I. THE PROBLEM OF A WORTHWHILE LIFE
Many of the early events entering into Lincoln's life seem too trivial
to mention in the light of his great services to America. But the
human struggle and the moral achievement of a supreme American ideal
cannot be appreciated or understood unless the experiences buffeting
the way to it, and their circumstances, are known for what they mean
to his life. Trivial experiences have very much to do with forming our
lives and without them we can neither appreciate nor understand the
great events that we believe have given us our career and our destiny.
After being nominated for the presidency of the United States, Lincoln
was asked for material from his early life out of which to make a
biography.
"Why," he replied earnestly, as if this was a sacred privacy in his
own profound struggle, "it is a great folly to attempt to make
anything out of me or my early life. It can all be condensed in a
single sentence; and that sentence you will find in Grey's Elegy:
'The short and simple annals of the poor.'"
His early friends all agree that he was lazy and idle, but, when we
ask closer, they tell us that he spent his time "reading and writing
and arguing." One of his most admiring friends hired him for a certain
period and became greatly disgusted at the young man's preference for
idling his time away reading. Another friend one day found him
reading, and, with the intention of severely rebuking him, asked what
he was doing. "Reading law," was the reply, without taking his eye
from the page.
"Almighty Gosh!" was all the disgusted friend could say. Reading was
bad enough waste of time, but to be reading law was beyond all use of
words or censure.
So, it merely proves that no one can be understood by the historical
student, except as the conditions of mental soil in which the
character grew are understood. And especially is it good to learn why
the prophet is without honor in his own country, sometimes not even
known in his own age. Home people rarely or never understand the
unusual worker, because they cannot measure outside of their own
experience, and their opinions rarely give much insight into the great
laborer born among them, with the great urge, if not the vision, of
work and the way.
Lincoln is probably the last Great American who shall ever have to
begin his mind-making as anything less than an "heir of all ages." In
Lincoln's case it seemed as if all else was banished that a mind might
build itself up anew to be a fundamental interpretation of American
civilization. Like the great Newton, he built his world of principle
out of the particulars of original experience, and found that it was
the order of the universe. And yet, it might be said that he was a
failure in particulars and minor matters, for he thought in terms of
general humanity and swung the world into a new consciousness and
vision of the moral law.
As Mr. Herndon says, "His origin was in that unknown and sunless bog
in which history never made a footprint." The social origin and
development of Christ were far less obscure, humble and lowly in
destitute and helpless environment, before the special task of
preserving a meaning in the earth as a home for man.
Julia Ward Howe expresses the seriousness attending the possibilities
of every new-born soul, as she says, of Lincoln,
"Through the dim pageant of the years
A wondrous tracery appears:
A cabin of the western wild
Shelters in sleep a new-born child,
Nor nurse, nor parent dear, can know
The way those infant feet must go;
And yet a nation's help and hope
Are sealed within that horoscope."
It was certainly impossible for a pioneer of the early frontier to
imagine how the rich live now, but it is not so hard for any one now
to imagine how people lived then, if he will go into the deep woods
with only a few simple tools and try to live. It can be done and it
will probably be a healthful experience, but not an experience that
any person would be expected to try twice.
It is therefore not needful to the setting of our story about the
making of a man, for any extended description to be made of the
ignorance and the poverty common to those times.
It is enough for us to say with Maurice Thompson in his lines:
"He was the North, the South, the East, the West;
The thrall, the master, all of us in one."
Ida Tarbell, after her extensive original researches into the early
life of Lincoln, very thoughtfully, says,
"He seems to have had as nearly a universal human sympathy as any one
in history. A man could not be so high or so low that Lincoln could
not meet him and he could not be so much of a fool, or so many kinds
of a fool. He could listen unruffled to cant, to violence, to
criticism, just and unjust. Amazingly he absorbed from each man the
real thing he had to offer, annexed him by showing him that he
understood, and yet gave him somehow a sense of the impossibility of
considering him alone, and leaving out the multitudes of other men as
convinced and as loyal as he was."
II. THE LINCOLN BOY OF THE KENTUCKY WOODS
We may well believe that the little Lincoln boy was thrilled with
stories of noxious "varmints" and wild "Injuns." As the fire crackled
in the wide earthen fireplace and the sparks flew up the broad dirt
chimney, we may well suppose the mystic superstitions of the ignorant
times thrilled the young mind with vague fears and often with
indescribable dread.
