Thomas B. McGregor: lawyer, statesman, lecturer

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THE RELIGION OF ABRAHAM LINCOLN'S PARENTS BY HON. THOMAS B. McGREGOR
LAWYER, STATESMAN, LECTURER





NEW LECTURE,

MR. AVERAGE AMERICAN.

By Hon. Thomas B. McGregor, Assistant Attorney General of Kentucky.


This lecture was delivered upon two of the leading Chautauqua platforms during the summers of 1919 and 1920.



It is a big dose of One-Hundred per cent Americanism, and is chuck full of old fashioned Southern wit and humor.




It keeps them awake, alive and listening, and any one who hears 
Mr. Average American
 goes away proud of the fact that he is an American and lives in this great hour of the World's reconstruction.






T
HE most interesting character in all American history is Abraham Lincoln.  Born as lowly as Jesus of Nazareth in a one-room Kentucky log cabin, reared in gripping and grinding poverty in the backwoods of Indiana and Illinois, he became a great lawyer, the great war President, the emancipator of a race and the preserver of a Nation.




His great humanity and depth of character is known to all students of his life.  From whence came these traits which were so early displayed?  What religious training or influences, if any, were thrown around him in his boyhood days?  Do you not suppose that there was something in the dreary pioneer life of his that caught and reflected the gleam of greater, nobler and happier things far beyond the wilderness horizon?




What of his parents?  What was it that they instilled into the great heart of the boy Lincoln that incited his ambition to serve humanity?  Although his mother died when he was only nine years of age, of her he said:  
All that I am, or hope to be, I owe to my angel mother.




Washington gave us our country.  Abraham Lincoln preserved it.  The one from the environs of aristocracy, the other from the womb of pure and undefiled democracy.




Judge Thomas B. McGregor is a native born Blue Grass orator.  He was reared in Western Kentucky, where Abraham Lincoln first saw the light of day and where his parents and their parents lived.  Mr. McGregor's ancestors were the same as Lincoln's people—sturdy, religious, pioneer Kentucky backwoodsmen, and his lecture upon the religion of Abraham Lincoln's parents presents many interesting and original historical facts discovered by Mr. McGregor who has been a close student of the life of Lincoln and his times.





Mr. McGregor is a young man but has served his State in the high office of the Attorney General, and on more than one occasion has been his party's standard bearer for high public honors.




Mr. McGregor in his lecture seeks to convince the world that the parents of Abraham Lincoln deserve a fairer estimate than has been allotted to them by most of the biographers of Lincoln and the story as told by the records that are still to be found in the archieves[sicarchives] of Little Pigeon Creek Church of the devotion paid by the parents of Abraham Lincoln to Him who guided the lad of Pigeon Creek in the hour of the Nation's travail, goes far to give to them their true estimate.



He also seeks to gain from Abraham Lincoln's preparation and training for American citizenship, a useful and proper perspective of the ideal citizen, in this hour of the world's crisis, when 
America First
 is, and should be, the watchword of the hour.




The lecture is entertaining, interesting and instructive.



Mr. McGregor is an able lawyer and a forceful public speaker—


Lexington Daily Leader.



There are two inborn qualities of a native born Kentuckian, chivalry and oratory, and Thomas B. McGregor, of the Clan of MacGregor, posesses[sicpossesses] them both.—


The Monthly Magazine.



The Blue Grass State has the faculty of turning out big men at an early age.  Most of her able men have arrived at bigness both mentally and physically early in life.  Tom B. McGregor is no exception to this general rule.  He was orator before he could spell the word.—


Maysville Independent.



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