Abraham Lincoln and the Abolition of Slavery in the United States

by Charles Godfrey Leland

Mordecai, the Indian-killer, and his brother, Josiah, remained in Virginia, and grew up to be respectable, prosperous men. The younger brother, Thomas, was always “idle, thriftless, poor, a hunter, and a rover.” He exercised occasionally in a rough way the calling of a carpenter, and, wandering from place to place, began at different times to cultivate the wilderness, but with little success, owing to his laziness. Yet he was a man of great strength and vigour, and once “thrashed the monstrous bully of Breckinridge County in three minutes, and came off without a scratch.” He was an inveterate talker, or popular teller of stories and anecdotes, and a Jackson Democrat in politics, which signified that he belonged to the more radical of the two political parties which then prevailed in America. In religion, he was, says Lamon, who derived his information from Mr. W. H. Herndon, “nothing at times, and a member of various denominations by turns.” In 1806, he lived at Elizabethtown, in Hardin County, Kentucky, where, in the same year and place, he married Nancy Hanks: the exact date of the marriage is unknown. It is said of this young woman that she was a tall and beautiful brunette, with an understanding which, by her family at least, was considered wonderful. She could read and write—as rare accomplishments in those days in Kentucky backwoods as they still are among the poor whites of the South or their Western descendants.[4] In later life she was sadly worn by hard labour, both in the house and fields, and her features were marked with a melancholy which was probably constitutional, and which her son inherited.

It is to be regretted that President Abraham Lincoln never spoke, except with great reluctance, of his early life, or of his parents. As it is, the researches of W. H. Herndon and others have indicated the hereditary sources of his chief characteristics. We know that the grandfather was a vigorous backwoodsman, who died a violent death; that his uncle was a grim and determined manslayer, carrying out for years the blood-feud provoked by the murder of his parent; that his mother was habitually depressed, and that his father was a favourite of both men and women, though a mere savage when irritated, fond of fun, an endless storyteller, physically powerful, and hating hard work. Out of all these preceding traits, it is not difficult to imagine how the giant Abraham came to be inflexible of purpose and strong of will, though indolent—why he was good-natured to excess in his excess of strength—and why he was a great humourist, and at the same time a melancholy man.

It should be remembered by the reader that the state of society in which Abraham Lincoln was born and grew up resembled nothing now existing in Europe, and that it is very imperfectly understood even by many town-dwelling Americans. The people around him were all poor and ignorant, yet they bore their poverty lightly, were hardly aware of their want of culture, and were utterly unconscious of owing the least respect or deference to any human being. Some among them were, of course, aware of the advantages to be derived from wealth and political power; but the majority knew not how to spend the one, and were indifferent to the other. Even to this day, there are in the South and South-West scores of thousands of men who, owning vast tracts of fertile land, and gifted with brains and muscle, will not take the pains to build themselves homes better than ordinary cabins, or cultivate more soil than will supply life with plain and unvaried sustenance. The only advantage they have is the inestimable one, if properly treated, of being free from all trammels save those of ignorance. To rightly appreciate the good or evil qualities of men moulded in such society, requires great generosity, and great freedom from all that is conventional.

Within the first few years of her married life, Nancy Hanks Lincoln bore her husband three children. The first was a daughter, named Sarah, who married at fifteen, and died soon after; the second was Abraham; and the third Thomas, who died in infancy.[5] The family were always wretchedly poor, even below the level of their neighbours in want; and as the father was indolent, the wife was obliged to labour and suffer. But it is probable that Mrs. Lincoln, who could read, and Thomas, who attributed his failure in life to ignorance, wished their children to be educated. Schools were, of course, scarce in a country where the houses are often many miles apart. Zachariah Riney, a Catholic priest, was Abraham’s first teacher; his next was Caleb Hazel. The young pupil learned to read and write in a few weeks; but in all his life, reckoning his instruction by days, he had only one year’s schooling.

