CHAPTER I
PINCHING TIMES
HE who seeks to understand the character and achievement of Abraham Lincoln must begin with a study of the man’s honesty. At the base of his nature, in the tap-root and very fiber of his being, pulsed a fidelity to truth, whether of thought or of deed, peculiar to itself. So thoroughgoing was this characteristic that it seems to have begun in him where in other men it generally leaves off. Politicians without number have yielded a work-a-day obedience to the rules of honor, but there is record of no other public leader in recent times who, among the vicissitudes of a trying career, has endeavored to balance actions and principles with such painstaking nicety. To trace these efforts from Lincoln’s early years is to pass with him, pace for pace, over part of the road that led to distinction. As we go we shall have to take account of happenings, little as well as big; for every man is the sum of all his parts, and in no other way may we hope to comprehend how the esteem that began with a few rustic neighbors grew until it filled the heart of a nation.
To what extent, if any, Lincoln inherited his uprightness of mind from remote ancestors will probably never be known. The bare lines of the genealogical chart afford no clues to the characters of the men and women whose names appear there. If any of the threads spun out of their several lives met and twined in the broad strand of blue that enriched his, there is no way of identifying the spinners. Less obscure, though perhaps of only passing interest, is what may be gleaned under this head about two of Lincoln’s nearer relations. His father’s brothers, Mordecai and Josiah, appear to have enjoyed general respect on account of their probity. “They were excellent men,” said one who claimed to know them intimately, “plain, moderately educated, candid in their manners and intercourse, and looked upon as honorable as any men I have ever heard of.”[i-1] Their younger brother Thomas, however, cannot be so readily portrayed. He has, like his illustrious son, been, in turn, depreciated and idealized to such a degree that the inquirer, who would reach safe conclusions in respect to him, must tread warily through a maze of contradictions.
Rejecting the praise as well as the blame of hearsay historians, and following the testimony of those only who knew the man, we learn from one that he was “honest”; from another that he “was regarded as a very honest man”; and still another found him “always truthful—conscientious.”[i-2] To these tributes must be added what one who was doubly connected with Thomas Lincoln had to say about him:—
“I’m just tired of hearing Grandfather Lincoln abused,” said Mrs. Dowling, the daughter of Dennis Hanks and Matilda Johnson, speaking to an attentive listener, not many years ago. “Everybody runs him down.”
Then, going on to free her mind woman-fashion, she continued:—
“Uncle Abe got his honesty, and his clear notions of living, and his kind heart from his father. Maybe the Hanks family was smarter, but some of them couldn’t hold a candle to Grandfather Lincoln when it came to morals. I’ve heard Grandfather Lincoln say, many a time, that he was kind and loving, and kept his word, and always paid his way, and never turned a dog from his door.”[i-3]
These qualities, so admirable in Thomas, were not lacking, it should be mentioned, in that particular member of “the Hanks family,” his cousin Nancy, with whom he mated.[i-4] She is said to have brought to the rude Kentucky cabin, in which they began their married life, a sweetness of spirit and a firmness of character that nicely supplemented his rugged integrity. Yet here again traditions are more plentiful than facts, and the repute of the little family, in those early days, so far as it affords a point of departure for the study of Abraham Lincoln’s straightforwardness, rests, in a manner, on the word of one neighbor,—a man of standing, however,—according to whom “they were poor,” but “they were true.”[i-5]
The poverty of the frontier, it has been said, is no poverty; but the Lincolns were poor almost to a proverb. Their condition appears to have been extreme, even for the primitive Kentucky settlement at Elizabethtown where they made their first home. The young husband was a carpenter by trade, but his new neighbors, with the self-reliance of pioneers, managed to do for themselves most of the work wherewith he had hoped to support his family. Its needs grew with the birth of a little daughter, but not its resources, which he presently sought to eke out by farming. The hut in Elizabethtown was abandoned for another hut and a piece of tillable land that Thomas had bought,—presumably on credit,—about fourteen miles away, near the Big South Fork of Nolin Creek.[i-6] There, in the following winter, was born the boy who became known to fame as Abraham Lincoln. He must have felt at an early age the tooth of the “stinted living” in those “pinching times,” to which, during later life, he once sadly referred; for his father did not prosper with the hoe, any more than he had with the hammer. After a few unfruitful years on Nolin Creek, Thomas relinquished the place for a better farm, in the Knob Creek region, about fifteen miles distant, acquired like its predecessor on easy terms. Yet the fortunes of the family did not mend. Its luckless head “was always lookin’,” as Cousin Dennis said, “fur the land o’ Canaan.” To his pioneer’s vision the There ever seemed fairer than the Here. So removal followed removal,—now in Kentucky, then into Indiana, and again into Illinois,—until, to borrow one of Abraham’s little stories, the chickens, if there were any, might have lain on their backs and crossed their legs to be tied, whenever they saw the wagon sheets brought out.[i-7]