(1809-1865).
[243. The tall man from Illinois making his first speech in Congress; how he wrote his name; what the people called him.]—Not many days before gold was found at Sutter's saw-mill in California (1848), a tall, awkward-looking man from Illinois was making his first speech in Congress. At that time he generally wrote his name
but after he had become President of the United States, he often wrote it out in full,—
The plain country people of Illinois, who knew all about him, liked best to call him by the title they had first given him,—"Honest Abe Lincoln," or, for short, "Honest Abe." Let us see how he got that name.
[244. The Lincoln family move to Indiana; "Abe" helps his father build a new home; what it was like.]—Abraham Lincoln was born on February 12th, 1809, in a log shanty on a lonely little farm in Kentucky.[1] When "Abe," as he was called, was seven years old, his father, Thomas Lincoln, moved, with his family, to Indiana;[2] there the boy and his mother worked in the woods and helped him build a new home. That new home was not so good or so comfortable as some of our cow-sheds are. It was simply a hut made of rough logs and limbs of trees. It had no door and no windows. One side of it was left entirely open; and if a roving Indian or a bear wanted to walk in to dinner, there was nothing whatever to stop him. In winter "Abe's" mother used to hang up some buffalo skins before this wide entrance, to keep out the cold, but in summer the skins were taken down, so that living in such a cabin was the next thing to living out-of-doors.
1 Kentucky: Abraham Lincoln was born on the banks of the Big South Fork (or branch) of Nolin Creek in Hardin (now La Rue) County, Kentucky.
2 Indiana: the Lincoln family moved to a farm on Little Pigeon Creek, near Gentryville, in what is now Spencer County, Indiana.
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