Samuel Davis, the father of Jefferson Davis, and Thomas Lincoln, the father of Abraham Lincoln, were men of the same English-American origin, and the families were originally of virtually the same class, though Thomas Lincoln, doubtless as the result of the death of his father at the hands of the Indians, when Thomas was a child, had fallen somewhat in the social scale. Both men became dissatisfied with material conditions in Kentucky at about the same time, and both emigrated with their families. But Samuel Davis went southward into Mississippi, while Thomas Lincoln went northward into Indiana. That the sons of both these Kentuckians had in them the fire of genius, the history of their country has abundantly proved. Each was destined by the compelling force of his character and gifts to play a great part. Like all other men, each was molded by his environment. The illiterate Thomas Lincoln was credited by his immortal son with the intention, in emigrating, to escape from a slave State. But is it not probable that the son, deeply preoccupied as he was in later years with the subject of the emancipation of the slaves, had projected backward, by a psychologic habit common to all mankind, this idea from his own mind into that of his father? In all probability no other motive than that of accident or convenience--for Thomas Lincoln was a poor and rather "shiftless" man--impelled Abraham Lincoln's father to go to Indiana instead of following the trail which so many of the more enterprising Kentuckians were taking to Mississippi or Louisiana. It was to that section that enterprise beckoned, for agriculture was carried on in the Southwest upon a large scale, and broader plantations were open to the adventuring settler. Indiana, on the other hand, was a "poor man's country." What if Thomas Lincoln had possessed a little more energy, and a few more shillings, and had gone to Mississippi instead of to Indiana and afterwards to Illinois? What if he had become a plantation and slave owner, and had thus subjected his boy Abraham to the overmastering influence of a southern environment? So far as I can recall, Mississippi never produced an anti-slavery man. In this event, there would have been for the national cause, for the saving of the Union, for the emancipation of the slaves, no Abraham Lincoln. On the other hand, the tremendous power and patience of Lincoln's nature, the majesty and greatness of his character, the resources of his intellect, would in all likelihood have been added to the sum of the statesmanship which was enlisted on the Southern side.