The life of Abraham Lincoln for boys and girls

Front matter

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Preface

Every American, over eight years old, ought to know the story of Abraham Lincoln's life. More than this, every American ought to know the best of Lincoln's writings. Above all, every American ought to know the man, Abraham Lincoln. To give to children an understanding of his great life, an appreciation of the simplicity and purity of his literary style, and a love of the man, has been the purpose of this little book. The effort has been to do this without departing from the dignity which maturer minds demand in the presentation of a personality that has won the love of us all. At the same time, the picture were incomplete without a portrayal of the humor that saved Lincoln from the madness to which the burden he carried might have driven him.

** A blend of mirth and sadness, smiles and tears, A quaint knight-errant of the pioneers : A homely hero born of star and sod ; A Peasant Prince ; a Masterpiece of God."

Contents

I. The Lincolns settle in Kentucky ... 1 II. Moving to Indiana 7

III. A Backwoods Boyhood 13

V. The Land op Full-Grown Men . . .26

Chapter I The Linc0ln8 Settle In Kentucky

On the eastern slope of the Allegheny Mountains, not far from the western border of Virginia, was the farm of Abraham Lincoln, grandfather of President Lincoln. This elder Lincoln was one of a family of Pennsylvania Quakers, who about the time George Washington was bom had settled in Virginia. He had prospered and had become a man of influence. Doubtless because he was a Quaker he had not joined Washington's army, although he had a younger brother who was an officer in the Virginia troops.

The Revolutionary War had been going on for five years and was now nearing its close. Of the soldiers who had often felt the thrill that comes to those who hear the sound of fife and drum and bugle, many were beginning to hear the call of the frontier beyond the mountains, which Washington in his boyhood had explored. As their time of service expired, it was but natural that these hardy veterans should see in the unsettled lands to the westward a field rich in adventure and tempting in its rewards. From Virginia the line of travel to this land of promise lay southwesterly, along the eastern slope of the AUeghenies, up the Shenandoah Valley, directly past the Lincoln farm in

Bockingham County, to the Cumberland Gap, and thence into the blue-gi*ass country of Kentucky.

As the endless caravan of canvas-covered wagons crept up the long, uneven slope on the Virginia side of the mountain range, hundreds of these venturesome pioneers passed the Lincoln farm, each company, no doubt, shouting to the less adventurous farmer, as they passed, a playful invitation to "sell out and come along." The elder Abraham Lincoln soon caught the spirit and joined the procession of emigrants that for the next fifty years was to take its winding course over the Wilderness Trail to the new West.

Li 1780, Kentucky was a vast solitude, inhabited by wild beasts and a few scattered bands of Indians. Its trees and streams, its wild ravines and sweeping valleys, lay before the wondering eyes of the emigrants as they came down the western slope of the great mountain barrier, — a picture of indescribable beauty, a picture in which there were no signs of human life, no bouses, or schools, or churches, or bridges, or roads, or fields of grain. It was a paradise just as God's hand had left it. And yet the struggle that was going on there between Daniel Boone and his comrades in adventure and the few thousand savages who claimed this paradise as their own, gave to Kentucky the romantic name of " the dark and bloody ground," and offered promise of excitement and adventure, as^ well as a free home, to all who might leave civilization behind them and brave the hardships of the Wilderness Trail.

Abraham Lincoln the elder was counted a rich man when he took the seventeen thousand dollars that he got for his Virginia farm and bought from the government his three plantations in Kentucky. He became the owner of seventeen hundred acres in three tracts,

THE LINCOLNS SETTLE IN KENTUCKY S

located in the Green River Valley, and near where Covington and Louisville are now. To the Louisville region, then a pathless wilderness, he brought his wife and children, the youngest of them two years old. Here he thought to find the fortune that his pluck and enterprise would bring him. He was a friend of Daniel Boone, the Indian fighter, and his wife was a cousin of Boone. The Lincolns knew this land by its forbidding name, " the dark and bloody ground," but they were not afraid. The boys, no doubt, had their dreams of wild game, and of the scalping-knife and tomahawk, and they went into the unknown country full of faith in the fortune they were to win there. But the father's fortune was to die at the hands of the Indians, leaving his widow and five young children to make their way in the backwoods, with no one to care for them, with no chance for an education, and property from which they could not make their living. Whatever value their hundreds of acres had, depended on their being cleared and planted. The death of the father was the end of their great hopes, and to the Lincoln boys, who were scattered and put out to work wherever they might find a job, Kentucky was indeed a " dark and bloody ground." The lands, such as they were, went by law to the eldest son, Mordecai.

