Again, if we reject Louisiana we also reject one vote in favor of the proposed amendment to the national Constitution.  To meet this proposition it has been argued that no more than three-fourths of those States which have not attempted secession are necessary to validly ratify the amendment.  I do not commit myself against this further than to say that such a ratification would be questionable, and sure to be persistently questioned, while a ratification by three-fourths of all the States would be unquestioned and unquestionable.  I repeat the question:  Can Louisiana be brought into proper practical relation with the Union sooner by sustaining or by discarding her new State government?  What has been said of Louisiana will apply generally to other States.  And yet so great peculiarities pertain to each State, and such important and sudden changes occur in the same State, and withal so new and unprecedented is the whole case that no exclusive and inflexible plan can safely be prescribed as to details and collaterals.  Such exclusive and inflexible plan would surely become a new entanglement.  Important principles may and must be inflexible.

In the present situation, as the phrase goes, it may be my duty to make some new announcement to the people of the South.  I am considering, and shall not fail to act when satisfied that action will be proper.

FROM A LETTER TO J. W. FELL, DECEMBER 20, 1859

I was born February 12, 1809, in Hardin County, Kentucky.  My parents were born in Virginia, of undistinguished families—­second families, perhaps I should say.  My mother, who died in my tenth year, was of a family of the name of Hanks, some of whom now reside in Adams, and others in Macon County, Illinois.  My paternal grandfather, Abraham Lincoln, emigrated from Rockingham County, Virginia, to Kentucky about 1781 or 1782, where a year or two later he was killed by the Indians, not in battle, but by stealth, when he was laboring to open a farm in the forest.  His ancestors, who were Quakers, went to Virginia from Berks County, Pennsylvania.  An effort to identify them with the New England family of the same name ended in nothing more definite than a similarity of Christian names in both families, such as Enoch, Levi, Mordecai, Solomon, Abraham, and the like.

My father, at the death of his father, was but six years of age, and he grew up literally without education.  He removed from Kentucky to what is now Spencer County, Indiana, in my eighth year.  We reached our new home about the time the State came into the Union.  It was a wild region, with many bears and other wild animals still in the woods.  There I grew up.  There were some schools, so called, but no qualification was ever required of a teacher beyond “readin’, writin’, and cipherin’” to the rule of three.  If a straggler supposed to understand Latin happened to sojourn in the neighborhood, he was looked upon as a wizard.  There was absolutely nothing to excite ambition for education.  Of course, when I came of age, I did not know much.  Still, somehow, I could read, write, and cipher to the rule of three, but that was all.  I have not been to school since.  The little advance I now have upon this store of education I have picked up from time to time under the pressure of necessity.