ABRAHAM LINCOLN

THE SAVIOR OF HIS COUNTRY

"His heart was as great as the world, but there was no room in it to hold the memory of a wrong."-RALPH WALDO EMERSON.

Americans have often thought of their nation as a mighty ship, that was carrying them and all that they held dear, now over tranquil waters, now through the perils and the tempests of an unknown sea. Washington had guided our "Ship of State" safely through the storms of her first voyage. Jefferson stood at the helm when Abraham Lincoln was born-that great captain who saved our noble vessel from shipwreck on the rocks of slavery and brought her safe to harbor, only to lie himself silent and lifeless on her deck.

In the century that had passed since Franklin's birth, the narrow strip of weak and divided English colonies along the Atlantic shore had grown to a united nation of eighteen strong states, that spread beyond the Allegheny Mountains to the broad Mississippi; and now Jefferson's Louisiana Purchase had moved its boundary even farther west, to the heights of the Rockies. Slavery had grown with the country. At the very beginning of our national life, Franklin, with almost his last breath protested against it to Congress and called it "a crime." Washington wished to see it ended by the free act of the people

in their legislatures. Even as a young man, Jefferson had worked vainly to free Virginia from it in this same wise way. And now Lincoln, having in him the heart and soul of America, was raised up to save his country from the curse of slavery.

A SON OF THE FRONTIER

The Lincolns came to America from England in 1635 and settled first in Massachusetts. Fathers and sons, they all loved adventure and a wandering life, and gradually drifted towards the South, and then with other settlers followed the frontier as it moved westward. From Massachusetts they went to New Jersey, and from New Jersey to Pennsylvania, where they were known as Quakers. For many years they found a home in Virginia.

The great Liberator took his name from his grandfather, the first Abraham Lincoln, who, at the end of the Revolution struck west through the forests and mountains, and made his way from Virginia to Kentucky, the bloody battle ground of the Indians. For here his friend, Daniel Boone, the great pioneer and frontiersman, had been for three years, founding a new settlement in the wilderness. Furious at the white men for taking their land, the Indians crept stealthily to their work of revenge, scalping and murdering whole families, and sometimes taking women and children prisoners. One morning in 1784, little six year old Thomas was with his father, Abraham, in the forest. Suddenly the ten year old brother Mordecai heard a shot and saw his father fall. He saw the Indian murderer running off with his small brother. Snatching up a gun, aiming it through a loophole in the logs of the cabin, Mordecai fired, the

Indian staggered and fell, and little Thomas ran safe to his mother's arms. He lived to become the father of the great Lincoln.

Trained by the hardships of the frontier, the Lincolns handed down from father to son strength of body and of character. But Thomas Lincoln had lost the energy of his Quaker fathers. He was a carpenter by trade, without ambition, and not able to win a good living from the hard frontier life. His wife, who had been Nancy Hanks, was long remembered as a beautiful, gentle Quaker girl, with the deep religious spirit of her people. She eagerly read every book she could find, and patiently taught her husband the alphabet and how to write his name.

In the rough log cabin swept by the winter winds, on a little farm by Nolin Creek in the wild new country of Kentucky, their second child, Abraham Lincoln was born, February 12, 1809. Never prospering, the little family soon moved to another farm, and Thomas built a poor cabin for their home. Later, after the summer of 1817, there seemed to be hope of better fortune in Indiana, where settlers were then able to buy land from the United States government for $2

an acre.

And so, in the dreary month of November, with two horses, the little family worked its hard way north to the new lands, through nearly one hundred miles of forest-Abraham, a boy of eight, using his gun and axe like his father. For that first winter in the heart of the wilderness, only a rough three-sided shed, with a buffalo skin to close it, sheltered them from the cold rains and snows and driving winds. In front of it was the fire, always burning. Over this, from stakes, on a chain swung the big iron kettle in which their food was cooked-fat bacon, corn and beans. Their bread