A CHILD OF POVERTY

Abraham Lincoln born to Thomas and Nancy Hanks Lincoln, in a log cabin on a farm near Hodgdenville, La Rue County, Kentucky, February 12, 1809.- Kentucky then a frontier state, to which Abraham's grandfather came about 1780, and where in 1784 he was killed by the Indians. Narrow escape of Abraham's father, who became a wandering laborer, unable to read or write. His rollicking marriage feast, June 12, 1806. — Abraham's privations in childhood. His tribute to a soldier of 1812.-Troubled by a bad land title and by slavery, the family leave Kentucky to make a new home in a free state.

ABRAHAM LINCOLN was born to poverty and ignorance. A rude log cabin on a poor, scrub farm was his birthplace. His father could not read and could barely write his name. His mother could both read and write, but she knew little of books or the world.

Their home was on the Kentucky frontier, and there was not yet a state in all the West that lay beyond them. Kentucky itself had been a savage waste only a few years before, that "dark and bloody ground" on which no white man had set foot. The generation of bold pioneers who had threaded their way over the Alleghanies in the steps of Daniel Boone were still on the scene, and the boy Lincoln

10 VIMU AIMBOTLIAD

ABRAHAM LINCOLN

heard from their lips the moving story of how they had hewn a path for civilization across the mountains and wrested peace from the roving red men in hardfought battles.

His own grandfather, Abraham Lincoln, for whom he was named had been one of that band of brave homeseekers. This elder Abraham, like most of the Kentucky settlers, came from Virginia. He found the land a wilderness. The buffalo roamed the blue-grass fields, and as Boone said, "were more frequent than I have seen cattle in the settlements, browsing on the leaves of the cane, or cropping the herbage on these extensive plains, fearless because ignorant of the violence of man.”

Warlike tribes of Indians lurked in the giant forests, and the white men, clad in skins, needed always to be on guard for their lives. They were as ready with the knife as with the rifle, and could outrun and outfight the Indian. They were of the same daring breed as the hardy men who have pushed the frontier westward to the Pacific and been the pathfinders of the nation.

Abraham Lincoln, the pioneer, took up a tract of land near where the city of Louisville now stands and built his home on it. There he was killed by the Indians while opening a farm. He was going to his day's work in the clearing when a shot rang

out from the brush and he fell dead.

His three sons were with him at the time. One of the boys started on a run to summon aid from the nearest fort, for there were forts all over Kentucky, in which the people gathered and defended themselves when attacked.

Another son fled to the cabin for a rifle. Seizing the gun he looked out and saw an Indian stooping over the third and youngest boy, who had been left beside the murdered father. To save him from the hands of the savage he must shoot quickly through a crack between the logs of the cabin wall, at the risk of killing his baby brother. He aimed at a white ornament on the Indian's breast and fired. His aim was true, and the red foe pitched forward dead. By this narrow chance the little fellow, Thomas, was spared to be the father of Abraham Lincoln.

The elder Abraham was a man of some thrift, for when he sold his property in Virginia the sale brought him $600, and he was a man of some spirit, else he would not have been a Kentucky pioneer. His grandson has said of him that he was a member of one of the "undistinguished families - second families perhaps I should say," but the younger Abraham lived and died without any definite knowledge of his grandfather's origin. "I am more con

cerned," he said, "to know what his grandson will be." He knew only of a "vague tradition that the grandfather had come from Pennsylvania to Virginia. Those who sought to set up ancestral claims for him failed to arouse his interest in the subject.

It is the accepted belief now that he was descended from a Massachusetts family which migrated to Pennsylvania, thence to Virginia, and finally to Kentucky. This, moreover, is not a very proud boast, for his branch of the Massachusetts Lincolns was wholly unknown to fame and fortune. Thus his descent has been traced through seven generations, disclosing four farmers, a miller, a blacksmith, and a weaver.

All that is known of Abraham Lincoln, the grandfather, indicates that he measured up to the average of the men around him, the sturdy state builders who founded the first commonwealth of the West. In his untimely death, his family suffered a dire misfortune. The new home was broken up. The widow moved to another county, while the boy who shot the Indian was so embittered by his experience that for some time he hunted the redskins in a passion for revenge.

Under the law, most of the property went to the oldest son. Thus Thomas, the youngest, was left