The Life of Abraham Lincoln

by Henry Ketcham

Overview

Henry Ketcham wrote this book in 1901, a mere 36 years after Abraham Lincoln was assassinated. A legislator himself, Ketcham had quite a unique opportunity to write the book so close to President Lincoln’s life. He based much of his biography on firsthand information about this truly unique president.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781773231471
Publisher:	David Rehak
Publication date:	08/09/2017
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	448
File size:	391 KB

About the Author

Abraham Lincoln has made it possible for a man so inexperienced and so unprepared for the presidency to become a great moral leader. In the most troubled of times, here was a man who led the country out of slavery and preserved a shattered Union -- in short, one of the greatest presidents this country has ever seen.

Read an Excerpt

CHAPTER III. EARLY YEARS. The year 1809 was fruitful in the birth of great men in the Anglo-Saxon race. In that year were born Charles Darwin, scientist, Alfred Tennyson, poet, William E. Gladstone, statesman, and, not least, Abraham Lincoln, liberator. Thomas Lincoln was left fatherless in early boyhood, and grew up without any schooling or any definite work. For the most part he did odd jobs as they were offered. He called himself a carpenter. But in a day when the outfit of tools numbered only about a half dozen, and when every man was mainly his own carpenter, this trade could not amount to much. Employment was unsteady and pay was small. Thomas Lincoln, after his marriage to Nancy Hanks, lived in Elizabethtown, Ky., where the first child, Sarah, was born. Shortly after this event he decided to combine farming with his trade of carpentering, and so removed to a farm fourteen miles out, situated in what is now LaRue County, where his wife, on the twelfth day of February, 1809, gave birth to the son whom he named Abraham after his father's father. The child was born in a log cabin of a kind very common in that day and for many years later. Lincoln's Boyhood Home in Kentucky. It was built four-square and comprised only one room, one window, and a door. Here they lived fqr a little more than four years, when the father removed to another farm about fifteen miles further to the northeast. The occasion of this removal and of the subsequent one, two or three years later, was undoubtedly the uncertainty of land titles in Kentucky in that day. This " roving disposition " cannot fairly be charged to shiftlessness. In spite of the extraordinary disadvantages of Thomas Lincoln's earlylife, he lived as well as his neighbors, though that was humble enough, and accum...