Edited by Ida Tarbell

McClure’s Magazine/November, 1895

IT is certainly a remarkable fact that only once before has a magazine undertaken to publish a Life of Abraham Lincoln. Editors have eagerly explored the whole world for subjects, themes have been worn threadbare, and yet the greatest of subjects has for some inscrutable reason been overlooked, excepting in a fragmentary way. The Life of Lincoln here begun will in no sense be a rival to the great and monumental work of Messrs. Nicolay and Hay. Theirs was “Abraham Lincoln: A History;” ours is to be Abraham Lincoln the Man. One-fourth of theirs was devoted to the first fifty years of Lincoln’s career; three-fourths of the McClure’s Life will be occupied with the story of Lincoln’s first fifty years.

From a pictorial standpoint this Life of Lincoln will be unique. Our frontispiece is the only portrait of Lincoln showing him with a young face. We shall publish fully twice as many portraits of Lincoln as have ever appeared in any Life, and we shall illustrate the scenes of Lincoln’s career on a scale never before attempted. The method of preparing this Life is also unique. As far as possible the story of each period of Lincoln’s career will be told by the persons most competent, either from personal association, or by special study, to relate it. Miss Tarbell directs each writer, and herself furnishes connecting links for the narrative. By this means accuracy, local color, and, in many cases, facts absolutely new are secured. The text and the pictures of this first article, however, are the best exposition of our plans, and the best indication of what we intend to do.

Lincoln’s Boyhood in Kentucky and Indiana

“THE short and simple annals of the poor” was Abraham Lincoln’s own characterization of his early life. It is a characterization true as well of the lives of his father and mother, and of all his ancestors as far back as we are able with any certainty to follow them. For our present purpose it is not necessary to trace these ancestors farther back than the paternal grandfather, one Abraham Lincoln, who, towards the close of the last century, fell under the spell of the adventurous spirit of his friend Daniel Boone, and left his home in Rockingham County, Virginia, in 1780 or thereabouts, to move into Kentucky, where he took up four hundred acres of land in Jefferson County, twenty miles east of Louisville. In 1784 Abraham Lincoln was killed by Indians, leaving his wife and five children to shift for themselves. The youngest of these children, a lad of six years at that time, was called Thomas.

The death of the father was sad for this child, for it turned him adrift to become a “wandering laboring-boy” before he had learned even to read. For twenty-two years he went about from place to place, doing many kinds of rough farm work, as well as learning indifferently well the trade of a carpenter and cabinet-maker; though undoubtedly he was, as one of his old acquaintances said, “a good carpenter for those days, when a cabin was built mainly with the axe, and not a nail or bolt-hinge in it; only leathers and pins to the door, and no glass, except in watches and spectacles and bottles. Tom had the best set of tools in what was then and now Washington County.” He never became a thrifty or ambitious man. “He would work energetically enough when a job was brought to him,” said one of his old acquaintances, “but he would never seek a job.” He was absolutely illiterate, never doing more “in the way of writing than to bunglingly write his own name.” Nevertheless, he had the reputation of having, as one of his nephews, J. L. Nail, says, “good, strong horse-sense;” and Dennis Hanks declares he was a man of the strongest determination when his mind was made up; besides, he was good-natured and obliging, “a very quiet sort of man,” says Mr. Nail, moral—and, in the crude way of the pioneer, he was religious.

When twenty-eight years old, Thomas Lincoln married. His wife, Nancy Hanks by name, was, like her husband, a Virginian, and, like him, of a “second-rate family.” Her experience in life had, too, been similar to her husband’s, for the Hanks family had been drawn into Kentucky by the fascination of Boone as had the Lincolns. But it was only in her surroundings and her family that Nancy Hanks was like Thomas Lincoln. In nature, in education, and in ambition she was, if tradition is to be believed, quite another person. Certainly a fair and delicate woman, who could read and write, who had ideas of refinement and a desire to get more from life than fortune had allotted her, was hardly enough like Thomas Lincoln to be a suitable wife for him. She was still more unfit to be his wife because of a sensitive nature which made her brood over her situation—a situation made the more hopeless by the fact that she had neither the force of character nor strength of body to do anything to improve it; if, indeed, she had any clear notion of what it lacked.

Thomas and Nancy Lincoln were married near Beechland, in Washington County, Kentucky, on June 12, 1806. There was still living in 1884, in his hundredth year, an old man, Christopher Columbus Graham, who was present at this wedding. “I was out hunting roots for my medicines,” he told an interviewer, “and just went to the wedding to get a good supper, and got it. I saw Nancy Hanks Lincoln at her wedding; a fresh-looking girl, I should say over twenty. I was at the infare, too, given by John H. Parrott, her guardian, and only girls with money had guardians appointed by the court. We had bear meat, . . . venison, wild turkey and ducks, eggs wild and tame—so common that you could buy them at two bits a bushel—maple sugar swung on a string to bite off for coffee or whiskey, syrup in big gourds, peach-and-honey, a sheep that the two families barbecued whole over coals of wood burned in a pit, and covered with green boughs to keep the juices in, and a race for the whiskey bottle. . . . Our table was of the puncheons cut from solid logs.”

