Reply #2: Huh?

[RoyGBiv]

I have the same question. What's the connection?

On yet another tangent, I'd like to note that the veracity of stories involving Lincoln's ancestry is at best questionable. I refer specifically to the first comment in that time line, noting that Samuel Lincoln settled in Massachusetts, leaving the implication that this was Lincoln's first "American" ancestor. I know of two distinct family trees for Lincoln's ancestors, neither of which are any relation to the other in any verifiable way, meaning one (or both) is wrong or not fully researched. Samuel Lincoln is a part of one of these trees. Another Lincoln who settled in Virginia is part of the other.

Anyway, I don't exactly doubt the story about Lincoln's grandfather. IIRC, the source is Lincoln himself, who apparently heard it from his own father, but family stories have a way of losing credibility when passed through generations by word of mouth. His grandfather may have been killed by Indians, as Lincoln put it, while toiling to establish a farm, or he may have been killed while trying to kill them so that he could establish a farm. We don't really know.

Regardless, the whole thing is part of the partial mythology that developed around Lincoln's heritage as a working class boy who rose up from nothing to be the President and one of the most important people in American history. Lincoln himself helped foster some of this mythology during his rise in the law profession and politics. He did do what he said he did, of course, but the way he did it is not often well represented in popular history. We're left with images of reading by candle light late into the night, as though this were unusual in the wilderness of 19th century America, and walking miles in harsh weather just to borrow books, or more importantly, to return those books. We're not often even told the elements of this story that would create the images of a shrewd politician, a wealthy lawyer with vast professional connections, or a person who would sacrifice principles in a given situation if it gained him the advantage.

And, again, how this relates to slavery or the end of it I am clueless to say.