The Story of Young Abraham Lincoln

Whipple assembled this 1915 life of Lincoln largely from what other people remembered: his stepmother Sarah Bush Johnston Lincoln, interviewed late in life by law partner William Herndon; Dennis Hanks, who grew up beside him and supplied most of what is known of his hardest years; and Indiana schoolmates and neighbors. It opens with a grandfather who followed Daniel Boone into Kentucky and was killed there, then moves through his mother’s death from milk sickness, a scattered year of backwoods schooling, flatboat trips to New Orleans, the move to Illinois, clerking and storekeeping at New Salem, borrowed law books, Springfield and Gettysburg. The last chapters turn to the grown man’s boyishness and to his small son Tad. Written plainly for young readers, while those firsthand memories could still be collected.