Even at the age of ten years the frontier lad was a hard worker. When
he was not wielding the axe in the forest, he was driving the horses,
threshing, ploughing, assisting his father as a carpenter. He also
“hired out” to the neighbors as ploughboy, hostler, water-carrier,
baby-minder or doer of odd chores, at twenty-five cents a day. He
suddenly began to grow tall, and there was no stronger youth in the
community than the lank, loose-limbed boy in deerskins, linsey-woolsey,
and coonskin cap, who could make an axe bite so deep into a tree.
His stepmother sent him to school again for several months. In 1826,
too, he walked nine miles a day to attend a log-house school. He had
new companions at home now, a stepbrother, two stepsisters, and his
cousins, John and Dennis Hanks.
As young Lincoln grew taller his skill and strength as a woodchopper
and rail-splitter, and his willingness to do any kind of work, however
drudging or menial--in spite of a natural meditative indolence--made
him widely known. His kindly, helpful disposition and simple honesty
gave him a distinct popularity, and he was much sought after as a
companion, notwithstanding his ungainly figure and rough ways.
But it was his extraordinary thirst for knowledge, his efforts to raise
himself out of the depths of ignorance, that showed the inner power
struggling against adverse surroundings.
He grew to a height of six feet and four inches by the time he was
seventeen years old. His legs and arms were long, his hands and feet
big, and his skin was dry and yellow. His face was gaunt, and his
melancholy gray eyes were sunk in cavernous sockets above his prominent
cheek bones. A girl schoolmate has described him: “His shoes, when he
had any, were low. He wore buckskin breeches, linsey-woolsey shirt, and
a cap made of the skin of a squirrel or coon. His breeches were baggy
and lacked by several inches meeting the tops of his shoes, thereby
exposing his shin-bone, sharp, blue and narrow.”
This is the real Abraham Lincoln, who read, and read, and read; whose
constant spells of brooding abstraction, eyes fixed, dreaming face,
gave him a reputation for laziness among some of his shallow fellows;
who would crouch down in the forest or sit on a fence-rail for hours
to study a book; who would lie on his stomach at night in front of the
fireplace and, having no paper or slate, would write and cipher with
charcoal on the wooden shovel, on boards and the hewn sides of logs,
shaving them clean when he wanted to write again.
Here is his cousin’s picture of him at the age of fourteen:
“When Abe and I returned to the house from work he would go to the
cupboard, snatch a piece of corn bread, sit down, take a book, cock his
legs up as high as his head, and read. We grubbed, plowed, mowed and
worked together barefooted in the field. Whenever Abe had a chance in
the field while at work, or at the house, he would stop and read.”
His principal books were an arithmetic, the Bible, “Æsop’s Fables,”
“Robinson Crusoe,” Weems’ “Life of Washington,” “The Pilgrim’s
Progress,” and a history of the United States. He became the best
speller and penman in his neighborhood. Yet there was a vein of waggery
in him which occasionally found a vent in such written verse as this:
_Abraham Lincoln,
His hand and pen,
He will be good,
But God knows when._
All this has been told of him many times and in many ways; yet the
nation he saved loves to dwell on the picture of the tall, tanned,
awkward woodchopper and farm drudge; gawky, angular, iron-muscled, with
bare feet or moccasins, deerhide breeches and coonskin cap, battling
out in the forest against his own ignorance and, by sheer force of will
power, conquering knowledge and commanding destiny.
Not a whimper against fate, not a word against youths more successful
than himself, no complaint of the hard work and coarse food--simply the
strivings of a soul not yet conscious of its own greatness, but already
superior to its squalid environments.
It is probable that there is not a youth in all America to-day, however
poor, ignorant, and forlorn, that has not a better chance to rise in
life than Abraham Lincoln had when he started to climb the ladder of
light by courage and persistent application.
He attended spelling matches, log-rollings and horse races. He wrote
vulgar and sometimes silly verse. He outraged the farmers who employed
him by delivering comic addresses and buffoonery in the form of
sermons from tree-stumps, to the snickering field hands. Sometimes he
thrashed a bully. His strength was tremendous. No man in the country
could withstand him. It is said that he once lifted half a ton. Yet
his temper was cool, his heart gentle and generous, and back of his
singsongy, rollicking, spraddling youth, with its swinging axe-blows,
forest-prowlings, and coarse humor, there was a gravity, dignity,
sanity, fairness, generosity and deep, straightout eloquence that made
him a power in that small community.
Think of a young man of six feet and four inches in coonskin and
deerhide, who could sink an axe deeper into a tree than any pioneer in
that heroic region, and who yet had perseverance enough in his cabin
home to read “The Revised Statutes of Indiana” until he could almost
repeat them by heart!
He became a leader and could gather an audience by merely mounting a
stump and waving his hands. Nor was that all. He frequently stopped
brawls and acted as umpire between disputants. Another side of his
nature was displayed when he found the neighborhood drunkard freezing
by the roadside, carried him in his arms to the tavern and worked over
him for hours.
When Lincoln’s sister Sarah married Aaron Grigsby in 1826, the
seventeen-year-old giant composed a song and sang it at the wedding.
Here are the concluding verses:
_The woman was not taken
From Adam’s feet we see,
So he must not abuse her,
The meaning seems to be._
_The woman was not taken
From Adam’s head we know,
To show she must not rule him--
’Tis evidently so._
_The woman she was taken
From under Adam’s arm,
So she must be protected
From injuries and harm._
Yet that dry volume of “The Revised Statutes of Indiana,” through
which the woodchopper worked so bravely, contained the Declaration of
Independence, the Constitution of the United States and the Ordinance
of 1787, and he bound them on his heart like a seal and wore them till
the hour of his cruel death.
As time went on Lincoln developed into a popular story-teller and
oracle at Jones’ grocery store in the nearby village of Gentryville.
His oratory grew at the expense of his farm-work. He went to all the
trials in the local courts, and trudged fifteen miles to Booneville for
the sake of hearing a lawsuit tried. Between times he wrote an essay on
the American Government and another on temperance. He made speeches,
he gossiped, he argued public questions, he cracked jokes, he made
everybody his friend--sometimes he worked. Already he was an American
politician, although he did not know it.
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