A Legacy of Fun

BY ABRAHAM LINCOLN.
WITH A SHORT SKETCH OF HIS LIFE.
LONDON: Frederick Farrah, 282, Strand. 1865.

Abe Lincoln, the late President of the United States of America, was born on the 12th of February, 1809, in Hardin County, in the State of Kentucky. His grandfather, who emigrated from Virginia to the above State, was slain by the Indians in 1784. Thomas Lincoln, father of the President, and Nancy Hawks, his mother, were natives of Virginia. The opportunities for education enjoyed by Abraham were few and far between, for at an early age his father needed his assistance in clearing the forest, and making it a fitting dwelling place for man. Still, whenever an opportunity presented itself, it was eagerly grasped, and the result was that, despite of untoward circumstances, Abraham succeeded in acquiring a decent knowledge of his mother tongue and the rudiments of an ordinary education.
“At nineteen,” says one of his biographers, “we find him serving as a common bargeman on a boat plying to New Orleans. In March, 1830, he accompanied his father to Macon County, Illinois, and helped him to build a log cabin for the family home, and he made enough rails to fence in ten acres of land. The next year he was employed as a boat builder to assist in building a flat-bottomed boat, which he afterwards took to New Orleans, and upon his return his employer put him in charge of a store in Illinois.
“In 1832, when the ‘Black Hawk War’ broke out, he joined a company of Volunteer Rifles; and such was his popularity that he was almost immediately unanimously chosen captain by his comrades—an unexpected piece of good fortune which he often said gave him greater pleasure than any subsequent success in life. Here he served for three months only, when he was proposed as a candidate for the Legislature of Illinois, but his opponents being in a majority he was defeated. Soon after this he was appointed post-master of New Salem; and now, having a little leisure time on his hands, he began to study law, borrowing of an evening books from a neighbouring lawyer, and returning them the next morning.