Marriage compelled the restless Thomas to locate at last. His first home was a poor little cabin in Elizabethtown, and here he remained until after the birth of his first child, a daughter, when he took land for a farm on Big South Fork of Nolin Creek, in what is now La Rue County, three miles from Hodgensville. Here he was living when, on February 12, 1809, his second child, a boy, was born. The little newcomer was called Abraham, after his grandfather— a name which had persisted through many preceding generations of the Lincolns.

Abraham Lincoln’s Life in Kentucky

The home into which the child came was a poor one. The cabin was not “the picturesque, vine-clad one of the storybooks,” says a resident of the country who has followed in detail the scenes of the President’s early life, “but one standing out in a clearing, with only one small room, a door, but no window, a stick chimney, with open cracks through which swept the winds, the rain, the snows of winter, and the swarms of mosquitoes in summer. . . . We take an inventory of the furniture of that cabin: bunks, the mattress of dry leaves, the slab stools, the open fireplace. We note the absence of even the necessities of life — neither stove, window nor floor.” The only one of Mr. Lincoln’s early acquaintances now living, Mr. Austin Gollaher, said to a representative of this Magazine, in describing the poverty of these early surroundings:

“At the time of Abraham’s birth his father was away from home. Some of her neighbors who were with Mrs. Lincoln at the event learned that she was destitute of anything in the nature of food. Some of the ladies called upon Judge William Cessna, one of the most prominent men of that time in this section, in Mrs. Lincoln’s behalf, and he donated flour and other articles of food.”

The picture is dark, but, fortunately, there are those who remember pleasanter things about it. Christopher Columbus Graham, whose statement s have already been quoted, says of some of the stories of the poverty in Thomas Lincoln’s family: “It is all stuff about Tom Lincoln keeping his wife in an open shed in a winter when the wild animals left the woods and stood in the corners next the stick-and-clay chimneys, so as not to freeze to death; or, if climbers, got on the roof. The Lincolns had a cow and calf, milk and butter, a good featherbed, for I have slept in it while they took the buffalo robes on the floor, because I was a doctor. They had home-woven ‘kiverlids,’ big and little pots, a loom and wheel; and William Hardesty, who was there too, can say with me that Tom Lincoln was a man, and took care of his wife.”

However poor the Lincoln home may have been, it affected the new child but little. He was robust and active; and life is full of interest to the child happy enough to be born in the country. He had several companions. There was his sister Nancy, or Sarah—both names are given her—two years his senior; there was a cousin of his mother’s, ten years older, Dennis Hanks, an active and ingenious leader in sports and mischief; and there were the neighbors’ boys. One of the latter, Austin Gollaher, still tells with pleasure of how he hunted coons and ran the woods with young Lincoln, and once even saved his life. “Yes,” said Mr. Gollaher; “the story that I once saved Abraham Lincoln’s life is true, but it is not correct as generally related.

“Abraham Lincoln and I had been going to school together for a year or more, and had become greatly attached to each other. Then school disbanded on account of there being so few scholars, and we did not see each other much for a long while. One Sunday my mother visited the Lincolns, and I was take n along. Abe and I played around all day. Finally, we concluded to cross the creek to hunt for some partridges young Lincoln had seen the day before. The creek was swollen by a recent rain, and, in crossing on the narrow footlog, Abe fell in. Neither of us could swim. I got a long pole and held it out to Abe, who grabbed it. Then I pulled him ashore. He was almost dead, and I was badly scared. I rolled and pounded him in good earnest. Then I got him by the arms and shook him, the water meanwhile pouring out of his mouth. By this means I succeeded in bringing him to, and he was soon all right.

“Then a new difficulty confronted us. If our mothers discovered our wet clothes they would whip us. This we dreaded from experience and determined to avoid. It was June, the sun was very warm, and we soon dried our clothing by spreading it on the rocks about us. We promised never to tell the story, and I never mentioned the incident to anyone until after Lincoln’s tragic end.”

Abraham Lincoln had a sister. Her name was Sallie, and she was a very pretty girl. She went to school when she could, which was not often.

“Yes, if you must know, Sallie Lincoln was my sweetheart. She was about my age. I loved her and claimed her, as boys do. I suppose that was one reason for my warm regard for Abe. When the Lincoln family moved to Indiana, I was prevented by circumstances from bidding goodby to either of the children. And I never saw them again.”

