The early life of Abraham Lincoln: / containing many unpublished documents and unpublished reminiscences of Lincoln's early friends

by Ida M. Tarbell

THOMAS LINCOLN’S BOYHOOD AND YOUNG MANHOOD.

The death of Abraham Lincoln was saddest for the youngest of the children, a lad of ten years at the time, named Thomas, for it turned him adrift to become a “wandering laboring-boy” before he had learned even to read. Thomas seems not to have inherited any of the father’s estate, and from the first to have been obliged to shift for himself. For several years he supported himself by rough farm work of all kinds, learning, in the meantime, the trade of carpenter and cabinet-maker. According to one of his acquaintances, “Tom had the best set of tools in what was then and now Washington County,” and was “a good carpenter for those days, when a cabin was built mainly with the axe, and not a nail or bolt-hinge in it; only leathers and pins to the door, and no glass, except in watches and spectacles and bottles.”[^[3]] Although a skilful craftsman for his day, he never became a thrifty or ambitious man. “He would work energetically enough when a job was brought to him, but he would never seek a job.” But if Thomas Lincoln plied his trade spasmodically, he shared the pioneer’s love for land, for when but twenty-five years old, and still without the responsibility of a family, he bought a farm in Hardin County, Kentucky. None of his biographers have ever called attention to this fact, if they knew it. A search made for this work in the records of Hardin County first revealed it to us, and we cannot but regard it as of importance, proving as it does that Thomas Lincoln was not the shiftless man he has hitherto been pictured. Certainly he must have been above the grade of the ordinary country boy, to have had the energy and ambition to learn a trade and secure a farm through his own efforts by the time he was twenty-five. He was illiterate, never doing more “in the way of writing than to bunglingly write his own name.” Nevertheless, he had the reputation in the country of being good-natured and obliging, and possessing what his neighbors called “good strong horse-sense.” Although he was “a very quiet sort of man,” he was known to be determined in his opinions, and quite competent to defend his rights by force if they were too flagrantly violated. He was a moral man, and, in the crude way of the pioneer, religious.

RETURN OF MARRIAGE OF THOMAS LINCOLN AND NANCY HANKS.
From a tracing of the original, made by Henry Whitney Cleveland. This certificate was discovered about 1885 by W. F. Booker, Esq., Clerk of Washington County, Kentucky.

LINCOLN IN FEBRUARY, 1860, AT THE TIME OF THE COOPER INSTITUTE SPEECH.
From a photograph by Brady. The debate with Douglas in 1858 gave Lincoln a national reputation, and the following year he received many invitations to lecture. One came from a young men’s Republican club in New York,—which was offering a series of lectures designed for an audience of men and women of the class apt to neglect ordinary political meetings. Lincoln consented, and in February, 1860 (about three months before his nomination for the Presidency), delivered what is known, from the hall in which it was delivered, as the “Cooper Institute speech”—a speech which more than confirmed his reputation. While in New York he was taken by the committee of entertainment to Brady’s gallery, and sat for the portrait reproduced above. It was a frequent remark with Lincoln that this portrait and the Cooper Institute speech made him President.

From a photograph by Klauber of Louisville, Kentucky. Mr. Graham, born in 1784, lived until 1885, and was the only man of our generation who could be called a contemporary of Thomas Lincoln and Nancy Hanks. Long before the documentary evidence of their marriage was found, Mr. Graham gave his reminiscences of that event. Recent discoveries made in the public records of Kentucky regarding the Lincolns, bear out in every particular his recollections. He is, in fact, the most important witness we have as to the character of the parents of President Lincoln and their condition in life. The accuracy of his memory and the trustworthiness of his character are affirmed by the leading citizens of Louisville, Kentucky, of which city he was a resident. In the Appendix will be found a full statement by Mr. Graham of what he knew of Thomas Lincoln and his life.

FACSIMILE OF A PASSAGE FROM LINCOLN’S EXERCISE-BOOK.

