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II
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If Daniel Boone, the mighty hunter and Indian fighter, had not roused the imagination of Virginians and Carolinians by his wonderful and romantic deeds in the exploration of the Kentucky wilderness, the grandfather of Abraham Lincoln would not have left Rockingham County, Virginia, and “entered” seventeen hundred acres of land in Kentucky, where he was presently slain on his forest farm by a savage in the presence of his three sons.
The youngest of these sons, Thomas Lincoln, was the father of the future President of the United States.
In spite of an educated, well-to-do American ancestry of pure English Quaker stock—one was a member of the Boston Tea Party; another was a revolutionary minuteman, served in the Continental Congress and was Attorney General of the United States under Jefferson—this frontier boy, who was only six years old when his father was murdered before his eyes, grew up without education, to be a wandering work boy, who gradually picked up odd jobs of carpentering.