Doubtless he often heard his father tell the story of his own
desperate boyhood, how Mordecai, the elder brother, had, just in the
nick of time, saved his life from the tomahawk.
Abe's father when a child went out to their clearing with his two
brothers and their father, whose name was Abraham. We may be sure that
their watchful eyes looked closely into every pile of brush or clump
of bushes that might hide an Indian. But the Indians were trained to
hide like snakes or foxes. So that which was ever expected and feared
happened. There was a shot from an unseen form in the bushes, and the
father of the family fell dead.
Mordecai, the eldest, ran for the cabin, the other boy ran for help,
but the younger boy, too bewildered and not comprehending what had
happened, remained by the side of his fallen father.
As Mordecai looked out through the chinks of the cabin to see the
enemy, which he supposed to be in numbers, he saw a lone Indian come
out and seize the boy. With quick aim he fired and the Indian fell
dead. The little boy, now understanding, began to scream, when
Mordecai ran to him and carried him into the cabin.
It was in the death of this pioneer that the Lincolns became subjected
to such poverty. And yet it is doubtful if their poverty was much
worse than most of those around them. In this vision of frontier life
we can get some idea at what great cost has been achieved the
civilization that composes the foundations of this country.
Lives seem insignificant and their experiences trivial, but in them
are the making of all that is good and great. In the making of typical
lives is to be seen the meaning and the making of the nation. It is
said that Lincoln's first attempts to write his name were made with a
stick upon the ground. Those letters have long since vanished and yet
that name is written in sentiments and deeds of gold throughout the
earth.
Wilbur Nesbit holds up the jewel of Lincoln's life in the following
lines:
"Not as the great who grew more great,
Until they have a mystic fame--
No stroke of pastime or of fate
Gave Lincoln his undying name.
A common man, earth-bred, earth-born,
One of the breed who work and wait,--
His was a soul above all scorn,
His was a heart above all hate."
III. HOME-SEEKERS IN THE WILD WEST
Thomas Lincoln became a home-seeking wanderer soon after the death of
his father. According to the laws of that time, all the property went
to the eldest, and it may be supposed that little attention was paid
in that rough destitute life to the raising of Thomas. He grew up
simply "a wandering, laboring boy," whose hard circumstances left
little ambition or hope in him. But, in the course of all wondrous
events and time, he became a carpenter, well respected, and married
his cousin, the niece of the man in whose shop he worked. This niece
was Nancy Hanks, daughter of Joseph Hanks, who had married Nannie
Shipley, a Quaker girl. From all authentic accounts that can be
gathered concerning Nancy Hanks, she was one of God's great women.
This much at least is sufficiently verified that she was a strong,
handsome girl, noted for her religious zeal, and was one of the most
sought-for singers at the marvellous camp-meetings of those days. That
the marriage of Thomas Lincoln and Nancy Hanks was regarded as an
important community event is the testimony of several who were
present, for every social enjoyment known to the times was there, and
the occasion was celebrated with unusual demonstrations of good will.
The wedding took place June 12, 1806, and the documents of the
marriage show that she had enough property left her by her father to
require a guardian appointed by the court. The uncle with whom she
lived was her guardian, appointed on the death of her parents when she
was nine years old.
Documents in existence also show that Thomas Lincoln owned a large
tract of land, that he held responsible public position, and was well
respected in his community. The stories of shiftlessness and shame so
long told as truth must be cast out as among the curiosities of
envious gossip, sometimes accepted even by those it injures as true
history.
A year after the marriage of Thomas Lincoln and Nancy Hanks their
first child was born, a girl, which they named Nancy. Twelve years
later, after the death of her mother and the marriage of her father to
Sarah Bush Johnson, this daughter renamed herself Sarah, by which name
she was known until her death at the age of twenty.
Sarah was born at Elizabethtown, Kentucky, but soon after the family
moved to a farm, bought several years before by Thomas Lincoln, about
fourteen miles away. There on February 12, 1809, was born one of the
greatest of all Americans, Abraham Lincoln.
