Page:Cambridge Modern History Volume 7.djvu/475

CHAPTER XIY. THE CIVIL WAR: I. (1) PRESIDENT LINCOLN. THE election of Abraham Lincoln as President of the United States, on November 6, 1860, was the culmination and final decision of the long political struggle between the North and the South over the question of slavery. Descended from several generations of pioneers, Abraham Lincoln was born in the backwoods of Kentucky on February 12, 1809. His childhood and youth were passed amid the poverty and rude experiences of the frontier. The fever of westward emigration caused his father to move from Kentucky to Indiana in 1816, and from Indiana to Illinois in 1830, when, having reached the age of twenty-one, the son, following usual custom, left the home-cabin to begin life on his own account. In rude elementary schools he obtained during his boyhood an aggregate of about one year's tuition from five different teachers. The reading, writing and ciphering thus learned he supplemented with diligent study of the few books that fell within his reach, so that at his majority, when he had grown to the stature of six feet four inches, with unusual physical strength and skill in frontier athletics, he also wrote a clear hand, and could express his thoughts in plain but concise and forcible language. Two flat-boat voyages on the great rivers to New Orleans, one from Indiana and the other from Illinois, gave him a glimpse of his country beyond his immediate neighbourhood. In the representative institutions of the New World, politics afforded the most frequent and easy avenue to distinction ; and the acquirements and aptitudes of the tall stripling, who had begun life as a day-labourer, gave him a popularity which secured him four successive biennial elec- tions to the State legislature. In these new surroundings he also underwent the varied experiences of clerk, village postmaster, captain of volunteers, deputy surveyor, and law student. The political and social conditions of the West were in their most active formative period. Between the date of Lincoln's majority and his election as President,