A life of Lincoln for boys

Preface

We know the old legend of the great gulf that once opened in the earth in Rome and threatened to destroy the city. The oracle declared that this gulf would never close until the most precious thing in Rome had been thrown into it. So the people brought gold and jewels and beautiful furniture and ornaments of all kinds. But the gulf remained as wide open as ever, and the people were in despair. At last one brave man who loved his country cried out: "The most precious thing in Rome is her manhood ! " And he leaped straight down into the gulf, dying for the sake of his country. For immediately it shut together over his head and Rome was saved.

In 1861, more than two thousand years afterward, in our own land of America, a great gulf of disunion opened in the midst of our Republic, and all our efforts at closing it were of no avail, until the most precious possession in our land, or in any land, had leaped into the gulf. Four hundreds of thousands of brave men gave their lives to the closing of this gulf of disunion which would have destroyed the peace and greatness of our land.

The last life to be sacrificed was Abraham Lincoln's. And the gulf closed. For Lincoln was a man whom the North as well as many in the South mourned for as a patriot, a lover and friend of his whole country. He

PREFACE.

was, as Stanton said of him, the greatest ruler of men that the world has seen, a ruler by persuading, convincing, leading by his own purity of purpose and great abilities.

Abraham Lincoln was as poor as any poor man ; none has fewer opportunities than he had. But who can bring so much out of so little, because who has his ability and his wonderful industry?

Yet the keynote of his character was not his ability or his industry, remarkable as these were. It w.is something still higher — it was his purpose. A remark that he once made shows how he felt as to all the honors that life could give him. He said one day that some persons were satisfied with being "Governor" or holding some office; but this kind of thing could never satisfy him. This was true. Not what he had, but what he was and what he could do in the world seemed to him worthy of struggle and labor.

The history of his life gives us a faint idea of what his struggle and labor were. It tells us also how his great desire to help the world was gratified in a wonderful way.

In all our land, indeed, in all the world there has been but one Abraham Lincoln. But of those who have his purpose to leave their world in some ways better than they found it, there should be many.

F. C. S.

Newton Centre, Mass.

June, 1907

Contents

CHAPTER PAGE

i How People Lived in 1809 ... 9

ii Daniel Boone and the Lincoln Pioneers 17

I. How People Lived in 1809

If you should shut your eyes on this present year and some fairy would whisk you backward into the year 1809, and, still keeping your eyes shut, you should listen, it would seem to you very still. Not a sound of the electric cars would you hear ; not an automobile would rumble in the distance and make you look to find if you were in its track; no whistle and rush of steam cars would you hear; no postman's whistle would sound shrill in the distance as he hurried from house to house with his bag of mail ; no footsteps of the boy with the morning or the evening paper to deliver would sound on the pavement or come running over the grass, cross lots; no telegram would be handed in at your door; no telephone bell would make you rush to the receiver to find out what somebody miles away was going to talk to you about— none of these things would you hear, for at that time they did not exist; there were no electric cars, or automobiles, or steamcars ; no postmen, or paper-boys, or telegraphs or telephones; no steamers crossing and re-crossing the ocean.

Then if you could open your eyes on this country as it was in 1809, remembering how you live and travel nowadays, you would wonder more and more how people got on at all in those times.

For from somewhere far down the dusty road you would hear a rumbling slowly growing more distinct ; by and by you would see a cloud of dust heavier than that raised now by an automobile, because in those times the roads were not so good; then two horses would come into view, and behind them two more, drawing a lumbering stagecoach such as you have never seen except in pictures. If you wished to take a journey, this would be the coach you would travel in— unless you were very rich and went in your own carriage with your own pair of horses.

If you were going any great distance, for instance, from New York to Boston— for that was a great distance in those days — you would have to prepare for a week's journey; for that trip used to take six days by stagecoach. Now the fast expresses do it in less than six hours.

HOW PEOPLE LIVED IN 1809. 11

As you were getting ready to start, people in your neighborhood would come or send to you asking if you would do them the kindness to deliver certain letters to their friends or business correspondents in Boston, or wherever you might be going. In those days it cost so much to send a letter by post that people always asked their friends to carry it, whenever this was possible. They used to begin their letters : "I take this opportunity of Mr. So-and-So's going to such a place"— wherever this might be— "to send you a letter. ' ' Then they would tell their news. In those days letters did not have envelopes; they were folded in a peculiar way that we should find it hard to imitate and sealed with sealing wax with a monogram, or a crest, or some pretty device pressed into the wax from the stamp.

