But fate did not decree that he should enjoy the honors he had so richly deserved. The White House was not a resting place for him. In the hour of his election the Nation for which he prayed was divided and the men that he loved as brothers were rushing headlong toward fratricidal war. He who loved peace was to see no more peace except just a few hopeful days before his own tragic end. He who hated war must captain his dear people through their long and mighty struggle and share in his gentle heart their great sacrifices. As the kindly harmonizer of jealous rivals, as the unifier of a distracted people, as the sagacious leader of discordant factions, he proved his true greatness in the hours of the nation's peril. In many a grave crisis when it seemed that the Confederacy would win and the Union be lost the almost superhuman wisdom of Lincoln would see the one right way through the storm. For good reasons, the followers of Lincoln came to believe that he was being guided by God Himself to save the Union. The genealogists of Lincoln trace his ancestry back to Virginia and to Massachusetts and to those Lincolns who came from England about 1635. The name Abraham recurs frequently among the Lincolns and our President seems to have been named after his grandfather Abraham who was killed by the Indians in Kentucky in 1778, when Thomas, the father of the President, was only ten years of age. Thus left fatherless at a tender age in a rude pioneer community, Thomas did not even learn to read. He worked about as best he could to live, became a carpenter, and in 1806 married his cousin, Nancy Hanks, the daughter of Joseph Hanks and his wife, Nannie Shipley, a sister of Thomas Lincoln's mother, Mary. The first child of Thomas Lincoln and his wife Nancy was a daughter. Our President, the second child, was born February 12, 1809, in a log cabin, three miles from Hodgensville, then Hardin, now LaRue County, Kentucky. When little Abraham was seven years old his father moved to Indiana and took up a claim near Gentryville, Spencer County, and built a rude shelter of unhewn logs without a floor, the large opening protected only by hanging skins. In this discomfort they lived for a year, when they erected a log cabin. There was plenty of game, but otherwise the fare was very poor and the life was hard. In 1818 little Abraham's mother, delicate, refined, pathetic and too frail for such rude life, sickened and felt that the end was near. She called her little children to her bed of leaves and skins and told them to "love their kindred and worship God," and then she died and left them only the memory of her love.