Excerpt from The Life, and Martyrdom of Abraham Lincoln, Sixteenth President of the United States; And Commander-in-Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States Yet in the case of Gladstone the prediction would not have been a wild one. His father was a man of large fortune who sat in Parliament for many years. The son would have the best school and university education which family position and wealth could procure. He would not need to earn a living, and could devote all his time and energy to public life. The parents of Abraham Lincoln, on the other hand, were poor pioneers, though no poorer than most of their neighbours. The father could barely read and write, the mother made her mark. The boy would grow to maturity on backwoods farms and would learn no more in the makeshift schools that the region offered than to read, write, and do simple arithmetic. After striking out on his own he would earn his living as a clerk in a frontier store, as village postmaster, and as a surveyor of the virgin lands that new settlers were then taking up. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.