The Story of Young Abraham Lincoln | Page 2

dispute, whether
Lincoln held his notes in his right hand or his left--if he used them at
all!--while making his immortal "little speech." To a group of veterans
of the Grand Army of the Republic he related, casually, what he saw
while a college student at Gettysburg, after working his way through
the crowd of fifteen thousand people to the front of the platform on that
memorable day. From this point of vantage he saw and heard
everything, and there is no gainsaying the vivid memories of his first
impressions--how the President held the little pages in both hands
straight down before him, swinging his tall form to right, to left and to
the front again as he emphasized the now familiar closing words, "of
the people--by the people--for the people--shall not perish from the
earth."
Such data have been gathered from various sources and are here given
for the first time in a connected life-story. Several corrections of stories
giving rise to popular misconceptions have been supplied by Robert,
Lincoln's only living son. One of these is the true version of "Bob's"
losing the only copy of his father's first inaugural address. Others were
furnished by two aged Illinois friends who were acquainted with "Abe"
before he became famous. One of these explained, without knowing it,
a question which has puzzled several biographers--how a young man of
Lincoln's shrewd intelligence could have been guilty of such a
misdemeanor, as captain in the Black Hawk War, as to make it

necessary for his superior officer to deprive him of his sword for a
single day.
A new story is told by a dear old lady, who did not wish her name
given, about herself when she was a little girl, when a "drove of
lawyers riding the old Eighth Judicial District of Illinois," came to
drink from a famous cold spring on her father's premises. She described
the uncouth dress of a tall young man, asking her father who he was,
and he replied with a laugh, "Oh, that's Abe Lincoln."
One day in their rounds, as the lawyers came through the front gate, a
certain judge, whose name the narrator refused to divulge, knocked
down with his cane her pet doll, which was leaning against the fence.
The little girl cried over this contemptuous treatment of her "child."
Young Lawyer Lincoln, seeing it all, sprang in and quickly picked up
the fallen doll. Brushing off the dust with his great awkward hand he
said, soothingly, to the wounded little mother-heart:
"There now, little Black Eyes, don't cry. Your baby's alive. See, she
isn't hurt a bit!"
That tall young man never looked uncouth to her after that. It was this
same old lady who told the writer that Lawyer Lincoln wore a new suit
of clothes for the first time on the very day that he performed the
oft-described feat of rescuing a helpless hog from a great deep hole in
the road, and plastered his new clothes with mud to the great merriment
of his legal friends. This well-known incident occurred not far from her
father's place near Paris, Illinois.
These and many other new and corrected incidents are now collected
for THE STORY OF YOUNG ABRAHAM LINCOLN, in addition to
the best of everything suitable that was known before--as the highest
patriotic service which the writer can render to the young people of the
United States of America.
WAYNE WHIPPLE.

THE STORY OF YOUNG ABRAHAM LINCOLN
CHAPTER I
ABRAHAM LINCOLN'S FOREFATHERS
Lincoln's grandfather, for whom he was named Abraham, was a distant
cousin to Daniel Boone. The Boones and the Lincolns had intermarried
for generations. The Lincolns were of good old English stock. When he
was President, Abraham Lincoln, who had never given much attention
to the family pedigree, said that the history of his family was well
described by a single line in Gray's "Elegy":
"The short and simple annals of the poor."
Yet Grandfather Abraham was wealthy for his day. He accompanied
Boone from Virginia to Kentucky and lost his life there. He had
sacrificed part of his property to the pioneer spirit within him, and, with
the killing of their father, his family lost the rest. They were "land
poor" in the wilderness of the "Dark-and-Bloody-Ground"--the
meaning of the Indian name, "Ken-tuc-kee."
Grandfather Lincoln had built a solid log cabin and cleared a field or
two around it, near the Falls of the Ohio, about where Louisville now
stands. But, in the Summer of 1784, the tragic day dawned upon the
Lincolns which has come to many a pioneer family in Kentucky and
elsewhere. His son Thomas told this story to his children:
HOW INDIANS KILLED "GRANDFATHER LINCOLN"
"My father--your grandfather, Abraham Lincoln--come over the
mountains from Virginia with his cousin, Dan'l Boone. He was rich