Cass, Douglas, Lincoln--all were adopted sons of the Northwest, and the career of every one illustrates not only the prodigality with which the back country showered its opportunities upon men of industry and talent, but the play and interplay of sectional and social forces in the building of the newer nation. Cass and Douglas were New Englanders. One was born at Exeter, New Hampshire, in 1782; the other at Brandon, Vermont, in 1813. Lincoln sprang from Virginian and Kentuckian stocks. His father's family moved from Virginia to Kentucky at the close of the Revolution; in 1784 his grandfather was killed by lurking Indians, and his father, then a boy of six, was saved from captivity only by a lucky shot of an older brother. Lincoln himself was born in 1809. Curiously enough, Cass and Douglas, the New Englanders, played their rôles on the national stage as Jackson Democrats, while Lincoln, the Kentuckian of Virginian ancestry, became a Whig and later a Republican.
Cass and Douglas were well-born. Cass's father was a thrifty soldier-farmer who made for his family a comfortable home at Zanesville, Ohio; Douglas's father was a successful physician. Lincoln was born in obscurity and wretchedness. His father, Thomas Lincoln, was a ne'er-do-well Kentucky carpenter, grossly illiterate, unable or unwilling to rise above the lowest level of existence in the pioneer settlements. His mother, Nancy Hanks, whatever her antecedents may have been, was a woman of character, and apparently of some education. But she died when her son was only nine years of age.
Cass and Douglas had educational opportunities which in their day were exceptional. Both attended famous academies and received instruction in the classics, mathematics, and philosophy. Both grew up in an environment of enlightenment and integrity. Lincoln, on the other hand, got a few weeks of instruction under two amateur teachers in Kentucky and a few months more in Indiana--in all, hardly as much as one year; and as a boy he knew only rough, coarse surroundings. When, in 1816, the restless head of the family moved from Kentucky to southern Indiana, his worldly belongings consisted of a parcel of carpenters' tools and cooking utensils, a little bedding, and about four hundred gallons of whiskey. No one who has not seen the sordidness, misery, and apparent hopelessness of the life of the "poor whites" even today, in the Kentucky and southern Indiana hills, can fully comprehend the chasm which separated the boy Lincoln from every sort of progress and distinction.