The Boys Life of Abraham Lincoln | Page 3

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The Boys' Life of Abraham Lincoln
by Helen Nicolay

I. A PRESIDENT'S CHILDHOOD
Abraham Lincoln's forefathers were pioneers--men who left their
homes to open up the wilderness and make the way plain for others to
follow them. For one hundred and seventy years, ever since the first
American Lincoln came from England to Massachusetts in 1638, they
had been moving slowly westward as new settlements were made in the
forest. 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.
When the Indian's shot laid the pioneer farmer low, his second son,
Josiah, ran to a neighboring fort for help, and Mordecai, the eldest,
hurried to the cabin for his rifle. Thomas, a child of six years, was left
alone beside the dead body of his father; and as Mordecai snatched the
gun from its resting-place over the door of the cabin, he saw, to his
horror, an Indian in his war-paint, just stooping to seize the child.
Taking quick aim at a medal on the breast of the savage, he fired, and
the Indian fell dead. The little boy, thus released, ran to the house,
where Mordecai, firing through the loopholes, kept the Indians at bay
until help arrived from the fort.
It was this child Thomas who