All the young people went to school, Abraham chiefly to be a companion to his sister on her long walk, so the traditions say. The schools of that day in the West were haphazard affairs, depending upon whether some vagrant man, with nothing better to do for the moment, wandered into the country, and offered his services. The terms were irregular, their length being decided by the time the settlers felt able to board the master and pay his small salary. The chief qualification for a schoolmaster seems to have been enough strength to keep the “big boys” in order, though one great authority affirms that pluck went “for a heap sight more’n sinnoo with boys.”

Many of the itinerant masters were Catholics—strolling Irishmen from the colony in Tennessee, or French priests from Kaskaskia. Lincoln’s first teacher, Zachariah Riney, was a Catholic, though there is no record that he tried proselyting among his pupils. Of the second master to whom he went in Kentucky, Caleb Hazel, we know even less than of Riney. However, they succeeded between them, in the few months Lincoln was their pupil, in teaching him to read and write. Mr. Gollaher testifies that Abraham Lincoln, in those days when he was his schoolmate, was “an unusually bright boy at school, and made splendid progress in his studies. Indeed, he learned faster than any of his schoolmates. Though so young he studied very hard. He would get spice-wood brushes, hack them up on a log, and burn them two or three together, for the purpose of giving light by which he might pursue his studies. It was not a good light, but the best he could obtain.”

Probably the boy’s mother had something to do with the spice-wood illuminations. Tradition has it that Mrs. Lincoln took great pains to teach her children what she knew, and at her knee they heard all the Bible lore, fairy tales, and country legends she had been able to gather in her poor life. It is not impossible that she did try to devise a means of lighting her cabin at night, when her work was ended, that she might read to her children.

Besides the “ABC schools,” as Lincoln called them, the only other medium of education in the country districts of Kentucky in those days was “preaching.” Itinerants like the schoolmasters, the preachers, of whatever denomination, were generally uncouth and illiterate, but they administered the gospel with startling literalness, and in a thundering rhetoric which was music to the ear of the pioneer. The code of morals they taught was mainly a healthy one, though they rarely tried to persuade to righteousness for its own sake, evidently believing it more effective to frighten their hearers from evildoing by terrifying pictures of future punishment. These men were of unquestionable sincerity and devotion, and they, no doubt, did much to keep the consciences of the pioneers awake. It is difficult to believe that they ever did much for the moral training of young Lincoln, though he certainly got his first notion of public speaking from them; and for years in his boyhood one of his chief delights was to get his playmates about him, and preach and thump until he had his auditors frightened or in tears.

The Lincolns Leave Kentucky

In 1816 a great event happened to the little boy. His father emigrated to Indiana from Knob Creek (Thomas Lincoln had removed from the farm on Nolin Creek to one some fifteen miles northeast, on Knob Creek, when Abraham was four years old). “This removal was partly on account of slavery, but chiefly on account of the difficulty in land titles in Kentucky,” says his son. It was due, no doubt, too, to that restless pioneer spirit, which drives even men of sober judgment continually towards the frontier, in search of a place where the conflict with nature is less severe—some spot farther on, to which a friend or neighbor has preceded, and from which he sends back glowing reports. It may be that Thomas Lincoln was tempted into Indiana by the reports of his brother Josiah, who had already settled on the Big Blue River of that State. At all events, in the fall of 1816, he started with wife and children and household stores to journey by horseback and by wagon from Knob Creek to a farm selected on a previous trip he had made. This farm, located near Little Pigeon Creek, about fifteen miles north of the Ohio River, and a mile and a half east of Gentryville, Spencer County, was in a forest so dense that the road for the travelers had to be hewed out as they went.

“They find no beaten highway through the forest, therefore our interest is the keener. We like to hear with our mind’s ear the sounding stroke of the axe as it bites the trees. We watch the chips fly; the tree quivers, shakes, and then crashes to the earth, only to be pulled aside because it obstructs the onward progress of this inveterate mover.”

To a boy of seven years, free from all responsibility, and too vigorous to feel its hardships, such a journey must have been, as William Cooper Howells, the father of the novelist, says of his own trip from Virginia to Ohio, in 1813, “a panorama of delightful novelty.” Life suddenly ceased its routine, and every day brought forth new and strange scenes and adventures. Little Abraham saw forests greater than he had ever dreamed of, peopled by strange new birds and beasts, and he crossed a river so wide that it must have seemed to him like the sea. To Thomas and Nancy Lincoln the journey was probably a hard and sad one; but to the children beside them it was a wonderful voyage into the unknown.

A New Home in Indiana

On arriving at the new farm an axe was put into the boy’s hands, and he was set to work to help build the “half-face camp” which for a year was the home of the Lincolns, and to aid in clearing a field for corn. There were few more primitive homes in the wilderness of Indiana in 1816 than this of young Lincoln’s, and there were few families, even in that day, who were forced to practise more makeshifts to get a living. The cabin which took the place of the “half-face camp” had but one room, with a loft above. For a long time there was no window, door, or floor; not even the traditional deer-skin hung before the exit, nor the oiled paper over the opening for light, nor the puncheon covering on the ground on which they trod.