The regular mail went on these stagecoaches according to a law that Congress passed in the March of 1802. Before that time the mail was carried by men on horseback. How small the mailbags must have been! Only the great iron horse can now carry the mails that are going from city to city all over the land, not once in two or three days, or even once a day, but all the time, every few hours. And a mail bag, or perhaps two thrown across a saddle with horse and rider jogging along the heavy roads! — why, now it takes a car fitted up for the purpose to carry the mails. It used to cost twenty-five cents and then twelve cents to send a letter. Now, as we know, one will go from Maine to California for two. So people don't ask their friends to take letters for them on journeys as they once did; they only have to ask them to drop these into the letter boxes.

If you had been traveling in 1809, you would not have gone inside the stagecoach if it had been fine weather; but would have taken a seat aloft beside the driver where you could breathe the fresh air and enjoy the country. And you would have found that the driver was expressman also and stopped at this house and that to deliver letters and packages and to receive and deliver messages. You would have found, too, that he knew all the gossip of the places he passed through on his route and could tell you the history of most of the people in them. For all the world loves to hear and tell news; and those were not the days of newspapers where people could read all the news they wanted, and sometimes more than they wanted. For in 1801 there were only two hundred weekly and seventeen daily newspapers published in all the country. So, if people had not told each other the news, how would they have heard any?

The stagecoaches stopped at taverns on the

HOW PEOPLE LIVED IN 1809. 13

way for fresh horses ; and if you had been one of the passengers, you would have gone in with the rest to get breakfast, or dinner, or supper. In those times dinner was in the middle of the day, unless with a few very fashionable persons who had it in the middle of the afternoon.

When you reached the end of your journey, if it happened to be winter weather and you were cold and snowy, no doubt you would have found a warm welcome from your friends, but you would not have found a warm house. They would have ushered you into the drawingroom where you would have found a great blazing fire of wood looking so comfortable and so beautiful. If you sat up close to the fire your nose would have been warm, or if you turned your back to the blaze your back would have been warm; but you would have found it difficult to keep both warm at the same time. Or if you had found a Franklin stove— for these were in use before that time, you would have been warmer so long as you kept near it. But as to having rooms and halls all over a house warmed as they are now, nobody ever dreamed of such a thing.

You might ask: "If it took so long to go between New York and Boston, how long did it take to go to California ?"

There was no California— there was the country of course. But it belonged to Mexico and only came to the United States when Texas did, in the Mexican war, 1845-1848.

In early times, and even after the Bevolutionary war, it had been thought that we should never want the country west of the Mississippi, and that this would always be a wilderness and a place for the Indians. But as the country grew, people changed their minds. In 1821 the United States bought Florida from Spain. Before that, however, in 1803, Louisiana was bought by us from France. The French had first come there in 1699 ; then France ceded it to Spain, 1762; but in 1800 Spain gave it back to France. Three years later the United States bought it from France.

We know the boundaries of Louisiana now. But in those days it was very much larger and its boundaries were ''vague and undetermined." On the north it went to Canada; or one old record says it "ends on the north at a place called Detroit between Lake Erie and Lake Huron." On the south it ran to the Gulf of Mexico. And as no one could tell on the west just where the French country ended which the United States had bought as Louisiana, and where the Spanish possessions began, the

HOW PEOPLE LIVED IN 1809. 15

Americans pushed west as far as they could and said the land had been French and belonged to them.

Ohio had been made a State only in 1802 ; and in 1809 the countiy west of this largely remained to be settled and conquered from the wilderness for civilization. Kentucky and Tennessee were States about the end of 1700; Vermont was admitted in 1791. But in 1809 these were the only new States admitted into the Union since the Revolution. This makes us realize what a different country even in size it was from today.

But, after all, it is not the size of a country that counts so much; it is not its many inventions and comforts and conveniences of business and of life, and, especially, it is not its vast wealth that makes its real power and greatness —it is the men and women in it that really count for its present and its future. And in America at that time were men and women as strong and brave and able as any who live today ; and most of all there were good and true men and women who loved God and loved their country.

