lincoln.La Rue County. His Early Life and Training in Kentucky.-Removal of the Family to Indiana.

THE ancestors of Abraham Lincoln were English, and of Quaker stock,-although the characteristic traits of that sect seem gradually to have disappeared under the stern discipline of the frontier life which fell to the lot of the earlier generations in this new country. We first find definite traces of them in Berks county, Pennsylvania, although it, probably, was not the place of their original settlement in America; and they may have been a branch of the family that settled, at an earlier date, in the Old Plymouth Colony. Indeed, tradition affirms that the Pennsylvania branch was transplanted from Hingham, Mass., and was derived from a common stock with Col. Benjamin Lincoln, of Revolutionary fame. There is, at least, a noticeable coincidence in the general prevalence among each American branch of Scriptural names the Benjamin, Levi, and Ezra of the Massachusetts family, having their counterpart in the Abraham, Thomas and Josiah of the Virginia and Kentucky race-a peculiarity to have been equally expected among sober Quakers and zealous Puritans.

"Old Berks," first settled in 1731, was not long the home of the Lincoln family, who seem to have emigrated before its organization as a county, in 1752, to what is now known as Rockingham county, Virginia.

Rockingham, now esteemed one of the most productive counties of the State of Virginia, was at that remote period in the very heart of the wilderness; a section, which, intersected by the beautiful valley of the Shenandoah, invited, by its natural resources, the advances of that civilization that even then looked hopefully forward toward the setting sun. And a

branch of the family, it is said, yet remains there, enjoying the benefits of the land which their ancestors selected and reclaimed with sturdy toil from its original wildness.

The Lincolns, however, were evidently of the stern old pioneer stock, which God seems to send into the world to break a way for the advance of a superior civilization; men who naturally court the adventure, the danger and the hardship of a frontier life, and who, having wrested a home from the wild elements of nature, straightway lose the desire of possession, and willingly relinquish all which they have gained for the sake of new excitements.

Abraham Lincoln, the grandfather of our subject, was of this class—a frontiersman, in the truest sense, whose rough but healthful life had been spent in felling the woods, in clearing the land which formed his homestead in the Shenandoah Valley—that valley since rendered so memorable in the war which his grandson has conducted in behalf of the Union and Universal Liberty-in hunting the abundant game, and in the hazards of an un

certain war with lurking savages. It is not surprising, then, that, to a man of such training and disposition, the glowing descriptions which, from about 1769 to 1780, began to spread throughout the older settlements concerning the incredible richness and beauty of the then recently-explored Kentucky Valley, should have possessed an irresistible charm! Perhaps, also, the settlements around him had already begun to be too far advanced for the highest enjoyment of his characteristic mode of life; for such men, when they begin to hear the axes of neighbors echoing around them, and from their cab in-doors can see the blue smoke curling upwards from other chimnies than their own, are apt to feel the need of "more elbow-room," and to take up their line of march for "solitudes more profound."

We must, also, in this case, take into consideration the fact that the first explorer of this Kentucky paradise, Daniel Boone, whose very name suggests a whole world of romantic adventure, was a neighbor of the Lincolns-having removed, when quite a lad, among the earlier emigrants from Eastern Pennsylvania to Berks county. Here he must have been a contemporary resident, and perhaps an acquaintance, in those familiar times when every one knew every one else in the same county. At all events, the Berks county people watched with eager interest and sympathy the adventurous career of Boone; and his achievements undoubtedly suggested new attractions to the more active and daring spirits among his boyhood companions, whose ideal of manhood he so nearly approached.

At this date, and for ten or twelve years later, the present State of Kentucky formed a part of the old