The furniture was painfully primitive. Their bedstead, or, rather, bed-frame, was still made of poles held up by two outer posts, and the ends made firm by inserting the poles in augur-holes that had been bored in a log which was a part of the wall of the cabin; skins were its chief covering. Little Abraham was not so well off as this even, his bed being a heap of dry leaves in the corner of the loft, to which he mounted by means of pegs driven into the wall. The table and chairs were of the rudest sort—rough slabs of wood in which holes were bored and legs fitted in.

The food, if coarse, was usually abundant, though sometimes the variety was painfully small. Of game there was plenty—deer, bear, pheasants, wild turkeys, duck, birds of all kinds. There were fish in the streams, and wild fruits of many kinds in the woods in the summer, and these were dried for winter use; but the difficulty of raising and milling corn and wheat was very great. Indeed, in many places in the West, the first flour cake was a historical event. “Corn dodger” was the every-day bread of the Lincoln household, the wheat cake being a reserved dainty for Sunday mornings.

Potatoes were the only vegetables raised in any quantity, and there were times in the Lincoln family when they were the only food on the table; a fact proved to posterity by the oft-repeated remark of Abraham to his father after the latter had asked a blessing over a dish of roasted potatoes—that they were “mighty poor blessings.” Not only were potatoes all the Lincolns had for dinner sometimes, they were all they had on occasions to offer to guests; for one of their neighbors tells of calling there once when raw potatoes, pared and washed, were passed around and eaten as apples.

The food was prepared in the rudest way, for the supply of both groceries and cooking utensils was limited. The former were frequently wanting entirely, and as for the latter, the most important item was the Dutch oven. “The old-fashioned deep iron skillet,” says one familiar with the life of the period, “with its strong iron lid, on which were piled the red coals to bake whatever the skillet might contain for the family to eat, the crane and its pot—these were the cooking and furnishing outfit of the Lincoln household. There was no floor in the cabin, and nothing spoke of comfort, except the cheerful, blazing wood fire, which did its utmost to give a rosy hue to the bare room, which contained but rude makeshifts.”

An important article in the primitive kitchen outfit was the “gritter.” It was made by flattening out an old piece of tin, punching it full of holes, and nailing it to a board. Upon this all sorts of things were grated, even ears of corn, in which slow way enough meal was sometimes secured for bread. Old tin made many other little contrivances besides the “gritter,” and every scrap to be found was carefully saved. Most of the dishes were of pewter; the spoons, iron; the knives and forks, horn handled.

Mrs. Lincoln and her daughters of course made their own soap and candles, and if they had cotton or wool to wear they had literally to grow it. One of the old settlers of Illinois says of her experience at this period: “As for our clothes, we had to raise, pick, spin, and weave cotton for winter and summer. We also made linsey of wool and flax. The first indigo we had we raised. Besides that we used sumac berries, white-walnut bark, and other barks for coloring.

“Now for cotton picking. We children had to lie before the fire and pick the seed from the cotton bolls before we could go to bed. The warmer the cotton the better it picked; so we would take a good sweat. The next day that had to be carded and spun; so some would soap the cotton, some card, and some spin; and when we would get enough spun and colored to make a dress apiece we would put it in the loom and weave it. It did not take fifteen or twenty yards to make a dress then; six or eight yards of linsey were enough for any woman.”

With such difficulties in the way it is probable that Abraham wore little cotton or linsey-woolsey. His trousers were of roughly tanned deerskin, his foot-covering a home-made moccasin, his cap a coonskin, his coat a blouse of linsey-woolsey. But if this kind of costume had some obvious disadvantages, it was not to be despised. So good an authority as Governor Reynolds says of one of its articles—the linsey-woolsey shirt—“It was an excellent garment. I have never felt so happy and healthy since I put it off.”

These “pretty pinching times,” as Abraham Lincoln once described the early days in Indiana, lasted until 1819. The year before, Nancy Lincoln had died, and for many months no more forlorn place could be conceived than the bereft household; but finally Thomas Lincoln went back to Kentucky and returned with a new wife— Sally Bush Johnston, a widow with three children, John, Sarah, and Matilda. The new mother came well provided with household furniture—things unheard of before by little Abraham—“one fine bureau, one table, one set of chairs, one large clothes chest, cooking utensils, knives, forks, bedding, and other articles.” She at once made the cabin habitable, and taught the children habits of cleanliness and comfort.

