Lectures and Essays

by Goldwin Smith

THE EARLY YEARS OF ABRAHAM LINCOLN

Our readers need not be afraid that we are going to bore them with the Slavery Question or the Civil War. We deal here not with the Martyr President, but with Abe Lincoln in embryo, leaving the great man at the entrance of the grand scene. Mr. Ward H. Lamon has published a biography [Footnote: The Life of Abraham Lincoln from his Birth to his Inauguration as President. By Ward H. Lamon. Boston: James R. Osgood & Co. 1872] which enables us to do this, and which, besides containing a good deal that is amusing, is a curious contribution to political science, as illustrating, by a world-renowned instance, the origin of the species Politician. The materials for it appear to be drawn from the most authentic sources, and to have been used with diligence, though in point of form the book leaves something to be desired. We trust it and the authorities quoted in it for our facts.

After the murder, criticism, of course, was for a time impossible. Martyrdom was followed by canonization, and the popular heart could not be blamed for overflowing in hyperbole. The fallen chief "was Washington, he was Moses, and there were not wanting even those who likened him to the God and Redeemer of all the earth. These latter thought they discovered in his early origin, his kindly nature, his benevolent precepts, and the homely anecdotes in which he taught the people, strong points of resemblance between him and the Divine Son of Mary." A halo of myth naturally gathered round the cradle of this new Moses—for we will not pursue the more extravagant and offensive parallel which may serve as a set-off against that which was drawn by English Royalists between the death of Charles I. and the Crucifixion. Among other fables, it was believed that the President's family had fled from Kentucky to Indiana to escape the taint of Slavery. Thomas Lincoln, the father of Abraham, was migratory enough, but the course of his migrations was not determined by high moral motives, and we may safely affirm that had he ever found himself among the fleshpots of Egypt, he would have stayed there, however deep the moral darkness might have been. He was a thriftless "ne'er do weel," who had very commonplace reasons for wandering away from the miserable, solitary farm in Kentucky, on which his child first formed a sad acquaintance with life and nature, and which, as it happened, was not in the slave-owning region of the State. His decision appears to have been hastened by a "difficulty," in which he bit off his antagonist's nose—an incident to which it would be difficult to find a parallel in the family histories of Scripture heroes, or even in those of the Sainted Fathers of the Republic. He drifted to Indiana, and in a spot which was then an almost untrodden wilderness, built a casa santa, which his connection, Dennis Hanks, calls "that darned little half-faced camp"—a dwelling enclosed on three sides and open on the fourth, without a floor, and called a camp, it seems, because it was made of poles, not of logs. He afterwards exchanged the "camp" for the more ambitious "cabin," but his cabin, was "a rough, rough log one," made of unhewn timber, and without floor, door or window. In this "rough, rough," abode, his lanky, lean- visaged, awkward and somewhat pensive though strong, hearty and patient son Abraham had a "rough, rough" life, and underwent experiences which, if they were not calculated to form a Pitt or a Turgot, were calculated to season an American politician, and make him a winner in the tough struggle for existence, as well as to identify him with the people, faithful representation of whose aims, sentiments, tastes, passions and prejudices was the one thing needful to qualify him for obtaining the prize of his ambition. "For two years Lincoln (the father) continued to live alone in the old way. He did not like to farm, and he never got much of his land under cultivation. His principal crop was corn; and this, with the game which a rifleman so expert would easily take from the woods around him, supplied his table." It does not appear that he employed any of his mechanical skill in completing and furnishing his own cabin. It has already been stated that the latter had no window, door or floor. "But the furniture, if it might be called furniture, was even worse than the house. Three-legged stools served for chairs. A bedstead was made of poles stuck in the cracks of the logs in one corner of the cabin, while the other end rested in the crotch of a forked stick stuck in the earthen floor. On these were laid some boards, and on the boards a shake-down of leaves, covered with skins and old petticoats. The table was a hewed puncheon supported by four legs. They had a few pewter and tin dishes to eat from, but the most minute inventory of their effects makes no mention of knives or forks. Their cooking utensils were a Dutch oven and a skillet. Abraham slept in the loft, to which he ascended by means of pins driven into holes in the wall." Of his father's disposition, Abraham seems to have inherited at all events the dislike to labour, though his sounder moral nature prevented him from being an idler. His tendency to politics came from the same element of character as his father's preference for the rifle. In after life we are told his mind "was filled with gloomy forebodings and strong apprehensions of impending evil, mingled with extravagant visions of personal grandeur and power." His melancholy, characterized by all his friends as "terrible," was closely connected with the cravings of his demagogic ambition, and the root of both was in him from a boy.

