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Illustration: LINCOLN.--From a painting by Howard Pyle
REGISTER OF THE TREASURY, 1861-65 AND AUTHOR OF “RECOLLECTIONS OF PRESIDENT LINCOLN AND HIS ADMINISTRATION”
NEW YORK AND LONDON HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS
LINCOLN.--From a painting by Howard Pyle _Frontispiece_
LINCOLN IN 1857.--From a photograph in the collection of Charles Carleton Coffin _Facing p._ 20
LINCOLN AND HIS SON THOMAS, KNOWN AS “TAD.” --From a photograph by Brady ″ 28
LINCOLN.--From the statue by Augustus St. Gaudens, at Lincoln Park, Chicago ″ 36
LINCOLN IN 1865.--From a photograph by Rice ″ 46
Without any attempt at biographical details or an appreciation, a few chief facts in Abraham Lincoln’s great career may be helpfully recalled to the minds of readers. His ancestors were Quakers in Berks County, Pennsylvania. His parents, born in Virginia, were influenced by the current of migration across the Alleghanies, and were carried first to Kentucky and afterward to Indiana.
It was in Hardin County, Kentucky, that Abraham Lincoln was born, February 12, 1809, the child of these humble settlers. Compared with the opportunities of the present-day boy, his chances seemed desperate indeed. His attendance at a regular school covered hardly more than a year. Nearly all the education which, among other gifts, enriched him with such a mastery of the English tongue he acquired painfully by himself. It was a question of necessities, of aiding to wrest a livelihood from a new country that confronted the boy, and so we find him at work, and at nineteen entering a larger world of practical affairs by helping to guide a flat-boat down the Mississippi to New Orleans. What he had to do was done so faithfully that his employer promoted him to be a clerk, and gave him charge of a store and mill at New Salem, Illinois.