Josiah Gilbert Holland

“ When inefficient men become very uncomfortable, they are quite likely to try emigration as a remedy. A good deal of what is called "the pioneer spirit" is simply a spirit of shiftless discontent. Possibly there was something of this spirit in Thomas Lincoln. It is true, at least, that when Abraham was about seven years old, his father became possessed with the desire to sell his little home, and remove to another, in some fairer wilderness. It is probable, also, that he did not like to rear his children in Kentucky. ”

“ The tree which rose so high, and spread its leaves so broadly, and bore such golden fruit, and then fell before the blast because it was so heavy and so high, has left its roots upturned into the same light that glorifies its branches, and discovered and made divine the soil from which it drew its nutriment. ”

“ It is highly probable that an exceptional Quaker among the Massachusetts Puritan family went, with other New Englanders, to Berks County in Pennsylvania, and that the blood which has given to New England a considerable number of most honorable names, has given to the nation one of the noblest that adorn its annals.
Thomas Lincoln, the father of the President, was made, by the early death of his father and the straitened circumstances of his mother, a wandering, laboring, ignorant boy. He grew up without any education. ”

“ Mary Lincoln was married to Ralph Crume, and Nancy to William Brumfield. The descendants of these women still reside in Kentucky. All these children were probably born in Virginia,--Thomas, in 1778,--so that he was only about two years old when his father emigrated.
Tracing the family still further, we find that Abraham, the emigrant, had four brothers: Isaac, Jacob, John and Thomas. The descendants of Jacob and John are supposed to be still in Virginia. Isaac emigrated to the region where Virginia, North Carolina and Tennessee unite, and his descendants are there. ”

“ Some of the knobs rising out of the barrens reach a considerable elevation, and are dignified by the name of mountains. "Shiny Mountain" is one of the most lovely of these, giving a view of the whole valley of the Nolin. A still larger knob is the "Blue Ball," from whose summit one may see, on a fair morning, the fog rising from the Ohio River, twenty miles away.
In a rude log cabin, planted among these scenes, the subject of this biography opened his eyes. The cabin was situated on or near Nolin Creek, about a mile and a half from Hodgenville, the present county seat of Larue County. ”

“ It has already been seen that these names have been perpetuated among the later generations of the Pennsylvania Lincolns, and that the three names--Abraham, Mordecai and Thomas--were all embraced in the family out of which the President sprang. The argument thus based upon the identity of favorite family names (and one of those quite an unusual name,) is very strong in establishing identity of blood, though, of course, it is not entirely conclusive. ”