The Ancestry of Abraham Lincoln

IT has been the general belief, a belief which was shared even by the illustrious President himself, that Abraham Lincoln's remote ancestry, as well as his immediate parentage, was of the humblest; that the Lincoln Family were so low born as to make it a futile task to endeavour to penetrate the obscurity from which they sprung, and that the commanding figure of Abraham Lincoln was a mere fortuitous circumstance, a "sport" of nature, rather than the result of centuries of inbred and inherited qualities derived from worthy forefathers. In view of the indisputable facts of the poverty of his parents and his own consequent early struggle against every disadvantage, this was a not unnatural conclusion to be reached by many of the ephemeral and superficial writers who first dealt with his biography. Their hasty summaries were buttressed and built upon by the perfervid imaginations of penny-a-liners, whose sole object seems to have been to magnify the greatness of the man by decrying his origin, until their fables were impressed as facts upon the minds of the majority of even the more intelligent people of the country.