The forefathers of Abraham Lincoln, like thousands of Western pioneers, were of a sturdy English lineage. His immediate ancestry, however, was less distinguished than that of many whose names are forgotten and whose influence on American history is imperceptible. Every effort to explain his career through an illustrious parentage has proved altogether futile.

Lincoln's grandfather belonged to that band of fearless adventurers in Kentucky, whose ideal was a lonely house in the middle of a vast farm, even though maintained in the presence of skulking redskins.[1] It was in this land that earned the title of "the Dark and Bloody Ground," that a common frontier tragedy made the grandmother of Lincoln a widow. For one day while her husband was in the fields, a short distance from the house, with their youngest son Thomas, a sudden shot from an Indian ambush broke the stillness of the woods and the father fell dead. The oldest son Mordecai looking out of the loop hole in the loft of the house saw an Indian raising his little brother from the ground. Aiming at a silver ornament on the breast of the redman, he brought him down. The boy ran to the cabin and the mother opened the door. She hastened to a more settled community where her son Thomas, the father of the President, grew to a shiftless manhood.[2]

The inhabitants of Kentucky were bred in the school of hardship. The battle with the forest and buffalo abated, but there remained the heroic fight with the soil. Splendid virile qualities were born in the strife with the Indians and the forest. Inventions were yet unknown and a living was drawn from the earth only through grinding labor. Yet frontier life rapidly gave way to the march of civilization, the trail and the path to the highway.

Hunters and warriors became tillers of the field. The merchant and manufacturer, the pioneer preacher, physician, lawyer and politician appeared with the onward tide of events.

The places of learning were few. Now and then a struggling teacher gave all that he had from his humble store to the young confidently entrusted to his care. Still something in the little log cabin school-house, even on unfrequented paths, developed character. Out of the battle with adverse conditions, with few advantages and manifold difficulties, came statesmen, and even scholars, men who laid the foundation of states, who guided the nation through its crises, and were equal to every emergency that endangered its vitality.

The law abiding character of the people was notably evinced by the supreme patience with which they effected their separation from the mother state, Virginia.[3] With wisdom they established courts of justice and the law of the land was speedily enforced. A malefactor who violated the statute against card playing, after imprisonment, turned his back on Kentucky, swearing "that it was the meanest country a white man ever got into."[4]

The pioneers of Kentucky had in a high degree the instinct of government, the passion for politics. Their sense of liberty was tempered by devotion to constitutional principles and reverence for the written law. The restless spirit of adventure was tamed by the potency of political responsibilities. At an early day, they displayed interest even in national problems. Their views were kindred to those of Virginia. Accustomed to restrain their own freedom, they did not favor the coercive measures of a distant, unknown, strong and centralized government.[5] The political policy of Washington was far from popular; that of Adams was odious.[6] The presidential contest between Adams and Jefferson agitated Kentucky. Discussions were frequent and widespread and even women participated. A pioneer boy was so elated over the triumph of Jefferson that, sitting in his chamber alone, he drank in cold water thirteen toasts in celebration of the triumphant event.[7]

It is probable that even in his infancy Lincoln listened at the fireside to many political controversies. In that case he heard doctrines advocated destructive of the national sovereignty, vitally hostile to those avowed and cherished by him in his public career. Traces of his early political surroundings on his vital convictions are hardly discernible. Lincoln became a national politician with little patience for the popular doctrine of State Sovereignty. He belonged to the Federal party by instinct. No American statesman was broader in his outlook of the general welfare. It is worthy of note that he passed his infancy in Kentucky; his boyhood and minority in Indiana, and a varied career in the State of Illinois. Not being the son of a single community or commonwealth, he did not look to any individual state with fullness of affection. He was a citizen of the Republic.As early as 1790, an effort was made in Kentucky to promote the gradual abolition of slavery. The arrival of Clay strengthened this movement. Strong passions were aroused by the angry discussions that followed this futile endeavor. About 1810 the number of slaves increased perceptibly. The blighting effects of the institution soon began their revelation. Labor was deemed disgraceful and demeaning. The possession of slaves, not "high intellectual and moral endowments," became the test of social status. Almost everything was subordinate to the dominating institution.

Such, in general, was the state of society in Kentucky when Thomas Lincoln, in 1816, made his weary trail through tangled woodland to the wild forests of Spencer County, Indiana. He was one of the multitude discouraged with prospects in the Southern states. It was frequently the overbearing conduct of slaveholders, rather than hatred to slavery, that led the pioneer to leave the land of his nativity. Still it is amazing that the majority of these emigrants bore no resentment to the institution that provoked their removal, but became or remained vigorous advocates in maintaining its supremacy.[8]

Efforts have been made to account for Thomas Lincoln's movement by reason of his extreme hostility to slavery. Lamon indulges in a more prosaic explanation, stating that there were not more than fifty slaves in Hardin County; that it was practically a free community; that his more fortunate relatives in other parts of the State had no scruples to their ownership; that he was wanderer by nature gaining neither riches nor credit; and that a quarrel with a neighbor, whose nose he bit off, made him more anxious than ever to leave Kentucky.[9] Lincoln in his campaign biography remarks that this removal was partly on account of slavery, but chiefly on account of the difficulty in land titles in Kentucky.[10] Ida Tarbell even endeavors to make a sort of Abolitionist out of Thomas Lincoln. She quotes an old man, who claims that he was present at the wedding of Thomas Lincoln and Nancy Hanks, and that Tom Lincoln and Nancy and Sally Bush were steeped full of Jess Head's notions about the wrong of slavery and the rights of man, as explained by Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Paine.[11] If this were the fact, it is very strange that Thomas Lincoln never thereafter manifested any hatred of slavery during a long life. If Thomas Lincoln had been a zealous advocate of the rights of the black man, is it not stranger still that his son never even hinted at receiving the slightest impetus to anti-slavery opinions from his father? The long silence of Thomas, Abraham and Sally Bush Lincoln disproves the contention that Thomas Lincoln was a friend or champion of the enslaved, or that his views differed from the prevailing sentiment in regard to Abolitionism.

One incident looms up in the brief stay of Abraham in Kentucky. "I had been fishing one day," said Lincoln, "and caught a little fish which I was taking home. I met a soldier in the road, and having always been told at home that we must be good to the soldiers, I gave him my fish."[12] This story strikingly displays the influence of his mother. Events were few in his early life, and made a correspondingly abiding impression.

Lincoln was seven years old when he passed beyond the borders of Kentucky. There he received the rudiments of an education from two nomadic teachers. At the time of his departure, caste feeling was beginning to dominate society in Kentucky, but Lincoln never showed any of its manifestations. "He was," says Frederick Douglas, "the first great man that I talked with in the United States freely, who in no single instance reminded me of the difference between himself and myself of the difference of color, and I thought that all the more remarkable because he came from a state where there were black laws."[13]

No human mind would have selected Hardin County for the birthplace of the man who was to grapple with the most portentous problem in all American history. For the slavery question baffled the wisdom of the makers of the Constitution. It darkened the last hours of the stalwart statesmen, Webster, Clay and Calhoun. It tried and tested the endurance of this nation in a crisis of grave moment.