HOUSE IN WHICH ABRAHAM LINCOLN WAS BORN.—HITHERTO UNPUBLISHED.
Thomas Lincoln moved into this cabin on the Big South Fork of Nolin Creek, three miles from Hodgensville, in La Rue County, Kentucky, in 1808; and here, on February 12, 1809, Abraham Lincoln was born. In 1813 the Lincolns removed to Knob Creek. The Nolin Creek farm has been known as the “Creal Farm” for many years; recently it was bought by New York people. The cabin was long ago torn down, but the logs were saved. The new owners, in August, 1895, rebuilt the old cabin on the original site. This, the first and only picture which has been taken of it, was made for this biography.

Thomas Lincoln learned his trade as carpenter in Elizabethtown, in the shop of one Joseph Hanks. There he met a niece of his employer, Nancy Hanks, whom, when he was twenty-eight years old, he married. Nancy Hanks was, like her husband, a Virginian. Her experience in life had, too, been similar to her husband’s, for the Hanks family had been drawn into Kentucky by the fascination of Boone, as had the Lincolns. But it was only in her surroundings and her family that Nancy Hanks was like Thomas Lincoln. In nature, in education, and in ambition she was, if tradition is to be believed, quite another person. Certainly a fair and delicate woman, who could read and write, who had ideas of refinement, and a desire to get more from life than fortune had allotted her, was hardly enough like Thomas Lincoln to be very happy with him. She was still more unfit to be his wife because of a sensitive nature which made her brood over her situation—a situation made the more hopeless by the fact that she had neither the force of character nor strength of body to do anything to improve it; if, indeed, she had any clear notion of what it lacked. Hers was that pitiful condition where one feels with vague restlessness that life has something better than one has found, something not seen or understood, but without which life will never be complete.

THOMAS LINCOLN’S BIBLE.—NOW FIRST PUBLISHED.
From the original, in the collection of O. H. Oldroyd, Washington, D. C. It is not known when or how Thomas Lincoln obtained this Bible. After his death it passed to his step-children, the Johnstons, and was sold by them to the “Lincoln Log Cabin Company,” to be exhibited at the World’s Fair. It was purchased from this company for the Oldroyd collection. The family record, reproduced on pages [58] and [59], belongs to this Bible. It was taken out and sold to Mr. C. F. Gunther before the Bible was sold to Mr. Oldroyd.

VIEW OF ROCK SPRING FARM, WHERE PRESIDENT LINCOLN WAS BORN.
From a photograph taken in September, 1895, for this biography. The house in which Lincoln was born is seen to the right, in the background. Rock Spring is in a hollow, under a clump of trees, in the left centre of the picture.

ROCK SPRING ON THE FARM WHERE LINCOLN WAS BORN.
From a photograph taken in September, 1895, for this biography. The spring is in a hollow at the foot of the gentle slope on the top of which the house stands.

Thomas and Nancy Lincoln were married near Beechland, in Washington County, Kentucky, on June 12, 1806. The wedding was celebrated in the boisterous style of one hundred years ago, and was followed by an infare, given by the bride’s guardian. To this celebration came all the neighbors, and, according to that entertaining Kentucky centenarian, Dr. Christopher Columbus Graham, even those who happened in the neighborhood were made welcome. He tells how he heard of the wedding while “out hunting for roots,” and went “just to get a good supper.” “I saw Nancy Hanks Lincoln at her wedding,” continues Mr. Graham, “a fresh-looking girl, I should say over twenty. I was at the infare, too, given by John H. Parrott, her guardian—and only girls with money had guardians appointed by the court. We had bear-meat; ... venison; wild turkey and ducks; eggs, wild and tame, so common that you could buy them at two bits a bushel; maple sugar, swung on a string, to bite off for coffee or whiskey; syrup in big gourds; peach-and-honey; a sheep that the two families barbecued whole over coals of wood burned in a pit, and covered with green boughs to keep the juices in; and a race for the whiskey bottle.”

