She was a beautiful woman, slender, sad, and pale, with dark hair. She was more refined than most women of those hardy pioneer times, but she could use a rifle, work on the farm, spin, and do other housework. Because of her gentle and firm character, she was loved and respected not only by her husband and children, but by her neighbours.
Above all things she had a deep and tender religious spirit which she shared with Abe and his sister, Sarah. She taught Abe to love truth and justice and to revere God. In time he could repeat by heart much of the Bible, and, when he grew up, he thought and wrote in the simple, clear, and forceful language of the Bible. And he learned from it his ideas of right and his scorn of wrong, making him “Honest Abe.”
OFF TO NEW ORLEANS
Young Abe Lincoln went on several flatboat trips carrying produce down the Mississippi to New Orleans.
One of these trips made a deep and lasting impression upon him. In New Orleans, he visited the slave-market. There negro men, women, and children were bought, sold, and flogged. Wives were torn from their husbands, children from their mothers, and auctioned off like cattle.
The anguish of these scenes wrung Lincoln’s heartstrings. With quivering lips, he said, “If ever I get a chance to hit that thing, I will hit it hard.”
John Hanks, a relative who was with him at the slave-market, said in after years:—
“Lincoln saw it; his heart bled; said nothing much, was silent, looked bad. I can say it, knowing him, that it was on this trip that he formed his opinions of slavery. It run its iron into him, then and there.”