Abraham Becomes a Laborer

By this time Abraham had become an important member of the family. He was remarkably strong for his years, and the work he could do in a day was a decided advantage to Thomas Lincoln. The axe which had been put into his hand to help in making the first clearing, he had never been allowed to drop; indeed, as he says himself, “from that till within his twenty-third year he was almost constantly handling that most useful instrument.” Besides, he drove the team, cut down the elm and linn brush with which the stock was often fed, learned to handle the old shovel-plough, to wield the sickle, to thresh the wheat with a flail, to fan and clean it with a sheet, to go to mill and turn the hard-earned grist into flour; in short, he learned all the trades the settler’s boy must know, and well enough so that when his father did not need him he could hire him to the neighbors. Thomas Lincoln also taught him the rudiments of carpentry and cabinet-making, and kept him busy some of the time as his assistant in his trade. There are houses still standing, in and near Gentryville, on which it is said he worked. The families of Lamar, Jones, Crawford, Gentry, Turnham, and Richardson all claim the honor of having employed him upon their cabins.

As he grew older he became one of the strongest and most popular “hands” in the vicinity, and much of his time was spent as a “hired boy” on some neighbor’s farm. For twenty-five cents a day—paid to his father—he was hostler, ploughman, woodchopper, and carpenter, besides helping the women with the “chores.” For them, so say the legends, he was ready to carry water, make the fire, even tend the baby. No wonder that a laborer who never refused to do anything asked of him, who could “strike with a mallet heavier blows” and “sink an axe deeper into the wood” than anybody else in the community, and who at the same time was general help for the women, never lacked a job in Gentryville.

Of all the tasks his rude life brought him, none seems to have suited him better than going to the mill. It was, perhaps, as much the leisure which was enforced on him by this trip as anything else which attracted him. The machinery was primitive, and each man waited his turn, which sometimes was long in coming. A story is told by one of the pioneers of Illinois of going many miles with a grist, and waiting so long for his turn that when it came he and his horse had eaten all the corn, and he had none to grind.

This waiting with other men and boys on like errands gave an opportunity for talk and story-telling which was a great delight to Abraham. In 1826 he added to his other accomplishments that of ferryman, being employed for some nine months at the mouth of Anderson Creek, where it joins the Ohio. This experience opened new possibilities to him, and he became ambitious to try the river as a boatman. It was a custom among the farmers of Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois at this date to collect a quantity of produce, build a raft, and float down to New Orleans to sell it. Young Lincoln saw this, and wanted to try his fortune as a produce merchant. An incident of his projected trip he related once to Mr. Seward:

“Seward,” he said, “you never heard, did you, how I earned my first dollar?” “No,” said Mr. Seward. “Well,” replied he, “I was about eighteen years of age, and belonged, as you know, to what they call down South the ‘scrubs;’ people who do not own land and slaves are nobody there; but we had succeeded in raising, chiefly by my labor, sufficient produce, as I thought, to justify me in taking it down the river to sell. After much persuasion I had got the consent of my mother to go, and had constructed a flatboat, large enough to take the few barrels of things we had gathered down to New Orleans. A steamer was going down the river. We have, you know, no wharves on the Western streams, and the custom was, if passengers were at any of the landings, they were to go out in a boat, the steamer stopping and taking them on board. I was contemplating my new boat, and wondering whether I could make it stronger or improve it in any part, when two men with trunks came down to the shore in carriages, and looking at the different boats, singled out mine, and asked: ‘Who owns this?’ I answered modestly, ‘I do.’ ‘Will you,’ said one of them,’ take us and our trunks out to the steamer?’ ‘Certainly,’ said I. I was very glad to have the chance of earning something, and supposed that each of them would give me a couple of bits. The trunks were put in my boat, the passengers seated themselves on them, and I sculled them out to the steamer. They got on board, and I lifted the trunks and put them on the deck. The steamer was about to put on steam again, when I called out, ‘You have forgotten to pay me.’ Each of them took from his pocket a silver half-dollar and threw it on the bottom of my boat. I could scarcely believe my eyes as I picked up the money. You may think it was a very little thing, and in these days it seems to me like a trifle, but it was a most important incident in my life. I could scarcely credit that I, the poor boy, had earned a dollar in less than a day; that by honest work I had earned a dollar. The world seemed wider and fairer before me. I was a more hopeful and thoughtful boy from that time.”

Soon after this, while he was working for Mr. Gentry, the leading citizen of Gentryville, his employer decided to send his son to New Orleans with a load of produce, and chose young Lincoln to go as “bow-hand,” “to work the front oars.” For this trip he received eight dollars a month and his passage back as a deck passenger on a steamer.