The youngest son, Thomas, now six years old, became " a wandering laboring boy," and did the roughest kind of farm-work for such pay as men cared to give him. There were no schools where he could be taught, and he never learned to read or write until his wife taught him to scratch the letters of his name. He was a famous wrestler, and he was strong and brave. He could tell a funny story, and, in his happy-go-lucky way, he won everybody's good will. In his memory he carried a picture, that he never lost, of the morning in the Kentucky clearing when the Indian killed his father, and his big brother Mordecai, fourteen years old, ran to the cabin for the rifle and shot his father's murderer.

Thomas Lincoln learned the carpenter's trade, after a fashion, in the shop of Joseph Hanks. There he fell in love with his cousin, Nancy Hanks, whom he married — a tall, frail, but charming girl, with dark hair and dark, sparkling eyes. She was in many ways like her son. She read books when she could get them, particularly the Bible, and she remembered what she read. She saw the funny side of life and she always enjoyed a good story. Yet she was often melancholy. She had not strength enough for the hardships she had to bear, and her short life had little happiness in it.

The Lincolns began their housekeeping in a shed that afterward was used as a stable in an alley in the village of Elizabethtown. Here their little girl Nancy was bom. " Tom " Lincoln was not a very good carpenter. In a community where the neighbors were as able as he to make the simple furniture and rude buildings they needed, it is not strange that he failed. He had followed no steady work since his father's death had thrown him upon the world, and while he was not discontented or idle, he was restless. So he gave up his trade and undertook farming. On Nolin's Creek, a dozen miles from where his friends and neighbors lived, and about sixty miles south of Louisville, he started to cut out the trees and build himself a house of logs. This was a one-room affair, with no door to keep out the cold and storm, and with no window to let in the light. There were open spaces between the logs that made its walls. The floor was the bare earth, pounded hard. In its one unfurnished room there was no picture except that of the

THE LINCOLNS SETTLE IN KENTUCKY 5

barren patches of grass and weeds that the family could see through the open doorway. They slept on a bed of skins on the floor, and in the winter they sat shivering about the fireplace while Tom told stories or Nancy read aloud. Here, on February 12, 1809, their second child, Abraham Lincoln, was bom.

There are pictures of this log house on the Bock Spring Farm, near Nolin's Creek, but the house was torn down and the logs were used in other buildings long before the pictures were made. The American people have bought the farm and rebuilt the cabin out of some of the same logs, and mean to keep it always in memory of the great American who was born there a hundred years ago.

The Lincolns soon found that they could not make a living on the place. So they moved again and built themselves another log cabin near Knob Creek, where the children and the tired mother were made more comfortable. Little Nancy was now old enough to go to school. They sent her, with her four-year-old brother for company, to be taught for a few months by an Irish wanderer, Zachariah Riney. Of him and their next teacher, Caleb Hazel, nothing is known except that they had no regular school, that they knew very little beyond the A, B, C's, and that they found in the little Lincoln boy a mind that was eager to learn and a disposition to ask questions that must have interested them and taxed their patience greatly. We are told that in the evenings, while other children slept, Abe was bringing spicewood branches to make a blaze in the open fireplace so that his mother could read to him and help him puzzle out the letters by the firelight.

The boy Lincoln was beginning to get an education. What he did not learn from the two wandering teachers and from bis mother, he picked up by asking questions of every man that passed the house, and by listening to the preachers who rode horseback through the country and preached the gospel wherever they could find an audience by the wayside. The lad remembered all that he heard, and repeated to his mother and to the boys and girls of his acquaintance the substance, and often the veiy words, of the sermons of these traveling preachers. The preachers knew scarcely more than their hearers, but they rode over hundreds of miles giving comfort and help to those that needed it, and keeping the frontier in touch with the rest of the world. One of them, David Elkin, was a frequent guest at the house, and won the admiration of the little backwoodsman, Abraham Lincoln.

