My Favorite Lincoln Commercial... Evah!

Happy President's Day.

And, if you want something more intellectual about ol' Abe, then read this.

It wasn't until the Lincolns had cleared enough land -- Abraham remembered he "had an axe put into his hands at once" -- that they availed themselves of an 18-by-20 foot log cabin. That first winter in Indiana has been described as "a veritable childhood Valley Forge of suffering." According to Lincoln scholar Michael Burlingame in his exhaustive, new two-volume "Abraham Lincoln: A Life" (a treasure on which I rely extensively here), another family in the vicinity recalled seeing the glowing eyes of wolves through the spaces in their cabin walls at night. This was the unadorned and unforgiving frontier, nearly uninhabited and characterized by ignorance, superstition, violence, drunkenness and death.

The adult Lincoln told a journalist that his youth had constituted "the short and simple annals of the poor": "That's my life, and that's all you or anyone else can make of it.
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