Early Education

With all this hard living and hard work, Lincoln was getting in this period a desultory kind of education. Not that he received much schooling. He went “by littles,” he says; ” in all it did not amount to inore than a year.” But more or less of the schoolroom is a matter of small importance if a boy has learned to read and to think of what he reads. And that this boy had learned. His stock of books was small, but he knew them thoroughly, and they were good books to know: the Bible, Aesop’s “Fables,” “Robinson Crusoe,” Bunyan’s “Pilgrim’s Progress,” a “History of the United States,” Weems’s “Life of Washington,” and the “Statutes of Indiana.” These are the chief ones we know about. He did not own them all, but sometimes had to borrow them from the neighbors, a practice which resulted in at least one casualty, for Weems’s “Life of Washington” he allowed to get wet, and to make good the loss he had to pull fodder three days. No matter. The book became his then, and he could read it as he would. Fortunately he took this curious work in profound seriousness, which a wide-awake boy would hardly be expected to do to-day. Washington became an exalted figure in his imagination; and he always contended later, when the question of the real character of the first President was brought up, that it was wiser to regard him as a godlike character, heroic in nature and deeds, as Weems did, than to contend that he was only a man who, if wise and good, still made mistakes and indulged in follies like other men.

In 1861, addressing the Senate of the State of New Jersey, he said: “May I be pardoned if, upon this occasion, I mention that away back in my childhood, the earliest days of my being able to read, I got hold of a small book, such a one as few of the younger members have ever seen—Weems’s “Life of Washington.” I remember all the accounts there given of the battle-fields and struggles for the liberties of the country, and none fixed themselves upon my imagination so deeply as the struggle here at Trenton, New Jersey. The crossing of the river, the contest with the Hessians, the great hardships endured at that time, all fixed themselves on my memory more than any single revolutionary event; and you all know, for you have all been boys, how these early impressions last longer than any others. I recollect thinking then, boy even though I was, that there must have been something more than common that these men struggled for.” Besides these books he borrowed many. He once told a friend that he “read through every book he had ever heard of in that country, for a circuit of fifty miles.” From everything he read he made long extracts, using a turkey-buzzard pen and brierroot ink. When he had no paper he would write on a board, and thus preserve his selections until he secured a copy-book. The wooden fire-shovel was his usual slate, and on its back he would cipher with a charred stick, shaving it off when covered. The logs and boards in his vicinity were always filled with his figures and quotations. By night he read and worked as long as there was light, and he kept a book in the crack of the logs in his loft, to have it at hand at peep of day. When acting as ferryman, in his nineteenth year, anxious, no doubt, to get through the books of the house where he boarded, before he left the place, he read every night “till midnight,” so says his room-mate.

In his habits of reading and study the boy had little encouragement from his father, but his step-mother did all she could for him. Indeed, between the two there soon grew up a relation of touching gentleness and confidence. In one of the interviews a biographer of Mr. Lincoln sought with her before her death, Mrs. Lincoln said :

“I induced my husband to permit Abe to read and study at home, as well as at school. At first he was not easily reconciled to it, but finally he too seemed willing to encourage him to a certain extent. Abe was a dutiful son to me always, and we took particular care when he was reading not to disturb him—would let him read on and on till he quit of his own accord.”

This consideration of his stepmother won the boy’s confidence, and he rarely copied anything that he did not bring it to her to read, asking her opinion of it; and often, when she did not understand it, explaining the meaning in his plain and simple language.

No newspaper ever escaped him. One man in Gentryville, a Mr. Jones, the storekeeper, took a Louisville paper, and here Lincoln went regularly to read and discuss its contents. All the men and boys of the neighborhood gathered there, and everything which the paper related was subjected to their keen, shrewd common-sense. It was not long before young Lincoln became the favorite member of the group and the one listened to most eagerly. Politics were warmly discussed by these Gentryville citizens, and it may be that sitting on the counter of Jones’s grocery Lincoln even discussed slavery. It certainly was one of the live questions in Indiana at that date. For several years after her organization as a Territory, and in spite of the Ordinance of 1787, a system of thinly disguised slavery had existed; and it took a sharp struggle to bring the State in without some form of slavery. So uncertain was the result that, when decided, the word passed from mouth to mouth all over Hoosierdom, “She has come in free, she has come in free!” Even in 1820, four years after her admission as a State, the census showed one hundred and ninety slaves, nearly all of them in the southwest corner, where the Lincolns lived, and it was not, in reality, until 1821 that the State Supreme Court put an end to the question. In Illinois in 1822-1824 there was carried on one of the most violent contests between the friends and opponents of slavery which occurred before the repeal of the Missouri Compromise. The effort to secure slave labor was nearly successful. In the campaign, pamphlets pro and con literally inundated the State; the pulpits took it up; and “almost every stump in every county had its bellowing, indignant orator.” So violent a commotion so nearby could hardly have failed to reach Gentryville.

