When Abraham Lincoln was born of a struggling family on the Kentucky frontier, the presidency of Thomas Jefferson was in its final days. The presidency had burdened the author of the Declaration of Independence whose ideals for nation and governance had been sorely tried by the wars of the European powers.
As a young man, Jefferson had envisioned a nation of yeoman farmers who would incarnate the ideals of 1776 and serve as the foundation of the nation. He never abandoned this vision and his accommodation to it had encouraged him to double the nation's boundaries and establish expanding frontiers for families like that of Thomas Lincoln - families who would risk much for the opportunity that the frontier promised.
Thomas Lincoln would never become one of Jefferson's yeoman farmers. Yet the Lincoln family's move to the frontier of Kentucky, then to Indiana, and finally to the Illinois country, confirmed the aspirations of the founding generation whose ideals established a nation where the dreams of even the poor sons of a Kentucky frontiersmen might first find purchase and then discover opportunity.
"Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" – sentiments a young Virginian had crafted in muggy Philadelphia and ideals honored more in their breach rather than in their practice. Still, in the United States, a baby born in a rude Kentucky cabin was not chained to his father's past nor to his father's condition nor to his father's successes or failures. For Thomas Lincoln, good man though he was, was not considered a success by any means unless you measure the success of a man by the accomplishments of his children.
Others were chained, of course. Abraham Lincoln was not born into bondage nor had his heritage been ravaged by greed or the diseases Europeans had carried to the native peoples of the continent. Struggle characterized his early life but struggle did not make Abraham Lincoln unique. America was an unfinished nation forty-three years after the Revolution of 1776, and few in the American nation could expect that life would be easy.
These particular things the president of the United States could not have known in the waning days of his administration. The particulars he did know included economic distress and imperial ambition, political division and the price paid for pragmatic decisions. President Jefferson would depart Washington, D.C. with little regret for what he would leave to James Madison in 1809. Perhaps, though, he would have found consolation had he known what one of his citizens would do with the birthright of 1776.
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