When Thomas Lincoln was first married (1806), he took his wife to live in Elizabethtown, in a wretched shed, which has since been used as a slaughter-house and stable. About a year after, he removed to Nolin’s Creek. Four years after the birth of Abraham (1809), he again migrated to a more picturesque and fertile place, a few miles distant on Knob Creek. Here he remained four years, and though he was the occupant of over 200 acres of good land, never cultivated more than a little patch, “being satisfied with milk and meal for food.” When his children went to school they walked eight miles, going and returning, having only maize bread for dinner. In 1816, the father, after having sold his interest in the farm for ten barrels of whiskey and twenty dollars, built himself a crazy flat-boat, and set sail alone on the Ohio, seeking for a new home. By accident, the boat foundered, and much of the cargo was lost; but Thomas Lincoln pushed on, and found a fitting place to settle in Indiana, near the spot on which the village of Gentryville now stands. It was in the untrodden wilderness, and here he soon after brought his family, to live for the first year in what is called a half-faced camp, or a rough hut of poles, of which only three sides were enclosed, the fourth being open to the air. In 1817, Betsy Sparrow, an aunt of Mrs. Lincoln, and her husband, Thomas, with a nephew named Dennis Hanks, joined the Lincolns, who removed to a better house, if that could be called a house which was built of rough logs, and had neither floor, door, nor window. For two years they continued to live in this manner. Lincoln, a carpenter, was too lazy to make himself the simplest furniture. They had a few three-legged stools; the only bed was made in a singular manner. Its head and one side were formed by a corner of the cabin, the bed-post was a single crotch cut from the forest. Laid upon this crotch were the ends of two hickory poles, whose other extremities were placed in two holes made in the logs of the wall. On these sticks rested “slats,” or boards rudely split from trees with an axe, and on these slats was laid a bag filled with dried leaves. This was the bed of Thomas and Nancy Lincoln, and into it—when the skins hung at the cabin entrance did not keep out the cold—little Abraham and his sister crept for warmth.[6] Very little is recorded of the childhood of the future President. He was once nearly drowned in a stream, and when eight years of age shot a wild turkey, which, he declared in after life, was the largest game he had ever killed—a remarkable statement for a man who had grown up in a deer country, where buck-skin formed the common material for clothing, and venison hams passed for money. One thing is at least certain—that, till he was ten years old, the poor boy was ill-clad, dirty, and ill-used by his father. He had, however, learned to write.

In 1818, a terrible but common epidemic, known in Western America as the milk-fever, broke out in Indiana, and within a few days Thomas and Betsy Sparrow and Mrs. Lincoln all died. They had no medical attendance, and it was nine months before a clergyman, named David Elkin, invited by the first letter which Abraham ever wrote, came one hundred miles to hold the funeral service and preach over the graves. Strange as it may seem, the event which is universally regarded as the saddest of every life, in the case of Abraham Lincoln led directly to greater happiness, and to a change which conduced to the development of all his better qualities. Thirteen months after the death of Nancy Lincoln, Thomas married a widow, Mrs. Johnston, whom he had wooed ineffectually in Kentucky when she was Miss Sally Bush. She was a woman of sense, industrious, frugal, and gifted with a pride which inspired her to lead a far more civilised life than that which satisfied poor Tom Lincoln. He had greatly exaggerated to her the advantages of his home in Indiana, and she was bitterly disappointed when they reached it. Fortunately, she owned a stock of good furniture, which greatly astonished little Abraham and Sarah and their cousin Dennis. “She set about mending matters with great energy, and made her husband put down a floor, and hang windows and doors.” It was in the depth of winter, and the children, as they nestled in the warm beds she had provided, enjoying the strange luxury of security from the cold winds of December, must have thanked her from the depths of their hearts. She had brought a son and two daughters of her own, but Abraham and his sister had an equal place in her affections. They were half naked, and she clad them; they were dirty, and she washed them; they had been ill-used, and she treated them with motherly tenderness. In her own language, she “made them look a little more human.”[7]

This excellent woman loved Abraham tenderly, and her love was warmly returned. After his death she declared to Mr. Herndon—“I can say what not one mother in ten thousand can of a boy—Abe never gave me a cross look, and never refused, in fact or appearance, to do anything I requested him; nor did I ever give him a cross word in all my life. His mind and mine—what little I had—seemed to run together. He was dutiful to me always. Abe was the best boy I ever saw, or ever expect to see.” “When in after years Mr. Lincoln spoke of his ‘saintly mother’ and of his ‘angel of a mother,’ he referred to this noble woman, who first made him feel ‘like a human being’—whose goodness first touched his childish heart, and taught him that blows and taunts and degradation were not to be his only portion in the world.” And if it be recorded of George Washington that he never told a lie, it should also be remembered of Abraham Lincoln, who carried his country safely through a greater crisis than that of the Revolutionary War,[8] that he always obeyed his mother.

