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Abraham Lincoln

1 Abraham Lincoln was born to poverty and ignorance. A rude log cabin on a poor, scrub farm was his birthplace. His father could not read and could barely write his name. His mother could both read and write, but she knew little of books or the world.

2 Their home was on the Kentucky frontier, and there was not yet a state in all the West that lay beyond them. Kentucky itself had been a savage waste only a few years before, that "dark and bloody ground" on which no white man had set foot. The generation of bold pioneers who had threaded their way over the Alleghanies in the steps of Daniel Boone were still on the scene, and the boy Lincoln heard from their lips the moving story of how they had hewn a path for civilization across the mountains and wrested peace from the roving red men in hard-fought battles.

3 His own grandfather, Abraham Lincoln, for whom he had been named had been one of that band of brave homeseekers. This elder Abraham, like most of the Kentucky settlers, came from Virginia. He found the land a wilderness. The buffalo roamed the blue-grass fields, and as Boone said, "were more frequent than I have seen cattle in the settlements, browsing on the leaves of the cane, or cropping the herbage on these extensive plains, fearless because ignorant of the violence of man."

4 Warlike tribes of Indians lurked in giant forests, and the white men, clad in skins, needed to be on guard for their lives. They were as ready with the knife as with the rifle, and could outrun and outfight the Indian. They were of the same daring breed as the hardy men who have pushed the frontier westward to the Pacific and been pathfinders of the nation.