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 The Expansion of the United States 365 ■south of them in Mexico and the West Indies, and of a great slave state, detached from the north and reaching to Panama. The return of Abraham Lincoln as an anti-extension president in 1860 decided the south to split the Union. South Carolina passed an " ordinance of secession," and prepared for war. Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana and Texas joined her, and a ■convention met at Montgomery in Alabama, elected Jefferson Davis president of the " Confederated States " of America, and adopted a ■constitution specifically upholding " the institution of negro slavery." Abraham Lincoln was, it chanced, a man entirely typical of the new people that had grown up after the War of Independence. His ■early years had been spent as a drifting particle in the general west- ward flow of the population. He was born in Kentucky (1809), was taken to Indiana as a boy and later on to Illinois. Life was Tough in the backwoods of Indiana in those days ; the house was a mere log cabin in the wilderness, and his schooling was poor and ■casual. But his mother taught him to read early, and he became a voracious reader. At seventeen he was a big athletic youth, a great wrestler and runner. He worked for a time as clerk in a store, went into business as a storekeeper with a drunken partner, and contracted ONE OF THE FIRST AMERICAN RIVER STEAMERS