but three months old, after which the father spent much of his time in travel, his death occurring in Cecil county, Maryland, in 1888.
Thomas B. Lincoln was a son of Abel Fearing Lincoln, an officer in the United States navy, who died in New Orleans of yellow fever when thirty-five years of age. Major General Benjamin Lincoln was a brother of the great-great-grandfather of General Lincoln of this review and received the surrender of Cornwallis at Yorktown. He was the eldest of the family, while Seth Lincoln, the great-great-grandfather of General Lincoln, was the youngest. Thomas Blodget Lincoln, the father, received his middle name because of connection with the old Blodget family of New England. His grandmother was the wife of Colonel Samuel Blodget, son of Governor Blodget of New Hampshire, and she was a daughter of Dr. William Smith, who with Benjamin Franklin founded the University of Pennsylvania and was the first provost of the university. The maternal grandfather of General Lincoln was Michael W. Ash, a brigadier general of the war of 1812 and of Irish birth. Genealogical records connect the family with the ancestry of President Lincoln, the line in each case being traced back to three brothers who came from England and landed on American soil in 1637. They located at Hingham, Massachusetts.
The family of Thomas B. and Sophie J. Lincoln numbered four children, namely : Matilda, Harriet, Sophie and James R. The three sisters are yet living but none are married.
General Lincoln traveled with his father until nine years of age and had been all over the continent prior to that time. A private tutor accompanied them and thus his education was not neglected. At the age of nine, however, he was placed in school and continued his studies until after the outbreak of the Civil war, attending the Loudon Military Academy of Maryland, the Virginia Military Institute and the Pennsylvania Military College. After the outbreak of hostilities the military spirit which he inherited from his ancestors was aroused and, espousing the cause of the Confederacy, he joined J. E. B. Stuart's Cavalry, which with Lee's army surrendered at Appomattox. He was serving on staff duty at the battle of Gettysburg and participated in a number of the hotly contested engagements of the Civil war.
General Lincoln afterward spent two years in Virginia and then came to Iowa, settling in Boone in February, 1868. He remained a resident of Boone county until October, 1883, when he came to Ames and took charge of the military department and steward's department of the Iowa State College, remaining in charge of the military section continuously since but resigning the steward's department in 1892. He has also taught in the engineering department but is perhaps most widely known because of his prominence in military circles. He mobilized the Iowa troops for the Spanish-American war and sent them to the front. He was appointed brigadier general by President McKinley on the 27th of May, 1898, and commanded a brigade in the Fourth Corps, later a brigade of the Second