If Daniel Boone, the mighty hunter and Indian fighter, had not roused
the imagination of Virginians and Carolinians by his wonderful and
romantic deeds in the exploration of the Kentucky wilderness, the
grandfather of Abraham Lincoln would not have left Rockingham County,
Virginia, and “entered” seventeen hundred acres of land in Kentucky,
where he was presently slain on his forest farm by a savage in the
presence of his three sons.
The youngest of these sons, Thomas Lincoln, was the father of the
future President of the United States.
In spite of an educated, well-to-do American ancestry of pure English
Quaker stock--one was a member of the Boston Tea Party; another was a
revolutionary minuteman, served in the Continental Congress and was
Attorney General of the United States under Jefferson--this frontier
boy, who was only six years old when his father was murdered before
his eyes, grew up without education, to be a wandering work boy, who
gradually picked up odd jobs of carpentering.
He became a powerfully built, square-set young man, somewhat indolent
and improvident, who occasionally showed his temper and courage by
knocking down a frontier rowdy.
The rough young carpenter in 1806 married Nancy Hanks, a niece of
Joseph Hanks, in whose shop he worked at his trade. Nancy, who was the
mother of Abraham Lincoln, was the daughter of a supposedly illiterate
and superstitious family, but she was comely, intelligent, knew how to
read and write and taught her husband to scrawl his name.
The great Lincoln always believed that he got his intellectual powers
from his mother.
For a time this pair, who were to bring forth the savior of America,
dwelt in a log hut, fourteen feet square, at Elizabethtown, Kentucky,
where they were married. Then a daughter was born. A year later the
carpenter bought a small farm on the Big South Fork of Nolin Creek, in
Hardin County.
Here, on wretched soil overgrown with stunted brush, Thomas Lincoln
and Nancy Hanks lived with their infant daughter in a rude log cabin,
enduring profound poverty.
It was in this mere wooden hutch, which had an earth floor, one door
and one window, that Abraham Lincoln was born on February 12th, 1809.
What American, however poor, ignorant, unlettered or discouraged, can
look upon the rude timbers of the home which sheltered the birth of
the greatest man of the Western Hemisphere without a thrill of hope
and a new realization of the opportunities that are co-eternal with
conscience, courage and persistence?
What man of any race or country can stand before that cabin and be a
coward?
Moses, the waif; Peter, the fisherman; Mahomet, the shepherd; Columbus,
the sailor boy--each age has its separate message of the humanity of
God and the divinity of man.
The gray-eyed boy Lincoln played alone in the forest near Knob Creek,
where his father had secured a better farm. It was a solitary and
cheerless life for a child. Sometimes he sat among the shavings of
his father’s carpenter shanty--a silent, lean little boy, with long,
black hair and grave, deep-set eyes, dressed in deerskin breeches and
moccasins, without toys and almost without companions.
[Illustration: The Kentucky log cabin in which Lincoln was born on
February 12th, 1809]
For a few months he attended log-cabin schools with his sister Sarah,
but he learned little more than his letters. It is amazing to think
that this man, whose Gettysburg address is accepted as one of the
noblest classics of English literature, did not have much more than
six months of schooling in his whole life.
In 1816 Thomas Lincoln decided to move from Kentucky to Indiana. He
built a raft, loaded it with a kit of carpenter’s tools and four
hundred gallons of whiskey, and, depending on his rifle for food,
floated down into the Ohio River in search of a new home. Having
picked out a place in the Indiana forest, he walked home and, with a
borrowed wagon and two horses, he took his wife and children into the
wilderness, actually cutting a way through the woods for them.
Near Little Pigeon Creek the carpenter and his wife, assisted by young
Abraham, now seven years old, built a shed of logs and poles, partly
open to the weather, and here the family lived for a year. Meanwhile
a patch of land was cleared, corn was planted, and as soon as a
log-cabin, without windows, could be built, the Lincolns moved into it.
The forest swarmed with game and the carpenter’s rifle kept his family
supplied with venison and deer hides for clothing. They relied on the
rifle and the corn patch for life. Little Lincoln “climbed at night to
his bed of leaves in the loft by a ladder of wooden pins driven into
the logs.”
Not only were the means of life hard to get, but it was a malarial
country, and in 1818 the small group of pioneers who came to dwell at
Pigeon Creek near the Lincolns were attacked by a pestilence known as
the milk-sickness.
In October the mother of Abraham Lincoln died. Her husband sawed a
coffin out of the forest trees and buried her in a little clearing.
Several months later a wandering frontier clergyman preached a sermon
over her lonely, snow-covered grave.
No wonder the countenance of the great Emancipator moved all who
beheld it by its deep melancholy. He knew what sorrow was forty-five
years before he paced his office in the White House all night, with
white face and bowed head, sorrowing over the bloody defeat of
Chancellorsville, wondering whether he was to be the last President of
the United States, and praying for the victory that came at Gettysburg.
All that year the sensitive boy grieved for the mother who had gone
out of his life; but in time his father went back to Elizabethtown,
Kentucky, where he married the widow of the town jailer, and presently
a four-horse wagon creaked up to the door of the Lincoln cabin in the
Indiana forest, with the bride, her son and two daughters, and a load
of comfortable household goods, including a feather bed and a walnut
bureau, valued at fifty dollars.
Sarah Bush Lincoln, the stepmother of Abraham Lincoln, was a woman of
thrift and energy, tall, straight, fair, and a kind-hearted motherly
Christian. The American people owe a debt to this noble matron who did
so much to influence and develop the character of the boy who was yet
to save the nation from destruction.
She was good to the Lincoln orphans whose mother lay out in the wild
forest grave. She gave them warm clothes. She threw away the mat of
corn husks and leaves on which they slept and replaced it with a soft
feather tick. She loved little Abe, and the lonely boy returned her
kindness and affection. In a primitive cabin, set in the midst of a
savage country, she created that noblest and best result of a good
woman’s heart and brain, a happy home.
Oh, pale woman of the twentieth century, sighing for a mission in the
great world’s affairs! Perhaps there may be a suggestion for you in the
simple story of what Sarah Bush did for Abraham Lincoln and, through
him, for the ages. Did not the two malaria-racked and care-driven
mothers who lived in the rough-hewn Lincoln cabin do more to influence
the political institutions of mankind than all the speeches and votes
of women since voting was first invented?