Thomas Lincoln was a harmless and honest man.

Beyond this, one will search in vain for any ancestral clue to the greatness of Abraham Lincoln." After reaching the new home in Illinois, young Lincoln worked with his father until things were in shape for comfortable living.

He helped to build the log cabin, break up the new land and fence it in, splitting the rails with his own hands.

It was these very rails over which so much sentiment was expended years afterward at an important epoch in Lincoln's political career.

During the sitting of the State Convention at Decatur, a banner attached to two of these rails and bearing an appropriate inscription was brought into the assemblage and formally presented to that body amid a scene of unparalleled enthusiasm.