It was into this country of great performance and still greater promise, and to be a leader of such men and women in a time of terrible struggle and danger, the choice of the people and, under God, their ruler to guide this nation to life instead of death— it was to do all this, and beyond it, to show in his own character how true and great a man can be, that, February 12, 1809, Abraham Lincoln was born.

II. Daniel Boone and the Lincoln Pioneers

The original grant of Colonial Virginia was a very large country indeed ; it included not only Virginia as it now is on the map, but the whole of West Virginia, Ohio, Kentucky and "everything westward to the Mississippi, and as much further as the colony had a mind to claim." The Virginia called afterward "the mother of States" was only the part between the Alleghany Mountains and Chesapeake Bay — our present Virginia.

The people who settled Virginia were more from the rural districts of England than those who came to New England; some were squires and many were yeomen. They were not so ready to build cities and live together as in New England; they liked better to spread over the country and have great estates. And they did not have so hard a time with the Indians as did the New England people, so that they could do this more safely.

As we know, the first Virginia company was organized in 1606. But this did not succeed, because people in England wanted to do all the management and give those here no rights. Then, in 1624, the English government took control, and the colonists came over faster. They soon found that there was no gold in the State and that they were too far south to get furs from the Indians. But about this time tobacco was introduced into Europe, and Virginia was found to be a fine place to grow tobacco; the colonists went into its culture largely. They needed plenty of land for this; and after a time when the best lands in Virginia had been taken up, they began to look over the mountains to see what was beyond.

It was not all desire for tobacco fields, however, that influenced them. The Anglo-Saxon people love land, they want space enough to live in, and to own for themselves acres and acres of rich lands. So, as has been said, after the best lands in Virginia had been taken up, the most ambitious and adventurous settlers began to dream of going to those beyond ; and at that time Kentucky seemed to them a world of wonders and romance. It had the Ohio river on the north, the Mississippi on the west, the Cumberland Mountains between it and Virginia ; it had rich and fertile lands ready for the pio-

BOONE AND THE LINCOLN PIONEERS. 19

neers; also, many of its rivers were navigable. There was another advantage. Only the Chickasaw Indians were really living in the country ; the other tribes passed through it often on their raids but lived north or south, or beyond the Mississippi; so that the land was open to the white man if he could come and take possession of the forests and cultivate the rich plains that he would find. These fertile acres proved too tempting to resist when the farmers in Virginia found that they would have to farm on the slopes of the Alleghanies or go beyond these for new lands. As early as 1750 Indian traders had found passes through these mountains; and it was one of these Indian traders who guided Daniel Boone to the State that he helped to build up and that made him so famous.

The first Kentucky colony was founded in 1774; and the following year other footholds were taken and held; all earlier attempts had failed.

Boone was not the first there; but he came early enough to find plenty to do, and to do it.

Daniel Boone was born in Pennsylvania, in 1734. But when he was a young man he moved from there, and through the Shenandoah Valley in Virginia went to the banks of the Yadkin Biver in North Carolina. There he married; and it was not until May of 1769 that he began his exploration of Kentucky. Several men went there in company with Boone.

But that winter Boone and a friend he was hunting with were captured by Indians. The Indians spoiled the camps and then set Boone and his companion free and told them they must never come there again, because they were trespassing upon Indian hunting grounds under treaties made with the Indians. This was true ; but Boone did not know it, or care for it. The Boone family were Quakers; and Daniel's grandfather had come to Pennsylvania to be near William Penn. Daniel had always been used to Indians ; in his childhood they had come to his father's house and had always been on friendly terms with the Boones; and Daniel knew them thoroughly. All his life he had great influence over them. They captured him several times; but they never hurt him. But he never saw again the other men of their party who had come to Kentucky with him.

After their release, as he was going through the woods with his companion, they met two men who called to them that they were white men and friends. One proved to be Daniel's younger brother, Squire Boone, come in search of Daniel.

