Page:Life and Works of Abraham Lincoln, v1.djvu/51

Rh It is an undisputed fact that Thomas Lincoln, within a year or so after his marriage, being prompted by a roving disposition, and the land hunger which he had inherited from his forbears, especially his father, removed his family to a patch of ground on which a little clearing had been made and a cabin erected, situate on the south branch of Nolin's Creek, three miles from the present village of Hodgenville, county-seat of LaRue County, and that in this rude cabin, in this neglected spot, on the twelfth day of February, 1809, the most illustrious man of his era was born.

The cabin was of the rudest kind even for those days. It is needless to attempt to describe it, for the present comfortably housed generation would deem such description to have been woven in the loom of the imagination. It suffices to say, which I do reverently, that our Saviour, who was born in a stable, had a birthplace scarcely less decent than the typical cabin of the "poor white" of the South a century ago, and that the advents respectively of the despised Nazarene and of the Kentucky carpenter's son, the one the Saviour of the world, and the other the liberator of a race, were achieved alike amid the most desolate surroundings, even for the primitive conditions of the time.

In this rude cabin the little stranger lived until he had attained his fourth year. As there were no immediate neighbors, the parents and the two little children were compelled to be company for each other, and we can only imagine—for history was then engaged on statelier themes, such as the career of Napoleon—what their daily life could have arrayed of current happiness, as a