Page:The Ifs of History (1907).pdf/156

 by his immortal son with the intention, in emigrating, to escape from a slave State. But is it not probable that the son, deeply preoccupied as he was in later years with the subject of the emancipation of the slaves, had projected backward, by a psychologic habit common to all mankind, this idea from his own mind into that of his father? In all probability no other motive than that of accident or convenience—for Thomas Lincoln was a poor and rather "shiftless" man—impelled Abraham Lincoln's father to go to Indiana instead of following the trail which so many of the more enterprising Kentuckians were taking to Mississippi or Louisiana. It was to that section that enterprise beckoned, for agriculture was carried on in the Southwest upon a large scale, and broader plantations were open to the adventuring settler. Indiana, on the other hand, was a "poor man's country."

What if Thomas Lincoln had pos-