The early life of Abraham Lincoln: / containing many unpublished documents and unpublished reminiscences of Lincoln's early friends

by Ida M. Tarbell

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-by 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.

LINCOLN’S BROAD-AXE.
This broad-axe is said to have been owned originally by Abram Bales of New Salem; and, according to tradition, it was bought from him by Lincoln. After Lincoln forsook the woods, he sold the axe to one Mr. Irvin. Mr. L. W. Bishop of Petersburg now has the axe, having gotten it directly from Mr. Irvin. There are a number of affidavits attesting its genuineness. The axe has evidently seen hard usage, and is now covered with a thick coat of rust.

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 was his efforts, it is said, 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.[^[11]] As sad as the death of his mother 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 was unclouded. He could feel intensely, and his imagination was quick to respond to the touch of mystery.

CHAPTER VII.
THE LINCOLNS LEAVE INDIANA.—THE JOURNEY TO ILLINOIS.—ABRAHAM LINCOLN STARTS OUT FOR HIMSELF.

In the spring of 1830, when Abraham was twenty-one years old, his father, Thomas Lincoln, decided to leave Indiana. The reason Dennis Hanks gives for this removal was a disease called the “milk-sick.” Abraham Lincoln’s mother, Nancy Hanks Lincoln, and several of their relatives who had followed them from Kentucky had died of it. The cattle had been carried off by it. Neither brute nor human life seemed to be safe. As Dennis Hanks says: “This was reason enough (ain’t it?) for leaving.” Any one who has travelled through the portions of Spencer County in which the Lincolns settled will respect Thomas Lincoln for his energy in moving. When covered with timber, as the land was when he chose his farm, it no doubt promised well; but fourteen years of hard labor showed him that the soil was niggardly and the future of the country unpromising. To-day, sixty-five years since the Lincolns left Spencer County, the country remains as it was then, dull, commonplace, unfruitful. The towns show no signs of energy or prosperity. There are no leading streets or buildings; no man’s house is better than his neighbor’s, and every man’s house is ordinary. For a long distance on each side of Gentryville, as one passes by rail, no superior farm is to be seen, no prosperous mine or manufactory. It is a dead, monotonous country, where no possibilities of quick wealth have been discovered, and which only centuries of tilling and fertilizing can make prosperous. Thomas Lincoln did well to leave Indiana.

The place chosen for their new home was the Sangamon country in central Illinois. It was at that day a country of great renown in the West, the name meaning “The land where there is plenty to eat.” One of the family—John Hanks, a cousin of Dennis—was already there, and the inviting reports he had sent to Indiana were no doubt what led the Lincolns to decide on Illinois as their future home.

Gentryville saw young Lincoln depart with real regret, and his friends gave him a score of rude proofs that he would not be forgotten. Even to-day there is not a family living in and around Gentryville, who remembers the Lincolns at all, who has not some legend to repeat of their departure. They tell how in those days “neighbors were like relatives,” and everybody offered some kindly service to the movers as a parting sign of good-will. The entire Lincoln family was invited to spend the last night before starting, with Mr. Gentry. He was so loath to part with Lincoln that he “accompanied the movers along the road a spell.” After they were gone, one of his sons, James Gentry, planted a cedar tree in memory of Abraham, which now marks the site of the Lincoln home.

JOHN E. ROLL, WHO HELPED LINCOLN BUILD THE FLATBOAT.
Born in Green Village, New Jersey, June 4, 1814. He went to Illinois in 1830, the year in which Mr. Lincoln went, settling in Sangamon town, where he had relatives. It was here he met Lincoln, and made the “pins” for the flatboat. Later Mr. Roll went to Springfield. A quarter of the city is now known as “Roll’s addition.” Mr. Roll was well acquainted with Lincoln, and when the President left Springfield he gave Mr. Roll his dog Fido. Mr. Roll knew Stephen A. Douglas well, and carries a watch which once belonged to the “Little Giant.”

The spot on the hill overlooking Buckthorn valley, where the Lincolns said good-by to their old home and to the home of Sarah Lincoln Grigsby, to the grave of the mother and wife, to all their neighbors and friends, is still pointed out. Buckthorn valley held many recollections dear to them all, but to no one of the company was the place dearer than to Abraham. It is certain that he felt the parting keenly, and he certainly never forgot his years in the Hoosier State. One of the most touching experiences he relates in all his published letters is his emotion at visiting his old Indiana home fourteen years after he had left it. So strongly was he moved by the scenes of his first conscious sorrows, efforts, joys, ambitions, that he put into verse the feelings they awakened.[^[12]]

SANGAMON TOWN IN 1831.
Drawn for this work by J. McCan Davis, with the aid of Mr. John E. Roll, a former resident.

While he never attempted to conceal the poverty and hardship of these days, and would speak humorously of the “pretty pinching times” he saw, he never regarded his life at this time as mean or pitiable. Frequently he talked to his friends in later days of his boyhood, and always with apparent pleasure. “Mr. Lincoln told this story” (of his youth), says Leonard Swett, “as the story of a happy childhood. There was nothing sad or pinched, and nothing of want, and no allusion to want in any part of it. His own description of his youth was that of a joyous, happy boyhood. It was told with mirth and glee, and illustrated by pointed anecdote, often interrupted by his jocund laugh.”

And he was right. There was nothing ignoble or mean in this Indiana pioneer life. It was rude, but with only the rudeness which the ambitious are willing to endure in order to push on to a better condition than they otherwise could know. These people did not accept their hardships apathetically. They did not regard them as permanent. They were only the temporary deprivations necessary in order to accomplish what they had home into the country to do. For this reason they endured hopefully all that was hard. It is worth notice, too, that there was nothing belittling in their life; there was no pauperism, no shirking. Each family provided for its own simple wants, and had the conscious dignity which comes from being equal to a situation. If their lives lacked culture and refinement, they were rich in independence and self-reliance.

LINCOLN IN 1859.
From a photograph in the collection of H. W. Fay, De Kalb, Illinois. The original was made by S. M. Fassett of Chicago; the negative was destroyed in the Chicago fire. This picture was made at the solicitation of D. B. Cook, who says that Mrs. Lincoln pronounced it the best likeness she had ever seen of her husband. Rajon used the Fassett picture as the original of his etching, and Kruell has made a fine engraving of it.