Two of the families which left Kentucky for the newer country in
these years will illustrate the movement. The Lincoln family
[Footnote: Tarbell, Lincoln, I., chaps, i.-iv.; Herndon, Lincoln,
I., chaps, i.-iv.; Nicolay and Hay, Lincoln, I., chaps, i.-iii.] had
reached that state by migration from the north with the stream of
backwoodsmen which bore along with it the Calhouns and the Boones.
Abraham Lincoln was born in a hilly, barren portion of Kentucky in
1809. In 1816, when Lincoln was a boy of seven, his father, a poor
carpenter, took his family across the Ohio on a raft, with a capital
consisting of his kit of tools and several hundred gallons of
whiskey. In Indiana he hewed a path into the forest to a new home in
the southern part of the state, where for a year the family lived in
a "half-faced camp," or open shed of poles, clearing their land. In
the hardships of the pioneer life Lincoln's mother died, as did many
another frontier woman. In 1830 Lincoln was a tall, strapping youth,
six feet four inches in height, able to sink his axe deeper than
other men into the opposing forest. At that time his father moved to
the Sangamon country of Illinois with the rush of land-seekers into
that new and popular region. Near the home of Lincoln in Kentucky
was born, in 1808, Jefferson Davis [Footnote: Mrs. Davis, Jefferson
Davis, I., 5.], whose father, shortly before the War of 1812, went
with the stream of southward movers to Louisiana and then to
Mississippi. Davis's brothers fought under Jackson in the War of
1812, and the family became typical planters of the Gulf region.

Meanwhile, the roads that led to the Ohio Valley were followed by an
increasing tide of settlers from the east. "Old America seems to be
breaking up, and moving westward," wrote Morris Birkbeck in 1817, as
he passed on the National Road through Pennsylvania. "We are seldom