Early days—Davis and Lincoln.
After the Revolutionary war
Samuel Davis, who had served in it as one of the mounted men of
Georgia, settled in
Kentucky.
Pending the war, in 1782 (the very year that
George Rogers Clarke captured
Kaskaskia),
Thomas Lincoln, of
Rockingham county, Virginia, removed to the same State.
Jefferson Davis, the son of the first named settler, was born on June 3, 1808, and on February 12, 1809, was born the son of the other—
Abraham Lincoln.
Samuel Davis moved to
Mississippi.
His son became a cadet at
West Point under appointment from
President Monroe, and soon, commissioned as a lieutenant in the United States army, appeared in the service fighting
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the Indians on the frontier in the
Blackhawk war. In early manhood
Abraham Lincoln removed to
Illinois, and, now, becoming a captain of volunteers, he and
Jefferson Davis were under the same flag engaged in the same warfare.
John Hampden and
Oliver Cromwell had once engaged passage for
America, and
George Washington was about to become a midshipman in the
British navy.
Had not circumstances changed these plans
Hampden and
Cromwell might have become great names in American history.
And suppose
Admiral George Washington, under the colors of King George III., had been pursuing the
Count D'Estaing, whose French fleet hemmed Cornwallis in at
Yorktown—who knows how the story of the great Revolution might have been written?
Had
Jefferson Davis gone to
Illinois and
Lincoln to
Mississippi, what different histories would be around those names; and yet I fancy that the great struggle with which they were identified would have been changed only in incidents and not in its great currents.
