Abraham Lincoln was born on the 12th of February, 1809, in Hardin, now Larue county, Kentucky, near Nolin creek, about a mile and a half from Hodgenville, the present county seat of Larue County. His parents were exceedingly poor and illiterate, the father being neither able to read nor write, while the mother could read but not write. Of his progenitors the following facts are gleaned from the able eulogy, by Rev. Elias Nason, of North Billerica, delivered before the New England Historic-Genealogical Society, and Hon. Solomon Lincoln of Hingham, 's "Notes on the Lincoln Family of Massachusetts."

The line of Mr. Lincoln's ancestry has been followed with certainty only to his great-grandfather, who emigrated about the middle of the last century from Berks county, Pennsylvania, to Rockingham county, Virginia. Where the Lincolns of Berks county came from, no record has as yet divulged, but they are believed to have been Quakers, and to have escaped from the intolerance of Massachusetts, to the friendly soil of Pennsylvania. The argument which tends most strongly to bind the ancestry of the late president to that of the distinguished Massachusetts Lincolns, is the great similarity of the Chistian names found in the two families, and one of these by no means a common one. Hingham, Mass., was formally settled September 18, 1635, by the Rev. Peter Hobart and twenty nine others, who drew house lots on that day. In the next year house lots were granted to Thomas Lincoln the miller, Thomas Lincoln the weaver, and Thomas Lincoln the cooper, and later still or in 1637, to Samuel Lincoln brother of Thomas the weaver. Samuel Lincoln, of this family the fourth original settler, had four sons: Samuel, Daniel, Mordecai and Thomas. Mordecai Lincoln had a son Mordecai, born April 24th, 1686, and another named Abraham, born Jan. 13th, 1689. Here we have the three names, Mordecai, Thomas and Abraham in frequent and familiar use. In Rupps's History of Berks and Lebanon Counties, Pennsylvania, we find that among the taxable inhabitants of Exeter, Berks county, soon after its organization in 1752, were Mordecai Lincoln and Abraham Lincoln; also, that Thomas Lincoln was living in Reading as early as 1757, and that Abraham Lincoln was one of the representatives from Berks county, in 1782-5 and a member of the convention for the framing of the constitution of the state in 1789-90. In a correspondence held in 1848 between the late president while a member of congress, and Hon. Solomon Lincoln of Hingham, the former stated: "My father's name is Thomas, my grandfather's was Abraham, the same of my own. My grandfather went from Rockingham county in Virginia, to Kentucky about the year 1782, and two years afterwards was killed by the Indians. We have a vague tradition that my great-grandfather went from Pennsylvania to Virginia, and that he was a Quaker. Further than this, I have never heard anything. It may do no harm to say that 'Abraham ' and 'Mordecai' are common names in our family." In a subsequent letter, he says: I have mentioned that my grandfather's name was Abraham. He had, as I think I have heard, four brothers, Isaac, Jacob, Thomas and John. He had three sons, Mordecai, Josiah and Thomas, the last my father. My uncle Mordecai had three sons, Abraham, James and Mordecai; uncle Josiah had several daughters and an only son Thomas. My father has an only child, myself of course. This is all I know certainly on the subject of names; it

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is, however, my father's understanding that Abraham, Mordecai and Thomas are old family names of ours." At the present day the above notes and surmises are all that can be offered in regard to the connection of the two families, and we shall have to wait for time to develop the hidden facts requisite to prove the descent from the same source.

Thomas Lincoln, the father of the president, was born in Virginia about the year 1778, so that he was a mere infant at the period of his father's removal to Kentucky, and not much more when in 1784, while at work in the field, a short distance from his cabin, he was stealthily approached by an Indian, and shot dead. In 1806, when Thomas was in his twenty-eighth year, he married Nancy Hanks,' like himself a Virginian by birth, and took her to the humble log cabin, where three years later was born the future president of the United States. They had three children, a daughter who married Aaron Grigsby when she was but fourteen years of age, and died shortly afterwards, and two sons, Abraham, named from his grandfather, and Thomas, who died in infancy, In 1816, when Abraham was but seven years old, his father removed from Kentucky and settled in Spencer county, Indiana, where three years later his mother died, the mother of whom in after years, with tears in his eyes, he said: "All that I am or hope to be, I owe to my angel mother." Her grave lies, unmarked, near the village of Gentryville, Spencer county, Indiana; but the first use that her reverent son put the little education he had acquired after her death, was to indite an epistle to an itinerant minister of the Baptist church, by the name of Elkin, whom he had once heard preach before his immigration from Kentucky, asking him to come and perform religious services over her grave, which he accordingly did about a twelve month after she had been laid to rest. Although it has been stated, and on no poorer authority than the late president himself, that the aggregate of all the school education of his life could be embraced within the limits of one year, still it seems that in this short space of time he was under the charge of no less than five teachers, two, Riney and Caleb Hazel in Kentucky, and Andrew Crawford, Sweeney and Dorsey in Indiana. It is to Andrew Crawford that the story is told of the president's "pulling fodder," for three days, to pay for a Life of Washington. It happened in this wise: Lincoln borrowed from his teacher a copy of Ramsey's Life of Washington, which he carelessly left in an open window, when a shower coming on it was drenched and nearly ruined. Hastening to his teacher in great grief and alarm, he explained the accident and offered to work out the worth of the book's damage, which he did in the manner detailed, and was rewarded for his behavior by being presented with the book. The two works with which he became best acquainted in his youth, were Æsop's Fables and Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress. And who can follow the record of his life without easily detecting the effect they had upon the development of two of his distinguishing characteristics-his legend of anecdote and reverence for religion.