After his marriage Thomas Lincoln settled in Elizabethtown. His home was a log cabin, but at that date few people in the State had anything else. Kentucky had been in the Union only fourteen years. When admitted, the few brick structures within its boundaries were easily counted, and there were only log schoolhouses and churches. Fourteen years had brought great improvements, but the majority of the population still lived in log cabins, so that the home of Thomas Lincoln was as good as those of most of his neighbors. Little is known of his position in Elizabethtown, though we have proof that he had credit in the community, for the descendants of two of the early storekeepers of the place still remember seeing on their grandfathers’ account books sundry items charged to T. Lincoln. Tools and groceries were the chief purchases he made, though on one of the ledgers a pair of “silk suspenders,” worth one dollar and fifty cents, was entered. He not only enjoyed a certain credit with the merchants of Elizabethtown; he was sufficiently respected by the public authorities to be appointed in 1816 a road surveyor, or, as the office is known in some localities, supervisor. It was not, to be sure, a position of great importance, but it proves that he was considered fit to oversee a body of men at a task of considerable value to the community. Indeed, all of the documents which we have been able to discover, mentioning Thomas Lincoln, show him to have had a much better position in Hardin County than he has been credited with.

LINCOLN IN 1858.—HITHERTO UNPUBLISHED.
After a faded ambrotype of Mr. Lincoln, now in the Lincoln Monument collection at Springfield, Illinois. All that is known of it is that it was taken at Beardstown in 1858. Mr. Lincoln wore a linen coat on the occasion. The picture is regarded as a good likeness of him as he appeared during the Lincoln Douglas campaign.

APPOINTMENT OF THOMAS LINCOLN AS ROAD SURVEYOR.—HITHERTO UNPUBLISHED.
From a tracing made by Henry Whitney Cleveland. The original of this document is in the records of Hardin County, at Elizabethtown, Kentucky. It has hitherto been entirely overlooked by the biographers of Lincoln, and was discovered in the course of a search for documents instituted for this work. The appointment was made on May 13, 1816, only a few months before the Lincolns moved to Indiana. It shows that Thomas Lincoln had a standing in the community, which his biographers have always ignored. The appointment, if modest, would not have been made, we have a right to believe, if Lincoln had been the “easy-going” and idle fellow he has been asserted to be.

CHAPTER II.
THE BIRTH OF ABRAHAM LINCOLN.—HIS EARLY EDUCATION AND FRIENDS.

It was at Elizabethtown that the first child of the Lincolns was born, a daughter. Soon after this event Thomas Lincoln decided to combine farming with his trade, and moved to the farm he had bought in 1803 on the Big South Fork of Nolin Creek, in Hardin County, now La Rue County, three miles from Hodgensville, and about fourteen miles from Elizabethtown. Here he was living when, on February 12, 1809, his second child, a boy, was born. The little new-comer was called Abraham, after his grandfather—a name which had persisted through many preceding generations of the Lincolns.

The home into which the child came was the ordinary one of the poorer Western pioneer—a one-roomed cabin with a huge outside chimney, no windows, and only a rude door. The descriptions of its squalor and wretchedness, which are so familiar, have been overdrawn. Dr. Graham, than whom there is no better authority on the life of that day, and who knew Thomas Lincoln well, declares:

“It is all stuff about Tom Lincoln keeping his wife in an open shed in a winter when the wild animals left the woods and stood in the corners next the stick-and-clay chimneys, so as not to freeze to death; or, if climbers, got on the roof. The Lincolns had a cow and calf, milk and butter, a good feather bed,—for I have slept in it, while they took the buffalo-robes on the floor, because I was a doctor. They had home-woven ‘kiverlids,’ big and little pots, a loom and wheel; and William Hardesty, who was there too, can say with me that Tom Lincoln was a man, and took care of his wife.”

DEED OF SALE SIGNED BY THOMAS LINCOLN AND WIFE.—HITHERTO UNPUBLISHED.
The Book of Deeds in Hardin County, Kentucky, shows that in 1803, three years before his marriage, Thomas Lincoln bought a farm in Hardin County. The same records contain a deed of the sale in 1814 of this same farm, it is supposed, signed by Thomas Lincoln. The deed is evidently written and signed by one person. Nancy Lincoln affixes her mark. This is not proof that she could not write; it not infrequently happens that people in remote country districts make a mark rather than labor with a pen, to which they are unaccustomed. All accounts of Nancy Lincoln agree that she was well educated for her day.