In the Indiana cabin Abraham's mother, whose maiden name was Nancy Hanks, died, far from medical aid, of the epidemic called milk sickness. She was preceded in death by her relatives, the Sparrows, who had succeeded the Lincolns in the "camp," and by many neighbours, whose coffins Thomas Lincoln made out of "green lumber cut with a whip saw." Upon Nancy's death he took to his green lumber again and made a box for her. "There were about twenty persons at her funeral. They took her to the summit of a deeply wooded knoll, about half a mile south-east of the cabin, and laid her beside the Sparrows. If there were any burial ceremonies, they were of the briefest. But it happened that a few months later an itinerant preacher, named David Elkin, whom the Lincolns had known in Kentucky, wandered into the settlement, and he either volunteered or was employed to preach a sermon, which should commemorate the many virtues and pass over in silence the few frailties of the poor woman who slept in the forest. Many years later the bodies of Levi Hall and his wife (relatives), were deposited in the same earth with that of Mr. Lincoln. The graves of two or three children, belonging to a neighbour's family, are also near theirs. They are all crumbled, sunken and covered with wild vines in deep and tangled mats. The great trees were originally cut away to make a small cleared space for this primitive graveyard; but the young dogwoods have sprung up unopposed in great luxuriance, and in many instances the names of pilgrims to the burial place of the great Abraham Lincoln's mother are carved on their bark. With this exception, the spot is wholly unmarked. The grave never had a stone, nor even a board, at its head or its foot, and the neighbours still dispute as to which of these unsightly hollows contains the ashes of Nancy Lincoln." If Democracy in the New World sometimes stones the prophets, it is seldom guilty of building their sepulchres. Out of sight, off the stump, beyond the range of the interviewer, heroes and martyrs soon pass from the mind of a fast-living people; and weeds may grow out of the dust of Washington. But in this case what neglect has done good taste would have dictated; it is well that the dogwoods are allowed to grow unchecked over the wilderness grave.

Thirteen months after the death of his Nancy, Thomas Lincoln went to Elizabethtown, Kentucky, and suddenly presented himself to Mrs. Sally Johnston, who had in former days rejected him for a better match, but had become a widow. "Well, Mrs. Johnston, I have no wife and you have no husband, I came a purpose to marry you. I knowed you from a gal and you knowed me from a boy. I have no time to lose, and if you are willin', let it be done straight off." "Tommy, I know you well, and have no objection to marrying you; but I cannot do it straight off, as I owe some debts that must first be paid." They were married next morning, and the new Mrs. Lincoln, who owned, among other wondrous household goods, a bureau that cost forty dollars, and who had been led, it seems, to believe that her new husband was reformed and a prosperous farmer, was conveyed with her bureau to the smiling scene of his reformation and prosperity. Being, however, a sensible Christian woman, she made the best of a bad bargain, got her husband to put down a floor and hang doors and windows, made things generally decent, and was very kind to the children, especially to Abe, to whom she took a great liking, and who owed to his good stepmother what other heroes have owed to their mothers. "From that time on," according to his garrulous relative, Dennis Hanks, "he appeared to lead a new life." It seems to have been difficult to extract from him "for campaign purposes" the incidents of his life before it took this happy turn.