The Lincoln farm — if we may call it a farm, with its trees and heavy underbrush, its stumps and patches of rock — was barren enough, and the little family lived mainly on the wild animals that the father shot and the fish that they could catch in the creeks near by. One day Abraham, now about five years old, had been trying to make himself useful and was coming home proudly swinging a fish from his line. Near the house he met an old soldier and, as he stopped to ask his usual questions of the man, there fiashed upon his memory a command his mother had once given him, that he must always be kind to the soldiers. Listantly he gave the man his fish and went home empty-handed, disappointed that he had no fish to show, yet happy that he had done a patriotic act.

Chapter II Moving To Indiana

At the beginning of the nineteenth century, Kentucky was no longer a wilderness. Through Cumberland Gap and down the Ohio River, thousands of families had been moving in from the East. Already the emigrants from Virginia and Maryland had brought with them a multitude of slaves who were to cut down the forests and plow the virgin soil and furnish for the new State the foundation for a slave civilization and a landed aristocracy. From the beginning the people of Kentucky were set apart in two classes. One of these classes consisted of those who could afford to have slaves to do their hard labor, and who in this way found time for themselves and their children to learn reading and writing. As the country became cleared and settled, these slave-owners were able to keep abreast of the times by means of travel and education. And because they had time and money and book-learning, they became the governing class in the new State. The other class was made up of those who were too poor to own slaves. They spent their days, axe in hand, cutting down the trees and getting the ground ready for the plow, and their nights in the heavy sleep that comes to those who work to the limit of their strength. When they needed food, the rod and gun brought them plenty of fish and game. Their boys and girls had to share in the endless labor as soon as they were old enough to do anything. The time of a boy of seven was too valuable to permit of his spending much of it in school. These two great classes, the owners of slaves and the " poor whites," had little in common. Wherever there were slaves the poor whites had small chance to get ahead in the world.

Thomas Lincoln was too poor to be a slave-owner, and so long as he had to live in a community where slaves were doing without pay the only kind of work that he knew how to do, he had no reason to expect that he could get ahead. It is certain that slavery had something to do with his failures in Kentucky, and it was partly on account of slavery that he left Kentucky a few years later to settle in the free State of Indiana.

A hundred miles to the northward was a newer country where there were no slaves, where the want of an education was no disadvantage to a man, and where there were no class distinctions between the rich and the poor. This new State had chosen for its great seal the picture of a pioneer, axe in hand, clearing the forest, with a buflEalo in the background making way for the advance of civilization. What made it peculiarly the poor man's land of promise was that it had just written into its new constitution a law that should make every immigrant sure that he could earn his daily bread without competing with slave labor. In that constitution there was a sentence that in years to come was to exert its influence upon Abraham Lincoln's public career. It read as follows : "As the holding any part of the human creation in slavery . . . can only originate in usurpation and tyranny, no alter-. ation of this constitution shall ever take place so as to introduce slavery ... in this State."

In the summer of 1816, the year that Indiana came into the Union, Tom Lincoln sold his possessions, and building himself a raft, put his little fortune on

MOVING TO INDIANA 9

board and floated with it down the Rolling Fork and the Salt River to the Ohio ; and on down the Ohio to the mouth of Anderson's Creek on the Indiana side. Plunging fifteen miles into the forest, lie found at Little Pigeon Creek the spot where he planned to build his new home. He walked back to the Kentucky cabin, and in the late fall brought his family across the countiy on the backs of two borrowed horses to the banks of the Ohio. Crossing the stream, he and his boy, Abe, began on the north shore to cut a road through the densely wooded forest of walnut and hickory toward their new home. In these woods the children saw many strange wild animals. Here was the home of the deer and the wild cat, the wolf and the bear. In the fallen leaves and undergrowth crept copperheads and rattlesnakes, while in the shadow of the trees they saw more birds than the little boy and girl could count. Stately, solitary cranes waded in the shallow water of the creek; overhead were flocks of screaming green and yellow paroquets ; and in the more open places occasional wild turkeys were seen. No doubt the long ride on horseback across northern Kentucky, the first vision of the Ohio River as it swept between its scarlet and golden hillsides, and the first serious efforts with the pioneer's axe to open a way through which the horses could carry their goods to the new home, made impressions upon the memory of the little emigrant that he never wholly forgot.

Years afterward, in telling about this boyhood home, Lincoln described it as " a wild region with many bears and other wild animals still in the woods." Speaking of this seven-year-old boy who had just come into Indiana, he said : '^ He settled in an unbroken forest, and the clearing away of surplus wood was the great task ahead. Abraham, though very young, was large of his age, and had an axe put into his hands at once ; and from that time till within his twenty-third year he was almost constantly handling that most useful instrument."