The Lincoln home was undoubtedly rude, and in many ways uncomfortable, but it sheltered a happy family, and its poverty affected the new child but little. He was robust and active; and life is full of interest to the child fortunate enough to be born in the country. He had several companions. There was his sister Nancy, or Sarah—both names are given her—two years his senior; there was a cousin of his mother’s, ten years older, Dennis Hanks, an active and ingenious leader in sports and mischief; and there were the neighbors’ boys. One of the latter, Austin Gollaher, still tells with pleasure of how he played with young Lincoln in the shavings of his father’s carpenter shop, of how he hunted coons and ran the woods with him, and once even saved his life.

A KENTUCKY HAND-MILL.
From a photograph of the original, owned by R. T. Durrett, LL.D., of Louisville, Kentucky. This mill was formerly the property of Joseph Brooks, a prominent pioneer of Kentucky. Similar ones were used by all Western pioneers.

“Yes,” said Mr. Gollaher, “the story that I once saved Abraham Lincoln’s life is true, but it is not correct as generally related.

“Abraham Lincoln and I had been going to school together for a year or more, and had become greatly attached to each other. Then school disbanded on account of there being so few scholars, and we did not see each other much for a long while. One Sunday my mother visited the Lincolns, and I was taken along. Abe and I played around all day. Finally, we concluded to cross the creek to hunt for some partridges young Lincoln had seen the day before. The creek was swollen by a recent rain, and, in crossing on the narrow footlog, Abe fell in. Neither of us could swim. I got a long pole and held it out to Abe, who grabbed it. Then I pulled him ashore. He was almost dead, and I was badly scared. I rolled and pounded him in good earnest. Then I got him by the arms and shook him, the water meanwhile pouring out of his mouth. By this means I succeeded in bringing him to, and he was soon all right.

MAP SHOWING POINTS OF INTEREST IN LINCOLN’S LIFE.—MADE SPECIALLY FOR THIS BIOGRAPHY.
The above map shows where Abraham Lincoln’s grandfather first took land in Kentucky, where his father and mother were married, where they first lived, where he was born, and where he lived from 1809 to 1816. It shows the Rolling Fork, Salt River, and the Ohio, which Thomas Lincoln followed in going into Indiana in 1816; the new home in Indiana; the point where Lincoln kept the ferry about 1826; Boonville, where he went to hear trials; the grave of his mother; the route by which it is supposed he went to Illinois in 1830 (see page [87] for note correcting this route); the location of both of Thomas Lincoln’s farms in Illinois, and his grave, near Farmington, Coles County. Sangamon, New Salem, Vandalia, Springfield, and the chief places where Mr. Lincoln practised law are shown, as well as the points where the Lincoln and Douglas debates and the important political events of the campaign of 1860 took place.

“Then a new difficulty confronted us. If our mothers discovered our wet clothes they would whip us. This we dreaded from experience, and determined to avoid. It was June, the sun was very warm, and we soon dried our clothing by spreading it on the rocks about us. We promised never to tell the story, and I never did until after Lincoln’s tragic end.

“Abraham Lincoln had a sister. Her name was Sallie, and she was a very pretty girl. Sallie Lincoln was about my age; she was my sweetheart. I loved her and claimed her, as boys do. I suppose that was one reason for my warm regard for Abe. When the Lincoln family moved to Indiana, I was prevented by circumstances from bidding good-by to either of the children, and I never saw them again.”[^[4]]

ABRAHAM LINCOLN’S INDIANA HOME.
After an old photograph showing the cabin as it appeared in 1869. Thomas Lincoln built this house in 1817, and moved into it about a year after he reached his farm. At first it had neither windows, door, nor floor; but after the advent of Sally Bush Lincoln it was greatly improved. When he decided to leave Indiana he was preparing the lumber for a better house.

All the young people went to school. At that day the schools in the West were usually accidental, depending upon the coming of some poor and ambitious young man who was willing to teach a few terms while he looked for an opening to something better. The terms were irregular, their length being decided by the time the settlers felt able to board the master and pay his small salary. The chief qualification for a school-master seems to have been enough strength to keep the “big boys” in order, though one high authority affirms that pluck went “for a heap sight more’n sinnoo with boys.”

