Abraham Lincoln in his Times Chapter 1 The Lincoln Tree Part 1

Abraham Lincoln in his Times Chapter 1 The Lincoln Tree Part 1

L incoln said little about his ancestry or childhood. When campaign biographers approached him, he was brief. He told one of them, the journalist John L. Scripps, “It is a great piece of folly to attempt to make anything out of my early life.” 1 He responded to another one, the politician Jesse Fell, by scribbling a cursory autobiography, explaining, “There is not much of it, for the reason, I suppose, that there is not much of me.” 2 Lincoln pared down his life story, sketching his ancestry, his childhood in Kentucky and Indiana, his career as a lawyer and politician in Illinois, and his emergence as an antislavery spokesman in the mid-1850s. His public cageyness about his ancestors and his youth contrasted with his intense private curiosity about them. He told Gideon Welles, his secretary of the navy, that he had “a craving desire” to gather information about his family history. 3  He believed that one’s personal and cultural backgrounds strongly shaped one’s character. Actually, he knew far…