Abraham Lincoln: a History — Volume 01 by Hay, John, 1835-1905, Nicolay, John George, 1832-1901

CHAPTER XXIV. THE TOPEKA CONSTITUTION The Bogus Legislature Defines Kansas Politics. The Big Springs Convention. Ex-Governor Reeder's Resolutions. Formation of the Free-State Party. A Constitutional Convention at Topeka. The Topeka Constitution. President Pierce Proclaims the Topeka Movement Revolutionary. Refusal to Recognize the Bogus Laws. Chief-Justice Lecompte's Doctrine of Constructive Treason, Arrests and Indictment of the Free-State Leaders. Colonel Sumner Disperses the Topeka Legislature

CHAPTER XXV. CIVIL WAR IN KANSAS Wilson Shannon Appointed Governor. The Law and Order Party Formed at Leavenworth. Sheriff Jones. The Branson Rescue. The Wakarusa War. Sharps Rifles. Governor Shannon's Treaty. Guerrilla Leaders and Civil War. The Investigating Committee of Congress. The Flight of Ex-Governor Reeder. The Border Ruffians March on Lawrence. Burning of the Free-State Hotel

ABRAHAM LINCOLN

CHAPTER I

LINEAGE

[Sidenote: 1780.]

In the year 1780, Abraham Lincoln, a member of a respectable and well- to-do family in Rockingham County, Virginia, started westward to establish himself in the newly-explored country of Kentucky. He entered several large tracts of fertile land, and returning to Virginia disposed of his property there, and with his wife and five children went back to Kentucky and settled in Jefferson County. Little is known of this pioneer Lincoln or of his father. Most of the records belonging to that branch of the family were destroyed in the civil war. Their early orphanage, the wild and illiterate life they led on the frontier, severed their connection with their kindred in the East. This, often happened; there are hundreds of families in the West bearing historic names and probably descended from well-known houses in the older States or in England, which, by passing through one or two generations of ancestors who could not read or write, have lost their continuity with the past as effectually as if a deluge had intervened between the last century and this. Even the patronymic has been frequently distorted beyond recognition by slovenly pronunciation during the years when letters were a lost art, and by the phonetic spelling of the first boy in the family who learned the use of the pen. There are Lincolns in Kentucky and Tennessee belonging to the same stock with the President, whose names are spelled "Linkhorn" and "Linkhern." All that was known of the emigrant, Abraham Lincoln, by his immediate descendants was that his progenitors, who were Quakers, came from Berks County, Pennsylvania, into Virginia, and there throve and prospered. [Footnote: We desire to express our obligations to Edwin Salter, Samuel L. Smedley, Samuel Shackford, Samuel W. Pennypacker, Howard M. Jenkins, and John T. Harris, Jr., for information and suggestions which have been of use to us in this chapter.] But we now know, with sufficient clearness, through the wide-spread and searching luster which surrounds the name, the history of the migrations of the family since its arrival on this continent, and the circumstances under which the Virginia pioneer started for Kentucky.