The two men with the Boones were not long afterward killed. Then the two brothers were alone together in the vast woods. There they

BOONE AND THE LINCOLN PIONEERS. 21

spent the long winter. In the spring their ammunition ran low. As they had to depend upon hunting for food, and for skins which gave them what money they had, there was nothing to do but go to the settlements for more. And they must have more horses and other supplies. Daniel decided that one of them must go and one stay; and that he must be the one to stay. For three whole months he was there, "by myself," he afterward said, " without bread, salt or sugar, without company of my fellow-creatures, or even a horse or dog." But he was born to live in the woods, he loved them so, and he loved hunting. It is said of him : "He was wanting in no quality of wise woodcraft. He could outrun a dog or a deer; he could thread the woods without food day and night ; he could find his way as easily as a panther could. Although a great athlete and a tireless warrior, he hated fighting and only fought for peace. In council and in war he was equally valuable. His advice was never rejected without disaster, nor followed but with advantage ; and when the fighting once began there was not a rifle in Kentucky which could rival his."

Yet for all his skill and his love of great spaces about him, he was homesick in those long lonely months and was glad enough to see his brother again. After Squire's return the two hunted for a year longer "in those lovely wilds." For they had to earn money by the skins of the animals they shot. Then they went back to the Yadkin River and brought their families to Kentucky.

The first ancestor of Abraham Lincoln to reach America came to Hingham, Massachusetts, in 1838, and died there. His grandson removed to New Jersey, and from there to Pennsylvania, where he died in 1735. His appraisers called him "Mordecai Lincoln, Gentleman," so that he must have had property. To one of his sons he left land in New Jersey; and this son about 1750 went to Virginia. It was this son, Abraham Lincoln, the grandfather of our president, who went to Kentucky, partly because he wanted more land and partly because he was so interested in what he had heard from Boone about that country. For the Boones and the Lincolns were well acquainted; there had been marriages in the families ; both were of Quaker origin. This ancestor of our president was quite well off, and when he sold his Virginia estates he bought land in Kentucky that would have made the family rich if they had kept it.

When he went there in 1780, the country was not quite so wild and uninhabited as it had been at Boone's coming. The people had begun to cultivate the land and they had built forts for

BOONE AND THE LINCOLN PIONEERS. 23

defence. For Kentucky was the border land between the northern and southern Indians who were at war with one another and was directly in the warpaths of these Indians. Also, in dealing with the Indians the white settlers did not regard the treaties made with them and sometimes were quite as treacherous and savage in warfare with them as the Indians themselves. Then, west of the Mississippi, and also north and south of Kentucky were the French who always got on well with the Indians and many a time roused them against the English settlers. The Indians loved their own lands as much as the white men did who came to crowd them out and take possession. There was enough land for both ; but neither saw it so ; and it was a time of savagery and horror.

In 1780 three hundred "large family boats" went down the Ohio River with people who settled in Kentucky; for that must have been an easier way of bringing families and household stuff than by land. In that same year the town of Louisville was incorporated; and the Virginia legislature— for then Kentucky was a part of Virginia, as we remember— endowed a college in that country, the origin of the University of Lexington.

In 1781 more people came ; and after the war of the Revolution a good many soldiers went back to Virginia who had no regular occupation ; some of these came to Kentucky as settlers. There were among the settlers many worthy people, and some knaves, as in every community.

But it was a hard, hard life, with terrible work and great danger, and no amusements ; no books or papers, very little visiting; only once in a while an opportunity to hear a preacher, and for this they had to take much time and travel far. The people dressed in skins of wild beasts that the men had killed and in linen stuffs that the women had woven. Except in firearms and knives they had almost no iron. They ate chiefly game, fish and coarse cornmeal. They used to buy and sell by barter, so that many a child grew up without ever seeing money. Their dwellings were open to the weather and some were so cold that the people living in them had to sleep on their shoes lest they should freeze too stiff to put on in the morning. Children used to play barefoot in the snow. But they suffered much from such hardships, and grew old and died before their time.

But for all their hard living these people had a great regard for law and through everything kept a certain order. They organized for themselves courts and councils; enforced contracts; collected debts ; and in knowledge of government

BOONE AND THE LINCOLN PIONEERS. 25

were far above their social condition. They were strong and courageous men and women. To the pluck and endurance of our pioneers all over the land, we owe much of what our countryis today.