The Lincoln home was so rude that descriptions of it, in comparison
with present poverty-stricken homes, sounds like distressful
destitution, but it was the home of frontiersmen in pioneer days. All
testimony agrees that no one suffered and that the boy grew strong
and manly, in the abiding favor of friends, and in the noble
aspirations of a superior destiny.
When Abraham Lincoln was seven years old and his sister Sarah was near
nine, his father desired to seek a better home, which the pioneer
always dreamed of as farther on. He built a flatboat in a creek half a
mile from his house, put his household goods upon it, and floated down
the Rolling Fork on a voyage of discovery to Salt River, and down Salt
River to the Ohio. At Thompson's Ferry on the Indiana shore he landed,
stored his goods, and went back after his family, which he brought
through on horseback.
IV. A WONDERFUL FAMILY IN THE DESOLATE WILDERNESS
Lincoln tells us of one thing his mother said to him which he never
forgot, though he was not yet nine years old. Her thought for him
became his dream of her.
"Mother wants her little boy to be honest, truthful, and kind to
everybody, and always to trust in God."
The words of his "angel mother," as he named her, were always the
guiding star of his life. He always wanted to be what his mother said
was her desire for him to be. He often said, "All I am or hope to be I
owe to my angel mother," and yet, as a poet has said it, that mother
"Gave us Lincoln and never knew."
An epidemic carried away Lincoln's mother in 1818 when he was nine
years of age. It was the beginning of that great man's acquaintance
with grief, but the impression she had made on him never forsook him.
Her last words to the surrounding friends were, "I pray you to love
your kindred and worship God."
When Elizabeth Barrett Browning asked Charles Kingsley for the secret
of his splendid life, he answered, "I once had a friend." So it was
with Lincoln. He once had a friend, and he always spoke of her as his
"angel mother."
So deeply had she impressed the nine-year-old boy with her religious
faith that he could never be satisfied until he induced a preacher to
preach a sermon and offer a prayer over her grave.
In that profoundly earnest incident of sympathy is to be seen the love
that leavened his life to the making of a man nobler than kings among
men.
Of these early years Lincoln spoke but little, and the gossip of old
people, who might have told interesting incidents, has not proven
altogether reliable. One of these personal incidents told by Lincoln
of his childhood may be regarded as typical of his life. It was from a
dim memory of what he had been taught concerning soldiers and war.
Lincoln said that he had a memory of only one incident relating to the
War of 1812. This happened near the close of the war. He had been
fishing and had caught a little fish. On the way home he met a soldier
returning from the war. He had been told that he must be kind to
soldiers. Thinking of this, he went up to the soldier and gave him the
fish.
Even the wilderness has a succession of new scenes and offers an
endless variety of revelations for the growing mind. Only the will of
disordered interests is able to get bad things into the desires of a
child. The Lincoln boy was fortunate in living with good people. There
was no one to impress him with false ideas of life.
We may be sure that there was something superior in Thomas Lincoln
that he sought out only noble women, and that noble women were willing
to trust their happiness and welfare to him.
Thomas Lincoln could not hope to make a living after his wife died
and care properly for his household needs, including the two
motherless children. His own homeless childhood made him tender toward
his little unmothered family, and, presently, he returned to Kentucky
and married Sarah Bush Johnson, another of God's own mother-women.
She came with abundance of household goods and there was soon a
comfortable Lincoln home. She loved the little boy she found on her
arrival in the Indiana household, and encouraged him in his eager
desire to know things.
The ten-year-old Lincoln was eager to learn of the wondrous world
beyond the woods and he asked many questions of wayfarers passing that
way. One day a very trivial event happened, but in the wondrous
revelation of things to the blooming mind it may have been one of the
greatest in Lincoln's life.
An emigrant wagon broke down near their place. The wife and two little
daughters staid in Lincoln's home two or three days, till the wagon
was repaired.
"The woman had books," so Lincoln tells us about it, "and she read us
stories." It was the first books he had ever seen and the first
book-stories he had ever heard. In fact, it was also the first
educated people he had ever seen. One of the little girls seems to
have impressed him deeply, to have awakened in him a spiritual
reverence for beautiful girlhood, and to have given him a never-dying
vision of possible sympathy and character for a nobler social life.