In the autumn of 1819, somewhat more than a year after the death of Abraham's mother, his father married again, this time a widow lady with three children, Mrs. Sally Johnston of Elizabethtown, Kentucky. I think it is to this lady more than to his own mother that he is indebted for his good early training and formation of character. And from the following

letter in possession of the writer written to his step-brother, her own son, it will be seen that he was much more chary of her rights than her own flesh and blood. It bears the superscription, "John D. Johnston, Charleston, Coles county, Illinois," and is dated, "Springfield, Nov. 25, 1851," and reads as follows:

Dear Brother: Your letter of the 22d is just received. Your proposal about selling the East forty acres of land is all that I want or could claim for myself, but I am not satisfied with it on Mother's account. I want her to have her living, and I feel that it is my duty, to some extent, to see that she is not wronged. She had a right of dower (that is the use of one-third for life) in the other two forties; but it seems she has already let you take that, hook and line. She now has the use of the whole of the East forty, as long as she lives; and if it be sold of course she is entitled to the interest on all the money it brings as long as she lives; but you propose to sell it for three hundred dollars, take one hundred away with you, and leave her two hundred, at 8 per cent, making her the enormous sum of sixteen dollars a year. Now, if you are satisfied with treating her in that way, I am not. It is true, that you are to have that forty for two hundred dollars, at Mother's death; but you are not to have it before. I am confident that land can be made to produce for Mother at least $30 a year, and I cannot, to oblige any living person consent that she shall be put on an allowance of sixteen dollars a year. Yours, &c., A. LINCOLN.

This lady in her eightieth year was still living at the time of the president's death, near Farmington, Coles county, Illinois.

At the age of nineteen Mr. Lincoln made his first "strike out from home," taking charge of a flat boat and its cargo for the sugar plantations near New Orleans. During the laborious voyage he and his only companion, a son of his employer, successfully defended themselves against an attack made at night by a band of negroes for the purposes of plunder, and escaping unhurt reached their destination, disposed of their freight and returned to their homes in safety. In March, 1830, Abraham having just completed his majority, started with his father and family from their Indiana home and after a tedious journey of fifteen days halted on the banks of the Sangamon river, near Decatur, Macon county, Illinois. It was at this era in his life that he acquired the epithet afterwards used towards him of “the rail-splitter of Illinois," he having split rails enough to fence in a lot of ten acres, the dimensions of his father's new home. Here, however, the family did not remain long. Finding the locality unhealthy they removed to Coles county in the same state, where old Thomas Lincoln died January 17th, 1851, in his seventy-third year. Having cut entirely loose from his family after their removal to Coles county, we next find Lincoln hired by a man named Offutt to build a flat boat at twelve dollars per month, which when completed he took to New Orleans, with a drove of hogs, for his employer. On his return his employer placed him in charge of a store and mill at New Salem, Menard county, Illinois. It was while young Lincoln was engaged in the duties of tending store, that he borrowed from an acquaintance a copy of Kirkham's

English grammar and commenced its study. The identical book used by Mr. Lincoln is now in the possession of Capt. R. R. Rutledge, with whose father Mr. Lincoln lived about this time. His name, together with several remarks, originally appeared on the fly leaf, but the leaf has been torn out. In this connection it may be of interest to state, that the writer has in his possession a page of Mr. Lincoln's copy-book made in 1824, when he was fifteen years old. It is of ordinary foolscap size, and has written across the bottom in large characters, " ABRAHAM LINCOLN'S BOOK." This interesting relic was presented to the writer, together with many others of a similar character, by his valued friend the Hon. William H. Herndon of Springfield, Illinois, to whom he is indebted for much valuable information.

