Growing up on the frontier gave Lincoln certain strengths such as self-reliance, patience and understanding. Survival itself demanded them.

No one can tell a completely "true" story of any piece of the past.

In the case of Abraham Lincoln, it is difficult to sort out the fact from the legend.

There are no contemporary records of his childhood except indirect and relatively insignificant documents such as bills of sale. Both of Lincoln's parents were illiterate, so the tapestry of letters one often finds in educated families is absent.

Myth-makers found great material in Lincoln's early years because of the lack of evidence about them and because of the idealizing needs of a country reunited after a terrible civil war.

The years of Lincoln's youth and maturity, though better documented, also have been caught up in exaggeration and legend. None of us can remain totally free from the legends of Abraham Lincoln for they are too deeply embedded in the American conscious.

It is really futile to speculate what he might have done, but it is not frivolous to guess that he purposely shaped his heroic image to fit a nation longing for unity and greatness.

All of these New Salem activities were necessarily part time affairs that were supplemented by occasional stints at splitting rails, working at the mill, harvesting and tending store for Samuel Hill.

This is questionable since his clinging to the possibility of Colonization shows that his grasp of the problem was faulty. Few white men of his day, least of all the single minded abolitionists, comprehended all the potential difficulties implied by emancipation. It would have been impossible for him or anybody else to reconcile the former slave owner to the Union's programs, under Army and church auspices, to protect and educate the former slave.

Lincoln was markedly honest but also a politician able to turn keen horsetrades; bent on justice but readily distracted into mercy; capably wielding power but never confusing his personal attributes with those of his office; intensely humorous but little given to the sting of wit; intensely religious but relying on no particular sect; a prose stylist employing with ingratiating clarity and pith the widely familiar words and music of the King James Bible and The Pilgrim's Progress.

What may have made the difference for Lincoln was an accumulation of widely read biographies so marshaling the data about a prepossessing character that a folklore figure gradually formed from their emanations and went floating over America as the ideal for the nation to love and trust. Not a father image, but rather a favorite uncle image.

The "real" Lincoln remains obscure to us all.

Of what little is known of Lincoln's parentage, separating truth from rumor and in reading what was written of them in his own hand, we can say for certain that Abe loved his mother, Nancy dearly, as he did his stepmother, Sarah, and that although he did name his fourth son after his father, Thomas, he did not have much respect for the man he described as "a wandering labor boy" who grew up "literally without education. He never did more in the way of writing than to bunglingly sign his own name."

Some common words found in the essay are:
Abraham Lincoln, Civil War, Improvement Act, City Lincoln, Zachary Taylor, Jacob Earle's, Illinois Washington, Mary Todd, Pilgrim's Progress, Salem Illinois, abraham lincoln, civil war, ordinary citizens, lincoln lived, log cabin, springfield 1837, slave trade, former slave, political career, lincoln learned,
Approximate Word count = 2560
Approximate Pages = 10 (250 words per page double spaced)