There had been other anti-slavery agitation going on nearby for several years. In 1804 a number of Baptist ministers of Kentucky started a crusade against the institution, which resulted in a hot contest in the denomination and the organization of the “Baptist Licking-Locust Association Friends of Humanity.” The Rev. Jesse Head, the minister who married Thomas Lincoln and Nancy Hanks, talked freely and boldly against slavery, and one of their old friends, Christopher Columbus Graham, the man who was present at their wedding, says: “Tom and Nancy Lincoln and Sally Bush were just steeped full of Jesse Head’s notions about the wrong of slavery and the rights of man as explained by Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Paine.” In 1806 Charles Osborn began to preach “immediate emancipation” in Tennessee. Ten years later he started a paper in Ohio, devoted to the same idea, and three years after he went to Indiana. In 1821 Benjamin Lundy started, in Tennessee, the famous “Genius,” devoted to the same doctrine; and in 1822, at Shelbyville, only about one hundred miles from Gentryville, was started a paper similar in its views, the “Abolition Intelligencer.” At that time there were in Kentucky five or six abolition societies, and in Illinois was an organization called the “Friends of Humanity.” If these things came to young Lincoln it was probably but vaguely; but some of them must have come to him, and he must have connected them with the “Speech of Mr. Pitt on the Slave Trade;” and with Merry’s elegy, “The Slaves,” which he had learned in his “American Preceptor;” and with the discussion given in his “Kentucky Preceptor,” “Which has the Most to complain of, the Indian or the Negro?”

Young Lincoln was not only winning in these days in the Jones grocery store a reputation as a debater and story-teller, he was becoming known as a kind of backwoods orator. He could repeat with effect all the poems and speeches in his various school readers, he could imitate to perfection the wandering preachers who came to Gentryville, and he could make a political speech so stirring that he drew a crowd about him every time he mounted a stump. The applause he won was sweet; and frequently he indulged his gifts when he ought to have been at work — so thought his employers and Thomas his father. It was trying, no doubt, to the hard-pushed farmers, to see the men who ought to have been cutting grass or chopping wood throw down their sickles or axes to group around a boy whenever he mounted a stump to develop a pet theory or repeat with variations yesterday’s sermon. In his fondness for speech-making he attended all the trials of the neighborhood, and frequently walked fifteen miles to Boonsville to attend court.

He wrote as well as made speeches, and some of his productions were even printed, through the influence of his admiring neighbors. Thus a local Baptist preacher was so struck with one of Abraham’s essays on temperance that he sent it to Ohio, where it appeared in some local paper. Another article, on “National Politics,” so pleased a lawyer of the vicinity that he declared the “world couldn’t beat it.”

Influence of the River Life

In considering the different opportunities for development which the boy had at this time, his months spent on the Ohio as a ferryman and his trips down the Mississippi should not be forgotten. In fact, all that Abraham Lincoln saw of men and the world outside of Gentryville and its neighborhood, until after he was twenty-one years of age, he saw on these rivers. For many years the Ohio and the Mississippi were the Appian Way, the one route to the world for the Western settlers. To preserve it they had been willing in early times to go to war with Spain or with France, to secede from the Union, even to join Spain or France against the United States if either country would insure their right to their highway. Every man of them had come to feel in the long years in which the ownership of the great river was unsettled, with Benjamin Franklin, “a neighbor might as well ask me to sell my street-door.” In fact, this waterway was their “street-door,” and all that many of them ever saw of the world passed here. Up and down the rivers was a continual movement. Odd crafts of every kind possible on a river went by: “arks” or “sleds,” with tidy cabins where families lived and where one could see the washing stretched, the children playing, the mother on pleasant days rocking and sewing; keel-boats, which dodged in and out and turned inquisitive noses up all the creeks and bayous; great fleets from the Alleghanies, made up of a score or more of timber rafts, and manned by forty or fifty rough boatmen; “Orleans boats,” loaded with flour, hogs, produce of all kinds; pirogues, made from great trees; “broad-horns,” curious nondescripts worked by a wheel; and, after 1812, steamboats.

All this traffic was leisurely. Men had time to tie up and tell the news and show their wares, if they found sympathetic listeners. Even the steamboats loitered as it pleased them. They knew no schedule. They stopped anywhere to let passengers off. They tied up wherever it was convenient to wait for fresh wood to be cut and loaded, or for repairs to be made. Waiting for repairs seems, in fact, to have absorbed a great deal of the time of these early steamers. They were continually running on to “sawyers,” or “planters,” or “wooden islands,” and they blew up with a regularity which was monotonous. Even as late as 1842, when Charles Dickens made the trip down the Mississippi, he was gravely recommended a great many times to keep as far aft as possible, “because the steamboats generally blew up forward.”

It was this varied river life that Abraham Lincoln came into contact with while a ferryman and boatman. Who can believe that he could see it and be part of it without learning much of the life and of the world beyond him? Every time a steamboat or raft tied up near Anderson Creek and he with his companions boarded it and saw its mysteries and talked with its crew, every time he rowed out with passengers to a passing steamer, who can doubt that he came away with new ideas and fresh energy? The trips to New Orleans were, to a thoughtful boy, an education of no mean value. It was the most cosmopolitan and brilliant city of the United States at that date, and there young Lincoln saw life at its intensest.