It was in the spring of 1832, that the skirmishes with the Sac Indians began, known in history as the Black Hawk war, whereupon Governor Reynolds, of Illinois, issued his call for volunteers, and among the first to offer themselves was Abraham Lincoln, who was almost unanimously elected captain of a company, formed in Menard county, from among his friends and neighbors. There was no fighting to be done, so the captain and his company had no chance of distinguishing themselves on the field, except in the manner described in the following extract from a speech delivered by Mr. Lincoln, when a member of congress, upon the nomination of General Cass, for the presidency, the general's friends having endeavored to endow their hero with a military reputation. "By the way, Mr. Speaker," said Mr. Lincoln, "do you know I am a military hero? Yes, sir, in the days of the Black Hawk war, I fought, bled and came away. Speaking of General Cass's career reminds me of my own. I was not at Stillman's defeat, but I was about as near it as Cass to Hull's surrender; and like him I saw the place very soon afterward. It is quite certain I did not break my sword, for I had none to break; but I bent my musket pretty badly on one occasion. * * If General Cass went in advance of me in picking whortleberries, I guess I surpassed him in charges upon the wild onions. If he saw any live, fighting Indians, it was more that I did, but I had a good many bloody struggles with the mosquitoes; and although I never fainted from loss of blood, I can truly say I was often very hungry."

Mr. Lincoln returned home but about ten days before the state election and was immediately solicited to become a candidate for the legislature, on the Clay ticket, to which position however he was not elected. It was during this canvas that he made his first political speech, and sufficiently is it characteristic of the man to find a place here. He said: "Gentlemen, fellow-citizens, I presume you all know who I am, I am humble Abraham Lincoln. I have been solicited by many friends to become a candidate for the legislature. My politics are short and sweet. I am in favor of a national bank. I am in favor of the internal improvement system, and a high protective tariff. These are my sentiments and political principles. If elected I shall be thankful, if not it will be all the same." After the election Mr. Lincoln entered into partnership with a man named Berry, in the town of New Salem ; but the latter proving a wild, dissipated fellow,the business soon became a wreck. He was then appointed postmaster of the town by President Jackson, and about the same time became deputy surveyor of the county. Not having the slightest knowledge of surveying, he borrowed

the necessary books from his chief, and after much arduous study procured a compass and chain and entered upon his duties. He had not been long engaged in his new employment, when his implements were attached for a debt of the old firm and sold, but generously purchased by a friend of his, one James Short, and gratuitously given back. In 1834, he became again a candidate for the legislature, and this time was elected by the highest vote cast for any candidate. To the same legislature was chosen Major John T. Stuart, whom Mr. Lincoln had known as a captain in the Black Hawk war. Major Stuart was one of the then leaders of the Springfield bar, and urged and encouraged Mr. Lincoln to study the law and make it his profession; enforcing his advice by offering him the loan of any law books he might have in his possession. Mr. Lincoln was not loth to accept this offer, and at the close of the session returned to his home in New Salem " with a load of borrowed legal lore," and began its study with great diligence.

In 1836, Mr. Lincoln was re-elected to the legislature, and, in the autumn of the same year, was admitted to the bar. We do not know the exact date of his admission, but he could not have been very long unemployed, for the writer has in his possession the original autograph præcipe, issued by Mr. Lincoln for the writ in his first case. It is sufficiently curious and interesting to find a place here, and is as follows:

The Clerk of the Sangamon Circuit Court, will issue a Summons returnable to the next Term of Mar. Sangamon Circuit Court. October 8th, 1836. A. LINCOLN.

It was at the next session of the Legislature, that Abraham Lincoln and Stephen A. Douglas met for the first time, and little then did these two men think of the important relations they were to hold in after life towards each other. The most prominent act of the session was that of removing the capital of the state from Vandalia to Springfield, and so active a part did Mr. Lincoln take in effecting this measure, that he was solicited to remove his residence to the new capital, which he accordingly did in the spring of 1837, and became a partner in the practice of the law, with his former adviser, Major Stuart. This partnership, under the name of "Stuart & Lincoln," lasted about two years. Mr. Lincoln then formed a business connection with Hon. S. T. Logan, the firm being "Logan & Lincoln," which continued until 1843. The next year he formed his third and last partnership, that of Lincoln & Herndon," which was only closed by the tragedy of April, '65. Upon the breaking up of Mr. Lincoln's second partnership, caused mainly by both members of the firm having similar political aspirations, he accosted his future partner and best friend, then quite a young and rather obscure practitioner, with, "Billy, let us go into business together!" which proposition Mr. Herndon thankfully accepted. Mr. Lincoln arranged the terms of partnership, and during the twenty-one years they were partners together, they never kept a separate account, but held each others money as they did their own, and never suspected nor experienced a wrong, and never had a misunderstanding nor a grievance. When Mr. Lincoln was about to leave