CHAPTER XXIII
ABRAHAM LINCOLN
The story of Abraham Lincoln should bring more inspiration to you than that of any other man or woman who is mentioned in this book. For Lincoln not only had a great mind, a great and forceful personality, but a great and kindly heart, filled with charity for all. He was, moreover, a man of the people. Whatever he gained in life, he gained by his own efforts. Washington created the United States, but Lincoln carried them through the most difficult crisis of their history—and it is more than probable that without him there would be no United States to-day.
He was born in 1809, in Hardin County, Kentucky, on the Twelfth of February, and was the son of Thomas Lincoln, a carpenter. Thomas Lincoln was a good natured but shiftless man who never did any more work than was absolutely necessary to keep his family from starving. He had pioneer blood in his veins, as, indeed, all Lincoln's ancestors had, from the time when they first came to America in 1637; and this fact kept them pushing continually to the westward and taking up new lands in unbroken country as opportunity offered. Thomas Lincoln's wife, Nancy, was made of better stuff than her easy going husband, and it is probably from her that the boy Abraham inherited the character that was to make his name the greatest in his country, if not in the entire world.
As a boy Abraham had little or no chance to go to school, but he was so industrious and eager to learn that he borrowed every book that he could lay his hand on, and in this way he obtained a thorough knowledge of the bible and of Shakespeare as well as of a few other classics, which included Æsop's fables, Robinson Crusoe, a history of Washington and the Pilgrim's Progress.
When Abraham was eight years old, his father moved to Indiana, and there the first great sorrow of his life befell the little boy. His mother died of a fever that appeared among the settlers, leaving Abraham and his sister Sarah, a little girl of eleven, to do the housework and the heavy chores of a backwoods farm. The following year Thomas Lincoln went away to Kentucky to marry again, and he brought back with him a big hearted woman named Sally Johnson, who had three children by a former marriage.
This marriage by Thomas Lincoln was the best thing that could have happened for his two motherless children. Sally Johnson was able to give them better care and more comforts than they had ever known. She inspired their father also to work more regularly and to put a door on the cabin in which they lived. Abraham helped his father in clearing the land and hewing the trees. He was big and strong for his age, and was constantly swinging an ax or guiding a plow.
All the time when not engaged in these active forms of labor, Abraham was reading and studying, by candle light or by firelight, chalking up sums of arithmetic on a board or the back of a shovel when he lacked paper to write them on, and striving in every way to gain for himself an education. Owing to the remote region where he lived and the constant moves that were made by his family, he had less than a year's schooling in the entire course of his life,—but his eagerness to learn counterbalanced this disadvantage and when he reached young manhood he knew as much as many who had been to the finest schools in the country from their earliest years and without interruption.
When he was twenty-one years old his father moved again. This time Thomas Lincoln settled in Illinois, and Abraham worked without pay for a year, helping him to clear his property and settle his land. Then, as was the custom in those days, he left home to seek his fortune elsewhere.