It was from such ancestors as these that Abraham Lincoln was descended. In the great struggles and victories of his life he needed all the courage that came to him from brave and worthy men and women.

III. The Little Boy in the Lonely Woods

Abraham Lincoln, the grandfather of our president, was killed by Indians. He was working with his three sons at the edge of a clearing. When he was shot, the oldest son, Mordecai, ran to the house and seized a rifle; the second son flew to the neighboring fort for assistance ; and Thomas, the youngest, afterward the father of President Lincoln, but then a child of six years, was left alone with the body of his father. Mordecai saw through a loophole in the cabin an Indian stooping to pick up the child ; and he shot the Indian dead. Help came from the fort and the Indians who had begun to gather, ran away. The rest of his life Mordecai always shot all the Indians he could, and never waited to find out whether they were his friends or his foes.

After her husband's death Abraham Lincoln's widow moved to a more thickly settled neighbor-

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LITTLE BOY IN THE LONELY WOODS. 27

hood ; and there her children grew up. Thomas became a carpenter. He could do good work, but had no ambition, and was the poorest of any of the Lincoln family. But he was honest and good and self-respecting, and of a sunny disposition. While he was learning his trade, he married Nancy Hanks, the niece of his employer. Her family had come from Virginia at the same time with the Lincolns and others. She could read and write, and she taught her husband to write his name. She was bright and handsome ; but they were very poor. After the birth of a daughter, they moved to a little farm, barren and unattractive. There, when Thomas and his wife were poorer than ever, on the twelfth of February, 1809, their son Abraham Lincoln was born. Evidently, he was named for his grandfather who was killed by Indians. Little did father and mother guess that this baby son after he had lived over fifty years was destined also to be shot, not by Indians, but by one quite as wicked and savage as any of them. \

When we see young people with every advantage, able to go to the best schools, to have all the best books to read, to travel and see many countries and famous places, to have all kinds of privileges and enjoyments in life, we are led to think that they have such opportunities to grow great in mind and power and do a noble work in the world that we are tempted to envy them all their possibilities. But when we study the matter we find that of all those who have made their lives a blessing to the world in any walk of life, in science, art, literature, discovery, government, very few have begun their lives with special advantages. A much greater number have worked their own way from poverty and hard circumstances and grown strong in their battles with hardships. A man's real possessions are his mind, become strong by study and thought and exercise along the lines in which he grows great, and especially his heart, which guides him in honesty and honor and justice and love to his fellowmen and points out the only right way to walk.

But of all the children who began life with little and grew to greatness, very few had so little as Abraham Lincoln. It is said that he never talked even to his intimate friends of those very early years. The first four years of life Abraham passed on a dismal and barren farm on Nolin Creek in Hardin County. Then his father bought a fine farm on Knob Creek and put a part of it under cultivation. Here they lived until the boy was seven years old.

What a lonely life for the little fellow! His

LITTLE BOY IN THE LONELY WOODS. 29

sister, a year or two older, was, no doubt often helping her mother. The two children went to school together to the only school in the neighborhood, where they learned the alphabet and not much more. But of books, toys, games and home care and petting, the little fellow knew nothing.

From a baby he wandered out by himself to find his own amusement in the lonely woods. Perhaps he, like Daniel Boone, loved the vast, beautiful woods, the stateliness of the trees— the sycamores, tulip trees, sugartrees, honey locusts, coffee trees, pawpaws, cucumber trees and black mulberries. There were not very many pines or fir trees which made it much easier for the pioneers, because they could so much more readily make a path through the woods, since the branches were high and there was not much underbrush. Then, the flowers were very beautiful, and there were so many of them in such variety.

But Abraham Lincoln when he was a young man was never a hunter like Daniel Boone. And in addition to his great tender heart, which loved all men and creatures too, there may have been another reason for this. For we can picture the lonely little fellow all by himself in the great woods, seated at the foot of some tree and making playmates of the inhabitants of these forests, the rabbits, the squirrels, and the birds. They would not be afraid of him; they would come about him and he would welcome them. He would watch them and learn their habits and come to love them far too well ever to point his gun at any of the fur or feather denizens of the great forests. They had been his companions and friends. It was not in his heart to hurt them.