He described his own education in a Congressional handbook as "defective." In Kentucky he occasionally trudged with his little sister, rather as an escort than as a school-fellow, to a school four miles off, kept by one Caleb Hazel, who could teach reading and writing after a fashion, and a little arithmetic, but whose great qualification for his office lay in his power and readiness "to whip the big boys." So far the American respect for popular education as the key to success in life prevailed even in those wilds, and in such a family as that of Thomas Lincoln.

Under the auspices of his new mother, Abraham began attending school again. The master was one Crawford, who taught not only reading, writing and arithmetic, but "manners." One of the scholars was made to retire, and re-enter "as a polite gentleman enters a drawing room," after which he was led round by another scholar and introduced to all "the young ladies and gentlemen." The polite gentleman who entered the drawing room and was introduced as Mr. Abraham Lincoln, is thus depicted: "He was growing at a tremendous rate, and two years later attained his full height of six feet four inches. He was long, wiry and strong, while his big feet and hands and the length of his arms and legs were out of all proportion to his small trunk and head. His complexion was very swarthy, and Mr. Gentry says that his skin was shrivelled and yellow even then. He wore low shoes, buckskin breeches, linsey woolsey shirt, and a cap made of the skin of an opossum or a coon. The breeches clung close to his thighs and legs, but parted by a large space to meet the tops of his shoes. Twelve inches remained uncovered, and exposed that much of shinbone, sharp, blue and narrow." At a subsequent period, when charged by a Democratic rival with being "a Whig aristocrat," he gave a minute and touching description of the breeches. "I had only one pair," he said, "and they were buckskin. And if you know the nature of buckskin when wet and dried by the sun they will shrink; and mine kept shrinking until they left several inches of my legs bare between the tops of my socks and the lower part of my breeches, and whilst I was growing taller they were becoming shorter, and so much tighter that they left a blue streak around my legs, which can be seen to this day."

Mr. Crawford, it seems, was a martinet in spelling, and one day he was going to punish a whole class for failing to spell defied, when Lincoln telegraphed the right letter to a young lady by putting his finger with a significant smile to his eye. Many years later, however, and after his entrance into public life, Lincoln himself spelt apology with a double p, planning with a single n, and very with a double r. His schooling was very irregular, his school days hardly amounting to a year in all, and such education as he had was picked up afterwards by himself. His appetite for mental food, however, was always strong, and he devoured all the books, few and not very select, which could be found in the neighbourhood of "Pigeon Creek." Equally strong was his passion for stump oratory, the taste for which pervades the American people, even in the least intellectual districts, as the taste for church festivals pervades the people of Spain, or the taste for cricket the people of England. Abe's neighbour, John Romine, says, "he was awful lazy. He worked for me; was always reading and thinking; used to get mad at him. He worked for me in 1829, pulling fodder. I say Abe was awful lazy, he would laugh and talk, and crack jokes all the time, didn't love work, but did dearly love his pay." He liked to lie under a shade tree, or up in the loft of the cabin and read, cipher, or scribble. At night he ciphered by the light of the fire on the wooden fire shovel. He practised stump oratory by repeating the sermons, and sometimes by preaching himself to his brothers and sister. His gifts in the rhetorical line were high; when it was announced in the harvest field that Abe had taken the stump, work was at an end. The lineaments of the future politician distinctly appear in the dislike of manual labour as well as in the rest. We shall presently have Lincoln's own opinion on that point.

Abe's first written composition appears to have been an essay against cruelty to animals, a theme the choice of which was at once indicative of his kindness of heart and practically judicious, since the young gentlemen in the neighbourhood were in the habit of catching terrapins and putting hot coals upon their backs. The essay appears not to have been preserved, and we cannot say whether its author succeeded in explaining that ethical mystery—the love of cruelty in boys.

In spite of his laziness, Abe was greatly in demand at hog-killing time, notwithstanding, or possibly in consequence of which, he contracted a peculiarly tender feeling towards swine, and in later life would get off his horse to help a struggling hog out of the mire or to save a little pig from the jaws of an unnatural mother.