V. WAY-MARKS OF RIGHT LIFE
Lincoln's new mother had three children of her own, but under her
management they all lived together, in the one-room house, in perfect
harmony and friendship.
Of the little Lincoln boy she said, "His mind and mine, what little I
had, seemed to run together." She said that there had never been a
cross word or look between them and that she loved the little fellow
as her own child. One thing is sure, to the American people, Sarah
Bush Lincoln has forever given a sacred meaning to the name stepmother
and hallowed its duties near to the meaning of mother.
In her old age she was visited by a biographer of Lincoln, to whom she
said, "I had a son John, who was raised with Abe. Both were good boys,
but I must say, both now being dead, that Abe was the best boy I ever
saw, or expect to see."
Lincoln's sister Sarah, or Nancy, as she was also called, was a noble
girl and was of inestimable help to Mrs. Lincoln in the labors of a
pioneer home. She was quick to learn and she did her share in helping
her brother in his desire to learn. There was nothing remarkable about
that brother, he was not wondrous, except in one thing, and that was
his unceasing zeal to have a greater mind, and for that mind to be a
right mind.
His first real school life was to travel a deer path through the deep
woods, nine miles each day, to school.
He had no time to waste on useless knowledge. Josh Billings once
exclaimed, lamenting, "What's the use of larnin' so much that ain't
so." Lincoln thought there was no use in such foolishness, and he
sought to fill his mind only with useful information, valuable toward
a greater life.
For instance, he got hold of a small dictionary and he read it through
and through with the eagerness that many people give to baseball news
or a novel. When the book called the "Statutes of Indiana" fell into
his hands he could hardly eat or sleep till he had read it through.
When he finally got hold of a grammar, it was no dry reading to him
and no task. He literally devoured its information and committed its
principles to memory, as a value of the finest wealth. He was indeed
remarkable or wondrous in nothing but the divine inspiration to
enlarge a useful mind. These are the minds that make life worth living
and invariably characterize the builders of the world.
It appears that the first approach of Lincoln to the formation of a
life-ideal, his first patriotic vision of American citizenship, was
derived from reading a life of Washington. A friendly neighbor loaned
him the book. His book-shelf was a chink in the log house. One night
it rained into his book-shelf and the next morning he found his
borrowed book bucked up into a most unreadable shape. Lincoln's
introduction to Washington was unhappy and significant. Trivial as the
incident might seem, it supplies suggestions of character on the way
of superior worth to civilization. Events, one by one, build up or
tear down together the structure of self or of the public system.
The Lincoln boy could have shielded himself, as to the damaged book,
behind personal irresponsibility for an accident, or he could have
flatly refused to make good. If so, we may well guess that he would
never have been President of the United States, and would never have
served America in its dire peril so as to be honored by the whole
world. He was not that kind of a character. As we trace the steps of
moral integrity, the trivial incident becomes powerfully significant.
The Lincoln boy made good. He worked three days for the owner of the
damaged book, so that another should not suffer loss through any
kindness or good-will to him; also, beyond that, he could have no
rest nor peace while any wrong existed between him and another man.
From that time on he had before him the vision of a great American.
Washington became his ideal type of character, and that ideal no doubt
helped much to make him the patient power he was in the great crisis
of his nation's existence.
The rough and hard never hurt any one if they are healthy interests;
the rude and uncultured wrong no taste if they are moral; and poverty
injures nobody when it is clean and persevering and safe. So the hard
requirements, rude living and destitute means only strengthened the
boy more and more for the heroic responsibilities requiring such a
type of manhood.
It is said that he memorized and often repeated for self-encouragement
the homely old verses of the song, "Try, Try Again."
"When you strive, it's no disgrace
Though you fail to win the race;
Bravely, then, in such a case,
Try, try again.
That which other folks can do,
Why, with patience, may not you?
All that's been done, you may do,
If you will but try."
In a copy book the following lines, still preserved, were written by
Lincoln:
"Abraham Lincoln
his hand and pen.
he will be good but
God knows when."
This pathetic glimpse of the childhood dream may account for his
profound interest in boys and boyhood. When he had reached world-wide
fame he said, "The boy is the inventor and owner of the present, and
he is our supreme hope for the future. Men and things everywhere
minister unto him, and let no one slight his needs."
[Illustration: Lincoln reading by Firelight.]