They faced solitude, privation, and all
the dangers and hardships that beset men who take up their homes
where only beasts and wild men have had homes before; but they
continued to press steadily forward, though they lost fortune and
sometimes even life itself, in their westward progress. Back in
Pennsylvania and New Jersey some of the Lincolns had been men of
wealth and influence. In Kentucky, where the future President was
born on February 12, 1809, his parents lived in deep poverty
Their home was a small log cabin of the rudest kind, and nothing
seemed more unlikely than that their child, coming into the world
in such humble surroundings, was destined to be the greatest man
of his time. True to his race, he also was to be a pioneer--not
indeed, like his ancestors, a leader into new woods and
unexplored fields, but a pioneer of a nobler and grander sort,
directing the thoughts of men ever toward the right, and leading
the American people, through difficulties and dangers and a
mighty war, to peace and freedom.
The story of this wonderful man begins and ends with a tragedy,
for his grandfather, also named Abraham, was killed by a shot
from an Indian's rifle while peaceably at work with his three
sons on the edge of their frontier clearing. Eighty-one years
later the President himself met death by an assassin's bullet.
The murderer of one was a savage of the forest; the murderer of
the other that far more cruel thing, a savage of civilization.
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