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Show ABRAHAM LINCOLN. The one hundredth anniversary of the birth of Abraham Lincoln will be celebrated on February 12, 1909. Already preparations have been made in many cities to fittingly commemorate the centenary centen-ary of the great emancipator, for as the years go by, Lincoln still retains the loving memory of a grateful people. Lincoln was probably the greatest great-est American that ever lived. Certain it is that he stands above the great men of his time in the love and esteem with which- he is held by the present generation. Lincoln was descended from a Quaker family of Fnglish origin living in Berks county, Pennsylvania. Penn-sylvania. His grandfather, however, was a Virginian, Vir-ginian, and left that state to settle in Kentucky along about 1780. Thomas Lincoln, Abraham Lincoln's Lin-coln's father, married Xancy Hanks, and Abraham was born in Hardin county. Kentucky, on February 12, 1809. In 1S16 the family of Thomas Lincoln emigrated to Indiana, where they lived for about fourteen years, when, in 1830, they moved to Illinois. Illi-nois. Shortly after the Lincoln family had settled , in Illinois, Abraham left home. He worked as a farm laborer and salesman for a short time and entered into business for himself. Then he took up the study of surveying and followed that occupation occupa-tion for a short time. He was a captain of a company com-pany in the Black Hawk war in 1832, and in 1836 was admitted to the bar. He began the practice of his profession the following year. In the meantime, mean-time, however, he had been elected a member of the legislature of the state of Illinois, in which body he served from 1834 to 1842 as a Whig. He also served in the congress of the United States as a Whig from 1847 to 1849. It was during the campaign of 1858 that Lincoln Lin-coln first attracted national attention to himself by the strong utterances and his uncompromising position on the question of slavery in hi9 joint de-hates de-hates with Stephen A. Douglas, his opponent in the campaign for senator. It was his masterful handling of this subject more than, any other one thing that brought him-the nomination for the presidency on the Republican ticket in 1860. In the campaign of 1860 the Republican party was a unit for Lincoln, while the Democratic party was split up into three parties, with candidates for the presidency on each. The Southern Democrats put up John C. Breckenridge, who got 72 votes in the electoral college; the Constitutional Democrats put up John Bell, who received 39 votes; the Northern Democrats put up Stephen A. Douglas, who received re-ceived 12 votes. Lincoln received 180 votes in the electoral college, or i7 more than the combined votes of his Democratic opponents. The secession of the southern states followed shortly after his inauguration, and from the firing upon Fort Sumter until the closing scenes of the great war at Appomattox Court House, Lincoln preserved an equanimity of temper end displayed such rare good sense in dealing with the mighty problems of those terrible days that he won the love and affection of the nation which already had intrusted in-trusted to him the enormous task of earrying on the war. He was re-elected in the campaign of 1SG4 by a vote of 212 to 21 for George B. McClel- lan. Only a little more than a month after his second inauguration, and at a time when his services serv-ices were all but indispensable, he was shot at Ford's theatre, Washington, by John Wilkes Booth, on April 14, lSt5, as part of a conspiracy to murder mur-der all the officers of the nation. He died the following fol-lowing day, and the nation was plunged into a gloom such as had never before been equaled. The centenary of this great man's birth will be fittingly remembered all over the country, and the great lesson of his life will be impressed upon the growing generation. And what a great lesson that is! |