It was indeed the beginning of civilization in that part of Indiana. The nearest neighbors were some miles away, but they lent a helping hand whenever it was needed. The Lincolns were utterly poor, but no poorer probably than the rest were. And all were rich in the spirit of neighborliness that made each newcomer welcome to the frontier community, and joined with him to build his cabin and protect his household from illness and want and danger of all kinds.

The prospect of beginning life again in the thick woods, in November, without any sort of shelter and with no white settlement near by, must have frightened the young mother. But she had a husband who never lost his courage and a boy and a girl whom she loved dearly ; and loneliness was not a new experience to her. It was too late to build a real house to live in during their first winter, so they had to make out of saplings what was called a half -faced camp. Three of its four sides were of poles covered as well as possible with dead leaves and brush, and the fourth side was open to the weather, except as it was protected by the bonfire that burned day and night before the opening. They had no matches ; so the fire must be watched and kept alive, or the woodsman must start another by a very slow process, with flint and steel. Indiana winters are sometimes bitter — that winter the temperature fell to eleven degrees below zero. Winds sweep fiercely along the Ohio valley and the snow drifts deep on the hillsides. We can picture the boy

MOVING TO INDIANA 11

and girl as they lay by night on the hard earth inside their haK-faced camp, with their feet toward the blazing fire, and enjoyed the dreamless sleep that their tired little bodies had earned, while Tom Lincoln, the father, listened to the howl of the storm and, hearing the cry of the wolf somewhere in the darkness, knew that he must keep up the fire or harm would come.

Without near neighbors and without the ordinary comforts, the Lincolns found life a serious affair. There was no time for play and little chance for learning, as books were lacking, too. But there were trees to be cut down ; and there was underbrush to burn, a well to dig, a garden to get ready for the spring planting, and plans to make for the real log house that they would build as soon as- winter was gone. When the weather kept them within the camp and close to the fireside, the father would frighten the boy and girl with his story of how the Indians had shot their grandfather, but he would keep up their courage by pretending that there were no Indians left in the Little Pigeon country ; and the children's mother would read to them out of her Bible the stories that the boy never forgot. So, because they had one another, they were happy and unafraid.

" At this place," Lincoln wrote of himself years later, " Abraham took an early start as a hunter which was never much improved afterward. A few days before the completion of his eighth year, in the absence of his father, a flock of wild turkeys approached the new log cabin, and Abraham with a rifle gun, standing inside, shot through a crack and killed one of them. He has never since pulled a trigger on any larger game."

There was no place where clothes could be bought for the children, nor was there any money to spend on them. Abe's cap was of coonskin, the tail hanging down behind for beauty. His shoes — when he wore any — were moccasins fashioned by his mother's delicate hands out of deerskin, and his trousers were of deerskin, too. A shirt of home-made linsey-woolsey completed his outfit. Stockings he never wore until he was a grown man. Lincoln has described the slipperiness of the deerskin moccasins and trousers when he got wet ; and how, with all their stretching, the deerskin trousers never quite covered his long brown legs.

Food, except fish and game, was hard to find, and without flour or meal, and without a stove, it was hard to prepare. It is not strange that the hungry boy said in his quaint way, as his father asked a blessing on the dinner of baked potatoes, " Dad, I call these mighty poor blessings."

Chapter III A Backwoods Boyhood

The next year the Lincolns were able to put up a new log cabin. This was at least a safer place to live in than the half-faced camp. This cabin had neither window, nor door, nor floor. The children slept on a bed of leaves in the loft, which they reached by climbing a row of pegs driven into the wall. The bed downstairs was built by driving a forked stake into the earth, near the corner of the room, and laying a pole from this stake across to each of two walls. On these crosspoles were laid rough boards, which were made soft and comfortable by covering them with leaves and clothing and the skins of wild animals. Such other furniture as they had, Tom Lincoln made out of the forest timber with his simple woodsman's tools.

Here, for another year, the mother sufllered from the exposure for which she was so little fitted and against which she was so ill-protected. Then came a dread disease which struck down people and cattle alike. From this plague, there being no physician within thirty miles to care for her, Nancy Lincoln died. Father and son cut down a tree and out of the green timber built a rough box for her burial. In the woods near by they made her a grave and laid her to rest.

