Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1864,

BY G. P. PUTNAM,

In the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the United States, for the Southern District of New York.

P

ABRAHAM LINCOLN.

RESIDENTS must first be candidates, and candidates are public property,

for all the great purposes of defamation and personal abuse; when one is named for the Presidency, a large section of the press, and a great portion of the people, find a direct interest in the propagation of whatever may tend to render contemptible the person named, and to make him appear unfit for any position of dignity or trust. Hence the present President is known over a great part of the country as "the baboon," and respectable writers in Europe have lamented the result of universal suffrage in his election; though perhaps no man ever occupied the same position who in himself and in his personal history was more truly representative of all that is best in the American people.

ABRAHAM LINCOLN was born in Hardin county, Kentucky (at a place now included in La Rue county), February 12th, 1809. His ancestors were Quakers, and migrated from Berks county, Pennsylvania, to Rockingham county, Virginia, whence his grandfather Abraham removed with his family to Kentucky, about 1782, and was killed by the Indians in 1784. Thomas Lincoln, the father of Abraham, was born in Virginia, and the President's mother, Nancy Hanks, was also a native of that state. Thomas Lincoln removed with his family in 1816 to a district now included in Spencer county, Indiana, where Abraham, then large for his age, assisted with an axe to clear away the forest. For the next ten years he was mostly occupied in this and other equally hard work on his father's farm, and in this period he went to school a little at intervals; but the whole time of his attendance at school amounted in the aggregate to not more than a year. He never went to school subsequently. His first experience of the world beyond home was acquired on a flat-boat, upon which he made the trip to New Orleans as a hired hand, when nineteen years of age. The advantages of travel under these circumstances are not great. Flat-boats it is true have been made the centre of a certain kind of free, western romance, and to float down the Ohio and the Mississippi in happy companionship with the "jolly flat-boat man," looks very pretty in a picture; especially if the picture be well painted, like Mount's. But unfortunately all flat-boat men were not jolly, and flat-boats didn't always float, flat-boat men were not the chosen of the human race, except perhaps for roughness, and flat-boats had very often to be poled along; there was much of coarse