Abraham had gone to school only a few weeks in Kentucky, and Mrs. Lincoln soon sent him again to receive instruction. His first teacher in Indiana was Hazel Dorsey; his next, Andrew Crawford. The latter, in addition to the ordinary branches of education, also taught “manners.” One scholar would be introduced by another, while walking round the log schoolroom, to all the boys and girls, taught to bow properly, and otherwise acquire the ordinary courtesies of life. Abraham distinguished himself in spelling, which has always been a favourite subject for competition in rural America, and he soon began to write short original articles, though composition formed no part of the studies. It was characteristic of the boy that his first essays were against cruelty to animals. His mates were in the habit of catching the box-turtles, or land-terrapins, or tortoises, and putting live coals on their backs to make them walk, which greatly annoyed Abraham. All who knew him, in boyhood or in later life, bear witness that this tenderness was equal to his calm courage and tremendous physical strength. The last school which he attended for a short time, and to reach which he walked every day nine miles, was kept by a Mr. Swaney. This was in 1826.

Abraham was now sixteen years of age, and had grown so rapidly that he had almost attained the height which he afterwards reached of six feet four inches. He was very dark, his skin was shrivelled even in boyhood by constant exposure, and he habitually wore low shoes, a linsey-woolsey shirt, a cap made from the skin of a raccoon or opossum, and buckskin breeches, which were invariably about twelve inches too short for him. When not working for his father, he was hired out as a farm-labourer to the neighbours. His cousin, John Hanks, says—“We worked barefoot, grubbed it, ploughed, mowed, and cradled together.”

All who knew him at this time testify that Abraham hated hard-work, though he did it well—that he was physically indolent, though intellectually very active—that he loved to laugh, tell stories, and joke while labouring—and that he passed his leisure moments in hard study or in reading, which he made hard by writing out summaries of all he read, and getting them by heart. He would study arithmetic at night by the light of the fire, and cipher or copy with a pencil or coal on the wooden shovel or on a board. When this was full, he would shave it off with his father’s drawing-knife, and begin again. When he had paper, he used it instead; but in the frequent intervals when he had none, the boards were kept until paper was obtained. Among the first books which he read and thoroughly mastered were “Æsop’s Fables,” “Robinson Crusoe,” Bunyan’s “Pilgrim’s Progress,” a “History of the United States,” Weem’s “Life of Washington,” and “The Revised Statutes of Indiana.” From another work, “The Kentucky Preceptor,” a collection of literary extracts, he is said by a Mrs. Crawford, who knew him well, to have “learned his school orations, speeches, and pieces to write.” The field-work, which Abraham Lincoln disliked, did not, however, exhaust his body, and his mind found relief after toil in mastering anything in print.[9] It is not unusual to see poor and ignorant youths who are determined to “get learning,” apply themselves to the hardest and dryest intellectual labour with very little discrimination of any difference between that and more attractive literature, and it is evident that young Lincoln worked in this spirit. There is no proof that his memory was by nature extraordinary—it would rather seem that the contrary was the case, from the pains which he took to improve it. During his boyhood, any book had to him all the charm of rarity; perhaps it was the more charming because most of his friends believed that mental culture was incompatible with industry. “Lincoln,” said his cousin, Dennis Hanks, “was lazy—a very lazy man. He was always reading, scribbling, writing, ciphering, writing poetry, and the like.” It is evident that his custom of continually exercising his memory on all subjects grew with his growth and strengthened with his strength. By the time he was twenty-five, he had, without instruction, made himself a good lawyer—not a mere “case-practitioner,” but one who argued from a sound knowledge of principles. It is said that when he began to read Blackstone, he thoroughly learned the first forty pages at one sitting. There is also sufficient proof that he had perfectly mastered not only “Euclid’s Geometry,” but a number of elementary scientific works, among others one on astronomy. And many anecdotes of his later life prove that he learned nothing without thinking it over deeply, especially in all its relations to his other acquisitions and its practical use. If education consists of mental discipline and the acquisition of knowledge, it is idle to say that Abraham Lincoln was uneducated, since few college graduates actually excelled him in either respect. These facts deserve dwelling on, since, in the golden book of self-made men, there is not one who presents a more encouraging example to youth, and especially to the poor and ambitious, than Abraham Lincoln. He developed his memory by resolutely training it—he brought out his reasoning powers as a lawyer by using his memory—he became a fluent speaker and a ready reasoner by availing himself of every opportunity to speak or debate. From the facts which have been gathered by his biographers, or which are current in conversation among those who knew him, it is most evident that there seldom lived a man who owed so little to innate genius or talents, in comparison to what he achieved by sheer determination and perseverance.