Lincoln was brought up on the breast of things. The rugged actualities of life in a new country, rather than the literature about life, entered into his training; and when we name those colleges to which the world’s great lights have severally owed their education, this man must be credited to the most venerable, though perhaps least honored, among them all,—the academy of hard knocks. Let us not infer, however, that the back settlements in which he spent his youth were wholly beyond the field of letters. Attending “A B C schools by littles,” as the autobiography expresses it, and learning betimes how to read, the lad lost no opportunity to borrow or acquire the few books within his reach. Under the stimulation of first one mother, then the other, every volume that he could lay hold of for fifty miles around was eagerly studied. What this shifting library comprised will doubtless never be fully known. It is said to have included—besides certain elementary school-books[i-18]—the Bible, Bunyan’s “Pilgrim’s Progress,” Æsop’s “Fables,” the “Arabian Nights,” Defoe’s “Robinson Crusoe,” Weems’s “Life of Washington,” Ramsay’s “Life of Washington,” a history of the United States, Weems’s “Life of Marion,” the “Speeches of Henry Clay,” with which was probably incorporated a “Memoir” of the statesman, the “Life of Benjamin Franklin,” Riley’s “Narrative of the Loss of the Brig Commerce,” a few of Cooper’s “Leather Stocking Tales,” and the Revised Laws of Indiana, with which were bound, besides other documents, the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States.[i-19] Some of these works, if not all of them, left an ethical glow in the boy’s heart. Thoughtfully absorbing the light that streamed from their pages, he caught glimpses here and there of a kinship that linked the everyday doings in his commonplace world with the ideals in his books.
A mishap to one of the borrowed volumes put these budding ideas of rectitude to the test. While in Abraham’s keeping, a “Life of Washington”[i-20] that belonged to a neighbor, Josiah Crawford by name, was badly soaked one night during a rainstorm, which beat through the chinks of the Little Pigeon Creek cabin. Carrying the damaged book back to its owner, the boy acknowledged himself answerable for its condition;—but how was he to pay the seventy-five cents which Crawford demanded in settlement? Money was as scarce as literature at that time with young Lincoln, so he agreed to work out the claim in the farmer’s corn-field. “You see,” said Abraham, relating the incident to a friend, “I am tall and long-armed, and I went to work in earnest. At the end of the two days there was not a corn-blade left on a stalk in the field. I wanted to pay full damage for all the wetting the book got, and I made a clean sweep.”[i-21] This ample submission to the laws of mine and thine was not, however, so graceful as it might have been. Our “long-armed” boy appears to have been still far removed from sainthood in those days; and, after the manner of boys, he nursed a grudge against Crawford for his unneighborly, though perhaps rightful, treatment of the accident. Having satisfied that thrifty person’s demands with the Scriptural “good measure, pressed down, and shaken together, and running over,” Abraham—so tradition has it—lampooned the man whenever occasion offered,—now in humorous prose, now in doggerel rhymes,—until Josiah’s “blue nose,” as well as certain other unlovely features, became the laughing-stock of the neighborhood. Indeed, the gibes ran their merry course—if we may believe one veracious chronicler—all the way to “the Wabash and the Ohio.”[i-22]
This unseemly persecution of Crawford, on the heels of an honorable settlement with him, narrowly saved the youthful Lincoln from occupying a place in the world’s gallery of premature worthies beside the copper-plate little Washington portrayed by Parson Weems. Nevertheless, that myth-maker’s model boy, who could not tell a lie, had left a deep impression in the mind of this real boy. To Abe’s uncritical faculties the biography rang true in every detail. For its reverend author, with all his faults, had the literary merit of apparent sincerity; and his string of “curious anecdotes,” as the title-page called them, had not yet been worn threadbare, to the verge of the ridiculous, by derisive repetition. Weems’s Washington, boy and man, became Lincoln’s hero—a cherished ideal which he never consented to modify, even after he had outgrown the story of the cherry tree and that truthful little hatchet-swinger.
Emulating the great Virginian, Abe carried himself, now consciously, now unconsciously, as this paragon of his fancy might have done, even to the point of leaving a hatchet, or more accurately speaking, an axe anecdote for later generations to admire. During those toilsome Indiana days,—so runs our tale,—the youth was engaged in clearing a piece of woodland some distance from the house. Leaving home early, he made it a practice to carry some luncheon and stay away until nightfall. The picnic element in the expedition appealed to the taste of his frolicsome stepsister, Matilda, whose frequent appeals for permission to accompany him met with her mother’s peremptory refusals. Eluding maternal vigilance one morning, the girl slyly followed Lincoln as he strode through the forest, humming a tune, with his axe on his shoulder. At a favorable moment she darted forward and, exerting cat-like agility, leaped squarely upon him. Grasping a shoulder with each hand, she braced her knee in the middle of his back, and brought the young woodsman dexterously to the ground. Lincoln, taken by surprise, went down like a log, carrying his assailant with him. As they fell the axe cut the girl’s ankle, making a painful wound that bled freely. After an improvised bandage had stanched the blood, Abe, mindful of Mrs. Lincoln’s oft-repeated orders, looked down at the sobbing culprit and asked:—
“ ’Tilda, what are you going to tell mother about getting hurt?”
“Tell her I did it with the axe,” she answered. “That will be the truth, won’t it?”
To which he responded:—
“Yes, that’s the truth, but it’s not all the truth. Tell the whole truth, ’Tilda, and trust your good mother for the rest.”[i-23]
Whether ’Tilda did tell “the whole truth,” and whether Sally Bush gathered her or Abraham or both of them to her heart, after the manner of Augustine Washington in the Reverend Mr. Weems’s tale, is not definitely known. Nevertheless, when the Plutarch that is to be runs his parallel between these two greatest of Americans, the legendary hatchet and the historic axe may become symbolic of how closely both these heroes did actually hew to the line, in their early fondness for the verities.
But if further youthful similarities shall be sought by that hypothetical biographer, he will not linger over the next episode in this chronicle of Lincoln’s moral growth. Abe had passed his nineteenth birthday when “the great man” of the Little Pigeon Creek neighborhood, old James Gentry, picked him out for a signal mark of confidence. That gentleman’s son, Allen, was to make a trading voyage in a Mississippi flat-boat laden with goods, and Lincoln was hired to share the adventure. They planned to do business along the river all the way, if necessary, to the Gulf. Drifting down the Ohio and thence on the broad waters of the Mississippi as far as New Orleans, the young men made a prosperous, though not entirely uneventful journey. Only one incident of the expedition concerns us here. At certain landings they were paid for their merchandise—as they discovered too late—in counterfeit money. Gentry, lamenting over the matter, feared his father’s anger; whereupon Lincoln consoled him with the suggestion that their employer would not care how much bad money they took in, if they brought the correct amount of good money home. “Never mind, Allen,” he continued; “it will accidentally slip out of our fingers before we get to New Orleans, and then old Jim can’t quarrel at us.”[i-24] This prophecy did, in fact, come true. The counterfeits, we are told, “all went off like hot cakes”; but to what extent the prophet helped to bring about so sweeping a fulfillment is nowhere recorded. When he and his associates, however, on their return, rendered an account of their stewardship in currency that was not hopelessly discredited, old Mr. Gentry is said to have pronounced on Lincoln what corresponded with the Scriptural commendation,—“Well done, good and faithful servant.”