LINCOLN FARM IN INDIANA.
From a photograph taken for this biography. Present appearance of the quarter section of government land in Spencer County, Indiana, entered by Thomas Lincoln, October 15, 1817, view looking east. Thomas Lincoln selected this tract in 1816, and, to identify it, he blazed the trees, and piled up brush at the corners to establish boundary lines. When he returned with his family he was obliged to cut his way to the spot chosen for his cabin, and to fell trees to find space for the “half-face camp” in which he first lived. This land was entered under the old credit system. Later Mr. Lincoln gave up to the United States the east half, and the amount paid on it was passed to his credit to complete paying for the west half. The patent issued for the latter tract was dated June 6, 1827.

Many of the itinerant masters were Catholics—strolling Irishmen from the colony in Tennessee, or French priests from Kaskaskia. Lincoln’s first teacher, Zachariah Riney, was a Catholic. Of his second teacher, Caleb Hazel, we know even less than of Riney. Mr. Gollaher says that Abraham Lincoln, in those days when he was his schoolmate, was “an unusually bright boy at school, and made splendid progress in his studies. Indeed, he learned faster than any of his schoolmates. Though so young, he studied very hard. He would get spice-wood brushes, hack them up on a log, and burn them two or three together, for the purpose of giving light by which he might pursue his studies.”

Probably the boy’s mother had something to do with the spice-wood illuminations. Tradition has it that Mrs. Lincoln took great pains to teach her children what she knew, and that at her knee they heard all the Bible lore, fairy tales, and country legends that she had been able to gather in her poor life.

Besides the “A B C schools,” as Lincoln called them, the only other medium of education in the country districts of Kentucky in those days was “preaching.” Itinerants like the schoolmasters, the preachers, of whatever denomination, were generally uncouth and illiterate; the code of morals they taught was mainly a healthy one, and they, no doubt, did much to keep the consciences of the pioneers awake. It is difficult to believe that they ever did much for the moral training of young Lincoln, though he certainly got his first notion of public speaking from them; and for years in his boyhood one of his chief delights was to get his playmates about him, and preach and thump until he had his auditors frightened or in tears.

GRAVE OF NANCY HANKS LINCOLN.
From a photograph loaned by W. W. Admire. The grave of Abraham Lincoln’s mother is on a wooded knoll about half a mile southeast of the site of her Indiana home. Near her are buried Thomas and Betsey Sparrow, who followed the Lincolns to Indiana, and who died a few days before Mrs. Lincoln, and of the same disease; and also Levi Hall and his wife, who died several years later. There are two or three other graves in the vicinity. Until 1879 the only mark about the grave of Nancy Lincoln was the names of visitors to the spot, cut in the bark of the trees which shaded it; then Mr. P. E. Studebaker of South Bend, Indiana, erected the stone, and soon after a fence was purchased by a few of the leading citizens of Rockport, Indiana. The inscription on the stone runs: “Nancy Hanks Lincoln, Mother of President Lincoln, died October 5, A.D., 1818. Aged thirty-five years. Erected by a friend of her martyred son.”

LINCOLN IN 1857.
From a photograph loaned by H. W. Fay of De Kalb, Illinois. The original was taken early in 1857 by Alexander Hesler of Chicago. Mr. Fay writes of the picture: “I have a letter from Mr. Hesler stating that one of the lawyers came in and made arrangements for the sitting, so that the members of the bar could get prints. Lincoln said at the time that he did not know why the boys wanted such a homely face.” Mr. Joseph Medill of Chicago went with Mr. Lincoln to have the picture taken. He says that the photographer insisted on smoothing down Lincoln’s hair, but Lincoln did not like the result, and ran his fingers through it before sitting. The original negative was burned in the Chicago fire.

MARRIAGE LICENSE OF THOMAS LINCOLN AND SARAH JOHNSTON.—NOW FIRST PUBLISHED.
From a tracing made by Henry Whitney Cleveland.

CHAPTER III.
THE LINCOLNS LEAVE KENTUCKY.—THEY SETTLE IN SOUTHERN INDIANA—CONDITIONS OF LIFE IN THEIR NEW HOME.

