Yours very truly,

A. Lincoln.

AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH

To J. W. Fell,

Springfield, December 20, 1859.

J. W. Fell, Esq.

My dear sir:—­Herewith is a little sketch, as you requested.  There is not much of it, for the reason, I suppose, that there is not much of me.  If anything be made out of it, I wish it to be modest, and not to go beyond the material.  If it were thought necessary to incorporate anything from any of my speeches I suppose there would be no objection.  Of course it must not appear to have been written by myself.

Yours very truly, A. Lincoln

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I was born February 12, 1809, in Hardin County, Kentucky.  My parents were both 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 that 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.