Thomas Lincoln’s futile shifts need not be set forth at length here,[i-8] but certain aspects of his inability to get on in the world have a peculiar significance. He responded with ready good nature to calls upon his time or his hospitality; and though he appears to have understood many things, he never learned how to turn his dealings with the little world around him to his own account. The few business ventures, in which he is said to have engaged, reveal how woefully he was lacking in what has been called “money sense.” A typical instance, related by his son many years after the event, may have suggested to the narrator that there were at least two members of the Lincoln family who had each a blind side in the direction of the almighty dollar. Here is the story substantially as Abraham related it:—
“Father often told me of the trick that was played upon him by a ‘pair of sharpers.’ It was the year before we moved from Kentucky to Indiana that father concluded to take a load of pork down to New Orleans. He had a considerable amount of his own, and he bargained with the relations and neighbors for their pork, so that altogether he had quite a load. He took the pork to the Ohio River on a clumsily constructed flat-boat of his own make. Almost as soon as he pushed out into the river a couple of sleek fellows bargained with him for his cargo, and promised to meet him in New Orleans where they arranged to pay him the price agreed upon. He eagerly accepted the offer, transferred the cargo to the strangers, and drifted down the river, his head filled with visions of wealth and delight. He thought that he was going to accomplish what he had set out to do, without labor or inconvenience. Father waited about New Orleans for several days, but failed to meet his whilom friends. At last it dawned upon him that he had been sold, and all that he could do was to come back home and face the music.”[i-9]
Consoling himself after such mishaps with the indolent philosophy of “Luck is ag’in’ me,” and “Whom the Lord loveth he chasteneth,” Thomas would return to his sporadic farming, or to what he liked better—his rod and his gun. For there is a tradition that this unthrifty fellow—honest and well-meaning though he was—had a distaste for manual labor. When work had to be done he did it, after a fashion, nor did he spare the boy who was growing up at his side; but further than that he apparently did not go. Indeed, it may be doubted whether the father ever found, along their limited horizon, the path which might have led either him or his son to business success. They certainly did not enter upon it. Yet if Thomas Lincoln failed to teach Abraham how to put money in their purse, let it be remembered, to his lasting credit, that he did show him how an empty sack might—despite a time-honored adage to the contrary—stand upright.
Noteworthy as was the father’s influence on the boy’s character, that of the mother appears to have been of deeper consequence. Lincoln’s earliest recollections of her, as he recalled in later years, pictured his sister and himself seated at her feet eagerly listening to the books that she read or the tales that she told. The poor lady succumbed early to the hardships of the Indiana backwoods; and the few facts that are known concerning her brief life set forth but a meager story.[i-10] If “the world knows nothing of its greatest men,” may this not be so, in a measure, because it knows nothing of their mothers? The deficiency, as far as Nancy Hanks is concerned, was supplied, for all time, in perhaps the most pithy yet comprehensive tribute that a distinguished son ever uttered to the memory of a parent. Looking down over his career from the last eminence, and tracing it all back again to the frail, sweet-faced woman whose life had flickered out before his wondering gaze, in the cabin home of his boyhood, Lincoln once said, with moist eyes: “All that I am, or hope to be, I owe to my angel mother.”[i-11]
When she passed on, the lad, it is true, was not quite eleven years old; nevertheless her teachings, during that first plastic period, had evidently left their sterling impress in his nature.
Nor did the home influence for right living stop there. After an interval of about a year, Thomas sought another mate. Leaving the little ones to manage the household on Little Pigeon Creek as best they might, he retraced his steps to Elizabethtown and offered himself in marriage to Mrs. Sarah Bush Johnston. She is said to have refused him, in their younger days, for Daniel Johnston, who, by a coincidence, had left her a widow with as many children as waited for her visitor at home.[i-12] On this occasion the lady listened more favorably to his proposal, yet she pointed out an obstacle, saying: “Tommy Lincoln, I have no objection to marrying you, but I cannot do it right off, for I owe several little debts which must first be paid.” To which he replied: “Give me a list of your debts.”
They amounted to about twelve dollars—not so mean a sum in those days of small things as present standards might indicate. At any rate, within a few hours our suitor had paid them, and had married the fair debtor. The settlement of these little accounts was, in a way, the central incident of their short courtship.[i-13] It puts one in mind of the good repute enjoyed by the Lincolns, from the beginning, in Elizabethtown. If the neighbor, who declared Thomas and his first wife to have been poor but true, had seen him and his second wife set out for home in a four-horse wagon loaded with her wealth of household belongings,—to say nothing of the three blooming Johnston children,—there might have been some hesitation about repeating the word “poor”; but in the face of those receipted bills, there would probably have been no desire to modify the word “true.”[i-14]
Sally Bush was a worthy successor to Nancy Hanks. A woman of strong personality and high ideals, this stepmother—to use a designation that she ennobled—is credited by not a few writers with exerting the larger influence in the moulding of Abraham Lincoln’s character. They have gone so far, some of them, as to assert that Lincoln himself, recognizing this to be so, had her in mind and not her predecessor, when he uttered that grateful acknowledgment to his “angel mother.”[i-15] This view is hardly sustained by the language of the tribute, or by the facts; yet Abraham apparently missed no opportunity for expressing in deeds, as well as in words, what—to use his own phrases—he owed the “noble woman” who had been “a good and kind mother”[i-16] to an orphaned boy.
Perhaps, after all, the controversy concerning the two women, if controversy it may be called, is fairly disposed of by what Mr. Lincoln told one of his acquaintances, Governor William Pickering, who some years later thus restated their conversation. “Once when Lincoln referred to the fact that he owed much to his mother, I asked, ‘Which mother, Mr. Lincoln, your own or your stepmother?’ To which Mr. Lincoln replied,—‘Don’t ask me that question, for I mean both, as it was mother all my life, except that desolate period between the time mother died and father brought mother into the home again. Both were as one mother. Hence I simply say, mother.’ ”[i-17]
With one or the other of these conscientious women at his side, Abraham Lincoln reached maturity. Almost every good man has had a good mother. Here was one who had two. It is not surprising, therefore, that his sense of right and wrong, after a few minor lapses, became developed to uncommon acuteness at an early age, nor should it be accounted a miracle that from the unsightly stumpage of a frontier clearing, emerged this blossom which grew, with time, into the finest flower of nineteenth-century honor.