The Heroic Life Of Abraham Lincoln The Great Emancipator (e-book) (used book) | bookbook.eu

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Excerpt from The Heroic Life of Abraham Lincoln: The Great Emancipator

Abraham was the firstborn, and then there was a sister Sarah, a year younger than he; then came Thomas two years later, who died in infancy.

The first schooling Abraham got was from his mother, who taught his sister and him to spell and to read. hen in his Seventh year he went to school in the little log school-house near his home.

But Thomas Lincoln, the father, heard of the richand fertile lands of Indiana, which had recently been admitted into the Union, and the tales of the Indians so inspired him that. He pulled up stakes and started for the new home, which to them was the Land of Promise. With all their household stuff packed on two horses, they made their way, by night sleeping on the fragrant pine twigs, clearing their way through tangled thickets and fording the streams. At last after a week or more on the tiresome journey they came to the banks of the river and, looking over, they saw the almost trackless forest which was to be their home.

The family pushed their way forward, and on a grassy knoll in the heart of the untrodden forest they built their first rude cabin.

Abraham was now in his eighth year. He was tall, thin and gawky, and clad in frontier fashion. He said himself he never wore stockings until he was a young man grown.

In this log hut, in the first year of their frontier life, came their first great sorrow, the death of their mother, on the 3d of October. She was buried under the shade of a wide-spreading sycamore tree, and over her grave little Abe shed his first tears of real sorrow. Years after he would say with tear-dimmed eyes, All I am or hope to be I owe to my angel mother.

In the autumn Of 1816, Thomas Lincoln, with the slight assistance little Abe could give him, felled the logs and raised a more substantial cabin.