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Stephen B. Oates is a professor of history at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and the author of eight other books, including The Fires of Jubilee and To Purge This Land with Blood. His task in this biography was to perpetuate Lincoln as he was in the day ....

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.... the Lincoln's arrived in Spencer County at the same time as winter, Thomas only had time to construct a "half-faced camp." Made of logs and boughs, it was enclosed on only three sides with a roaring fire for the fourth. The nearest water supply was a mile away, and the family had to survive on the abundance of wild game in the area. Less than two years after the move to Indiana, Mrs. Lincoln caught a horrible frontier disease known as "milk sick.". Thomas Lincoln returned to Kentucky to find a new wife. On December 2 he married Sarah Bush Johnston, a widow with three children, and took them all back to Indiana. Although there were now eight people l ....