Not long before this, cousins had come from Kentucky to live near them. Some of these cousins also died of the plague, and so there were other graves to dig, and strange boxes for the boy to help fashion. The children became familiar with the mystery of death. Nancy and Abe were now eleven and nine years old, too young to know how to make the home comfortable, and too lonely to keep up the father's spirits. It seemed impossible for the disheartened man to give them proper clothing and food. The cabin continued doorless and windowless and forlorn.

Abe was a most affectionate child, and the idea of leaving the dead mother alone in those dreadful woods, with no religious service, and no prayer except the unexpressed cry from his own heart, was more than he could bear. In some way he had learned to write a fair hand. He painfully wrote out a letter and gave it to a traveler into Kentucky to be delivered, whenever he could be found, to the missionary preacher, David Elkin, who had been their friend years before. Many months afterward the good preacher found his way to the settlement on Little Pigeon Creek and preached the funeral sermon by the grave of Nancy Hanks Lincoln, paying to her memory the tribute of praise that the little boy had hungered to hear. To this service came women, on horseback, from neighboring settlements, carrying their children on the saddle-bow, while the men trudged beside them through the woods. And from that day these neighbors kept in their friendly sympathy the serious, odd-looking boy, understanding his sorrow and wondering what dreams there were in the depths of his mysterious eyes.

Things went from bad to worse, until it began to look as if the family would be scattered, as Thomas Lincoln and his brothers and sisters had been thirty years before. Then there came a change. The father realized what the home needed most, and went back alone to Kentucky. There he found Sarah Johnston, a young widow, whom he had always known, and per-

A BACKWOODS BOYHOOD 15

suaded her to marry him. The coming of this new mother to Little Pigeon Creek was a fortunate thing for the Lincoln children, for she loved them and cared for them as tenderly as their own mother would have done. Her three children, too, brought into Abe's life the cheer of companionship that he had needed, and saved him from much of the melancholy toward which he was always strongly inclined. She was considered rich in the little Hoosier settlement. It took four horses to haul the real furniture that she brought. There were beds and chairs, and there was a fifty-dollar walnut bureau, the first the children had ever seen. This bureau was an object of such splendor that Tom Lincoln pronounced it " little less than sinful to own such a thing."

Soon the cheerless cabin was made homelike. Lito the open doorway Mrs. Lincoln had them fit a door of split timber. A window was cut through the logs and frames were set in. There was no glass in the frontier country, so they fastened sheets of greased paper across the window to let the light through. Boards were split with axe and wedge and laid on the earth for flooring. The open spaces between the logs in the walls were filled with clay. And so the cabin became a house. These were not the only changes. Between the boy and his new mother there sprang up an understanding that soon ripened into love. She believed in him and encouraged him in a way that his father never did, and she saw to it that the ambitious boy had new and better opportunities to learn, and that his father and others did not disturb him when he wanted to read. Because she found him unlike other children, she kept watch over him with special tenderness. Fifty years later, when he had grown to manhood and had given his life for his country, she recalled to a friend the boyhood that had been intrusted to her for guidance. " Abe was a poor boy," she said, " and I can say what scarcely one woman — a mother — can say in a thousand. Abe never gave me a cross word or look, and never refused to do anything I requested him. I never gave him a cross word in all my life. His mind and mine — what little I had — seemed to run together. He was here after he was elected President. He was the best boy I ever saw, or expect to see." And it was of her that he said in one of his rare bursts of confidence, " All that I am or hope to be I owe to my mother."

Neighbors have left many accounts of Abraham's boyhood. These all testify that " he saw hardships, had meagre clothing, coarse food, and no advantage of securing an education. All who knew him agreed that his ways were not like those of other boys, and he was not fully understood." One thing is sure from his own accounts of his boyhood, that, with all its hardships and its days of sadness, it was a very happy one.

It is hard to believe that, in the early days of the West, men and women had the same strange superstitions that the Puritans had in New England two hundred years earlier. It is true, however, that in the country where Abraham Lincoln lived as a boy, people believed that their lives and fortunes were influenced by visions, and ghosts, and witches. They believed, for instance, that potatoes planted " in the dark of the moon " would suffer blight ; that fences built " in the light of the moon " were bound to fall ; that a bird at the window foretold death ; that the breath of a horse in a child's face would give it the whooping cough ; that work could not be commenced with safety