In 1816 a great event happened to the little boy. His father emigrated to Indiana from Knob Creek (Thomas Lincoln had removed from the farm on Nolin Creek to one some fifteen miles northeast, on Knob Creek, when Abraham was four years old). “This removal was partly on account of slavery, but chiefly on account of the difficulty in land titles in Kentucky,” says his son. It was due, as well, no doubt, to the fascination which an unknown country has always for the adventurous, and to that restless pioneer spirit which drives even men of sober judgment continually towards the frontier, in search of a place where the conflict with nature is less severe—some spot farther on, to which a friend or a neighbor has preceded, and from which he sends back glowing reports. It may be that Thomas Lincoln was tempted into Indiana by the reports of his brother Josiah, who had settled on the Big Blue River in that State. At all events, in the fall of 1816 he started with wife and children and household stores to journey by horseback and by wagon from Knob Creek to a farm selected on a previous trip he had made. This farm, located near Little Pigeon Creek, about fifteen miles north of the Ohio River, and a mile and a half east of Gentryville, Spencer County, was in a forest so dense that the road for the travellers had to be hewed out as they went.

SARAH BUSH LINCOLN.
From a photograph in the possession of her granddaughter, Mrs. Harriet Chapman of Charleston, Illinois. Sarah Bush was born in Kentucky, December 13, 1788. She was a friend of Thomas Lincoln and Nancy Hanks, and it is said that Thomas Lincoln had been her suitor before she married Daniel Johnston. Her husband died in October, 1818. In November, 1819, Thomas Lincoln went to Kentucky to seek her a second time in marriage. An incident of the courtship is told by Mr. J. L. Nall, a cousin of President Lincoln: “Uncle Thomas came back to Kentucky after the death of his first wife, Nancy Hanks, and proposed marriage to the widow Johnston; she told him that she would be perfectly willing to marry him, as she had known him a long time, and felt that the marriage would be congenial and happy; but it would be impossible for her even to think of marrying, and leaving the State, as she was considerably in debt. Uncle Thomas told her that need make no difference, as he had plenty of money, and would take care of her financial affairs; and when he had ascertained the amount of her indebtedness and the names of the parties to whom the money was due, he went around and redeemed all her paper and presented it to her, and told her, when she showed so much honor about debts, he was more fully satisfied than ever that she would make him a good wife. She said, as he had displayed so much generosity in her behalf, she was willing then to marry and go with him to Spencer County, Indiana.” Sarah Bush Lincoln changed the character of the Lincoln home completely when she entered it, and there is no question of the importance of her influence upon the development of her step-son Abraham. She was a woman of great natural dignity and kindliness, and highly esteemed by all who knew her. She died on the 10th of December, 1869, at the old homestead in Coles County, Illinois.

THE MARRIAGE BOND GIVEN BY THOMAS LINCOLN AT HIS MARRIAGE WITH SARAH JOHNSTON.—NOW FIRST PUBLISHED.
From a tracing made by Henry Whitney Cleveland.

BUCKTHORN VALLEY, WHERE LINCOLN WORKED AND HUNTED.
After a photograph made for this biography. In this valley are located nearly all the farms on which Lincoln worked in his boyhood, including the famous Crawford place, where he and his sister Sarah were both employed as “help.” Visitors to the locality have pointed out to them numberless items associated with his early life—fields he helped to clear and till, fences he built, houses he repaired, wells he dug, paths he walked, playgrounds he frequented. Indeed, the inhabitants of Buckthorn Valley take the greatest pride in Lincoln’s connection with it.

To a boy of seven years, free from all responsibility, and too vigorous to feel its hardships, such a journey must have been, as William Cooper Howells, the father of the novelist, says of his own trip from Virginia to Ohio, in 1813, “a panorama of delightful novelty.” Life suddenly ceased its routine, and every day brought forth new scenes and adventures. Little Abraham saw forests greater than he had ever dreamed of, peopled by strange birds and beasts, and he crossed a river so wide that it must have seemed to him like the sea. To Thomas and Nancy Lincoln the journey was probably a hard and sad one; but to the children beside them it was a wonderful voyage into the unknown.