CHAPTER I.
Ancestry--The Lincolns in Kentucky--Death of Lincoln's Grandfather--Thomas Lincoln and Nancy Hanks--Mordecai Lincoln--Birth of Abraham Lincoln--Removal to Indiana--Early Years--Dennis Hanks--Lincoln's Boyhood--Death of Nancy Hanks--Early School Days--Lincoln's First Dollar--Presentiments of Future Greatness--Down the Mississippi--Removal to Illinois--Lincoln's Father--Lincoln the Storekeeper--First Official Act--Lincoln's Short Sketch of His Own Life.
The year 1809--that year which gave William E.Gladstone to England--was in our country the birth-year of him who wears the most distinguished name that has yet been written on the pages of American history--ABRAHAM LINCOLN.

In a rude cabin in a clearing, in the wilds of that section which was once the hunting-ground and later the battle-field of the Cherokees and other war-like tribes, and which the Indians themselves had named Kentucky because it was "dark and bloody ground," the great War President of the United States, after whose name History has written the word "Emancipator," first saw the light.

Born and nurtured in penury, inured to hardship, coarse food, and scanty clothing,--the story of his youth is full of pathos.

Small wonder that when asked in his later years to tell something of his early life, he replied by quoting a line from Gray's Elegy: "The short and simple annals of the poor." Lincoln's ancestry has been traced with tolerable certainty through five generations to Samuel Lincoln of Norfolk County, England.

Not many years after the landing of the "Mayflower" at Plymouth--perhaps in the year 1638--Samuel Lincoln's son Mordecai had emigrated to Hingham, Massachusetts.