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      The Boy

       Table of Contents

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      ABRAHAM LINCOLN:

       HIS STORY

       Table of Contents

      CHAPTER I

      THE BOY

      In every century are born men whose lives bring messages of help and hope to those who come after. Such an one was Abraham Lincoln. The year of his birth, 1809, was a lion-year. Charles Darwin was born the same day; Mendelssohn, Edgar Allen Poe, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Alfred Tennyson, and William Ewart Gladstone in the same year. Few boys of today start life so handicapped by hardships or with fewer opportunities. Lincoln knew little about his ancestors. In later life he said that he was more concerned to know what his grandfather's grandson would be than who his grandfather had been.

      One of his grandfathers was named Abraham Lincoln, and went as a pioneer to Kentucky—then the "Dark and Bloody Ground" claimed and guarded by fierce Indian tribes. There, near where the city of Louisville now stands, he cleared a field in the forest, not far from a stockade erected by other settlers, and built a cabin. A schoolmaster of that time ​remembers boarding in a similar cabin, which had but one room sixteen feet square, where lived a father, mother, ten children, three dogs, and two cats. It was so cold at night that he slept on his shoes in order to prevent them from freezing too stiff to be worn the next day.

      One morning in the year 1784 this first Abraham Lincoln started with his three sons, Mordecai, Josiah, and Thomas, to work at a little clearing near the cabin. Suddenly from a near-by thicket sounded the crack of a rifle, and this first Kentucky Lincoln fell back dead. Josiah ran to the stockade for help. Mordecai dashed back to the cabin and took down his father's rifle just as an Indian, in full war paint, reached Thomas, a little boy of six, who had stayed by his father's body. It was necessary to shoot quick and straight to save his brother's life. Aiming through a loophole at a white string of wampum on the Indian's breast, Mordecai dropped him dead while Thomas escaped into the cabin. From there Mordecai fought off the other Indians until help came from the stockade.

      The sight of his father's death turned this oldest boy Mordecai into an Indian-hunter, and he spent his life in stalking and killing Indians wherever he could find them. Thomas, the father of Abraham Lincoln, grew up a ​wandering laboring boy, with just enough education to write his name. Drifting from one job to another he became a carpenter and married Nancy Hanks, the niece of the man in whose shop he worked. The young couple went to housekeeping in a log cabin which had one room, one door, and one window, and was furnished with a spinning-wheel, a loom, and a feather bed.

      There, in Hardin County, Kentucky, on February 12, 1809, Abraham Lincoln was born, and there he lived until he was seven years old. Lincoln's only playmate was his sister, and his playground the lonely forest. With this sister he went to school now and then under wandering school-teachers, who held school in a deserted cabin made of round logs with a dirt floor and small holes for windows covered with greased paper. There he learned his alphabet.

      The War of 1812 was being fought at this time. "I had been fishing one day," he once told a friend in speaking about these times, "and had caught a little fish, which I was taking home. I met a soldier in the road and having been told at home that we must be good to the soldiers, I gave him my fish."

      In April, 1816, Thomas Lincoln sold his farm for four hundred gallons of whiskey and twenty dollars, built a raft, and started down ​the Ohio River to find a new home in Indiana. On the way the raft capsized, but he saved his tools and most of the whiskey. On the Indiana shore he chose some land for his new farm and then went back for his family. The last thing that the little boy remembers of his Kentucky home was that his mother took him and his sister to say good-bye to the little brother whom they were leaving behind in an unmarked grave in the wilderness.

      On two borrowed horses, with some bedding and a few pans and kettles, the Lincoln family cut their way through the forest for eighteen miles to Little Pigeon Creek. There Thomas Lincoln hurriedly built a shed out of saplings entirely open on one side, and in this the family lived a whole year while he cleared a cornpatch and built a rough cabin.

      All through the freezing winter storms they huddled together in this rude camp. Finally the new log cabin was built and the family moved in. One can gain an idea of how hurriedly and roughly it was put together from a memorandum made by Abraham Lincoln in later years: "A few days after the completion of his eighth year," he wrote, "in the absence of his father, a flock of wild turkeys approached the new log cabin, and Abraham, with a new rifle gun, standing inside, shot through a crack

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