people.




CHAPTER III.

EARLY YEARS.


The year 1809 was fruitful in the birth of great men in the Anglo-Saxon
race. In that year were born Charles Darwin, scientist, Alfred
Tennyson, poet, William E. Gladstone, statesman, and, not least,
Abraham Lincoln, liberator.

Thomas Lincoln was left fatherless in early boyhood, and grew up
without any schooling or any definite work. For the most part he did
odd jobs as they were offered. He called himself a carpenter. But in a
day when the outfit of tools numbered only about a half dozen, and when
every man was mainly his own carpenter, this trade could not amount to
much. Employment was unsteady and pay was small.

Thomas Lincoln, after his marriage to Nancy Hanks, lived in
Elizabethtown, Ky., where the first child, Sarah, was born. Shortly
after this event he decided to combine farming with his trade of
carpentering, and so removed to a farm fourteen miles out, situated in
what is now La Rue County, where his wife, on the twelfth day of
February, 1809, gave birth to the son who was named Abraham after his
grandfather. The child was born in a log cabin of a kind very common in
that day and for many years later. It was built four-square and