Amusements of His Life

If his struggle for both livelihood and time to tie up and tell the news and show education was rough and hard, his life was not without amusements. At home the rude household was overflowing with life. There was Abraham and his sister, his step-brother, and two step-sisters, and Dennis Hanks, whom bad fortune had made an inmate of the Lincoln home—quite enough to plan sports and mischief and keep time from growing dull. Thomas Lincoln and Dennis Hanks were both famous story-tellers, and the Lincolns spent many a cozy evening about their cabin fire, repeating the stories they knew. Of course the boys hunted. Not that Abraham ever became a true sportsman; indeed he seems to have lacked the genuine sporting instinct, as his own story of his exploits shows: “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 riflegun, standing inside, shot through a crack and killed one of them. He has never since pulled the trigger on any larger game.” He went swimming in the evenings; went fishing with the other boys in the fishing pool, and caught chubs and suckers enough to delight any boy; he wrestled, jumped, or ran races at the noon rests.

The sports he preferred were those which brought men together: the spelling-school, the husking-bee, the “raising;” and of all these he was the life by his wit, his stories, his good-nature, his doggerel verses, his practical jokes, and by a rough kind of politeness—for even in Indiana in those times there was a notion of politeness, and one of Lincoln’s schoolmasters had even given “lessons in manners.” Lincoln seems to have profited to a degree by them; for Mrs. Crawford, at whose home he worked some time, declares that he always “lifted his hat and bowed” when he made his appearance.

There was, of course, a rough gallantry among the young people; and Lincoln’s old comrades and friends in Lidiana have left many tales of how he “went to see the girls;” of how he brought in the biggest back-log and made the brightest fire; then, of how, “sitting around” it, watching the way the sparks flew, the young folks told their fortunes. He helped pare apples, shell corn, and crack nuts. He took the girls to meeting and to spelling-school, although he was not often allowed to take part in the spelling-match, for the one who “chose first” always chose “Abe Lincoln,” and that was equivalent to winning, as the others knew that “he would stand up the longest.”

The nearest approach to sentiment at this time of which we know, is a story he once told to an acquaintance in Springfield. It was a rainy day, and he was sitting with his feet on the wood-sill, his eyes on the street, watching the rain. Suddenly he looked up and said:

“Did you ever write out a story in your mind? I did when I was a little codger. One day a wagon with a lady and two girls and a man broke down near us, and while they were fixing up, they cooked in our kitchen. The woman had books and read us stories and they were the first I ever had heard. I took a great fancy to one of the girls; and when they were gone I thought of her a great deal, and one day when I was sitting out in the sun by the house I wrote out a story in my mind. I thought I took my father’s horse and followed the wagon, and finally I found it, and they were surprised to see me. I talked with the girl and persuaded her to elope with me; and that night I put her on my horse, and we started off across the prairie. After several hours we came to a camp; and when we rode up we found it was the one we had left a few hours before, and we went in. The next night we tried again, and the same thing happened—the horse came back to the same place; and then we concluded that we ought not to elope. I stayed until 1 had persuaded her father to give her to me. I always meant to write that story out and publish it, and I began once; but I concluded it was not much of a story. But I think that was the beginning of love with me.”

Early Sorrows

His life had its tragedies as well as its touch of romance—tragedies so real and profound that they gave dignity to all the crudeness and poverty which surrounded him, and quickened and intensified the melancholy temperament he had inherited from his mother. Away back in 1816, when Thomas Lincoln had started to find a farm in Indiana, bidding his wife be ready to go into the wilderness on his return, Nancy Lincoln had taken her boy and girl to a tiny grave, that of her youngest child; and the three had there said good-bye to a little one whom the children had scarcely known, but for whom the mother’s grief was so keen that the boy never forgot the scene. Two years later he saw his father make a green pine box and put his dead mother into it, and he saw her buried not far from their cabin, almost without prayer. Young as he was, it is said that it was his efforts which brought a parson from Kentucky, three months later, to preach the sermon and conduct the service which seemed to the child a necessary honor to the dead. As sad as the death of his mother had been was that of his only sister, Sarah. Married to Aaron Grigsby in 1826, she had died a year and a half later in child-birth, a death which to her brother must have seemed a horror and a mystery.

Apart from these family sorrows there was all the crime and misery of the community—all of which came to his ears and awakened his nature. He even saw in those days one of his companions go suddenly mad. The young man never recovered his reason, but sank into idiocy. All night he would croon plaintive songs, and Lincoln himself tells how, fascinated by this mysterious malady, he used to rise before daylight to cross the fields and listen to this funeral dirge of the reason. In spite of the poverty and rudeness of his life the depth of his nature had not been blunted. He could feel intensely, and his imagination was quick to respond to the touch of mystery.