This awkward landsman on water was born in a cabin in the
Kentucky wilderness, a house replaced by one of unhewn timber, without
door or floor or window, probably not better than the meanest of the gypsy
houses just outside the fortifications of Paris. He accompanied his
restless, migratory father from one squatter home to another until he
settled in Illinois, where the timber-land and prairie meet, near the
Sangamon, and there built another cabin, made rails to fence ten acres of
land--which gave him the sobriquet the "rail-splitter"--"broke" the
ground, and raised a crop of corn on it the first year. You may remember
that Joliet made report of such a possibility there.
Lincoln's origin you will recognize as typical of that frontier, except
that the character which asserted itself in the son, if there is
transmission of acquired character, seems to have come from the mother and
the nurturing of his stepmother rather than from the shiftless, paternal
pioneer who gave the wilderness environment and soil to the nurturing of
this stock and was as little paternalistic as the government.
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