Not long before his tragic death, Mr. Lincoln said: “All that I am, and
all that I hope to be, I owe to my mother.” That mother died when little
Abe was nine years of age. But she had already woven the texture of
her deepest character into the habits and purposes of her boy. Her own
origin had been humble. But there were certain elements in her character
that prepared her for grand motherhood. When Nancy Hanks, at the age
of twenty-three, gave her heart and hand to Thomas Lincoln, she was a
young woman of large trustfulness, of loving, unselfish disposition, of
profound faith in Divine Providence, of unswerving Christian profession.
On the day of their marriage Thomas Lincoln took this young wife to his
unfinished cabin, which had as yet neither door, floor, nor window. The
young man was a shiftless Kentucky hunter, who could not read a word. He
was handy with his few carpenter tools, but had received no encouragement
to keep at work. His happy, trusting wife assisted him to finish the
cabin. He mortared the chinks with mud which they together had mixed. Her
hope and song made the work of the day his happy employ. In the evening
she taught him to read, spelling the words out of her Bible as the text
book, which served her double purpose.
From that day Thomas Lincoln was a new man. It was this conscientious
wife that inspired him to move across the Ohio into the free State of
Indiana. Here Lincoln soon became a justice of the peace. When this
wife died, only twelve years after their marriage, Thomas Lincoln had
been transformed from the shiftless hunter, who could not read, to an
intelligent farmer of the largest influence of any man in his township.
Little Abe had been taught to read out of that same Bible, and had read
out of that mother’s eyes and voice her large trust in the overshadowing
Providence and her unswerving honesty in doing the right. It was this
woman that put into his hands the fine books--the Bible, Pilgrim’s
Progress, Æsop’s Fables, Robinson Crusoe, and Weems’s Life of Washington.
Such was the mother that started Abraham Lincoln. “Widow Johnston,” who
became his stepmother, was a good woman, with whom he always maintained
the kindest relations. She deserved the honorable mention she received.