He Knew Lincoln, and Other Billy Brown Stories

by Ida M. Tarbell

“Yes, sir; he was what I call a godly man. Fact is, I never knew anybody I felt so sure would walk straight into Heaven, everybody welcomin’ him, nobody fussin’ or fumin’ about his bein’ let in as Abraham Lincoln.”

Billy was tilted back in a worn high-back Windsor, I seated properly in his famous “Lincoln’s chair,” a seat too revered for anybody to stand on two legs. It was a snowy blusterly day and the talk had run on uninterruptedly from the weather to the campaign. (The year was 1896, and Billy, being a gold Democrat, was gloomy over politics.) We had finally arrived, as we always did when we met, at “when Mr. Lincoln was alive,” and Billy had been dwelling lovingly on his great friend’s gentleness, goodness, honesty.

“You know I never knew anybody,” he went on, “who seemed to me more interested in God, more curious about Him, more anxious to find out what He was drivin’ at in the world, than Mr. Lincoln. I reckon he was allus that way. There ain’t any doubt that from the time he was a little shaver he grabbed on to everything that came his way—wouldn’t let it go ’til he had it worked out, fixed in his mind so he understood it, and could tell it the way he saw it. Same about religion as everything else. Of course he didn’t get no religious teachin’ like youngsters have nowadays—Sunday schools and church regular every Sunday—lessons all worked out, and all kinds of books to explain ’em. Still I ain’t sure but what they give so many helps now, the Bible don’t get much show.

“It wa’n’t so when Mr. Lincoln was a boy. No, sir. Bible was the whole thing, and there ain’t any doubt he knew it pretty near by heart, knew it well before he ever could read, for Lincoln had a good mother, that’s sure, the kind that wanted more than anything else in the world to have her boy grow up to be a good man, and she did all she knew how to teach him right.

“I remember hearin’ him say once how she used to tell him Bible stories, teach him verses—always quotin’ ’em. I can see him now sprawlin’ on the floor in front of the fire listenin’ to Nancy Hanks tellin’ him about Moses and Jacob and Noah and all those old fellows, tellin’ him about Jesus and his dyin’ on the cross. I tell you that took hold of a little shaver, livin’ like he did, remote and not havin’ many books or places to go. Filled you chuck full of wonder and mystery, made you lie awake nights, and sometimes swelled you all up, wantin’ to be good.

“Must have come mighty hard on him havin’ her die. Think of a little codger like him seein’ his mother lyin’ dead in that shack of theirs, seein’ Tom Lincoln holdin’ his head and wonderin’ what he’d do now. Poor little tad! He must have crept up and looked at her, and gone out and throwed himself on the ground and cried himself out. Hard thing for a boy of nine to lose his mother, specially in such a place as they lived in.

“I don’t see how he could get much comfort out of what they taught about her dyin’, sayin’ it was God’s will, and hintin’ that if you’d been what you ought to be it wouldn’t have happened, never told a man that if he let a woman work herself to death it was his doin’s she died—not God’s will at all—God’s will she should live and be happy and make him happy.

“But I must say Mr. Lincoln had luck in the step-mother he got. If there ever was a good woman, it was Sarah Johnston, and she certain did her duty by Tom Lincoln’s children. ’Twa’n’t so easy either, poor as he was, the kind that never really got a hold on anything. Sarah Johnston did her part—teachin’ Mr. Lincoln just as his own mother would, and just as anxious as she’d been to have him grow up a good man. I tell you she was proud of him when he got to be President. I remember seein’ her back in ’62 or ’3 on the farm Mr. Lincoln gave her, little ways out of Charleston. One of the last things Mr. Lincoln did before he went to Washington was to go down there and see his step-mother. He knew better than anybody what she’d done for him.

“Yes, sir, the best religious teachin’ Mr. Lincoln ever got was from Tom Lincoln’s two wives. It was the kind that went deep and stuck, because he saw ’em livin’ it every day, practicin’ it on him and his sister and his father and the neighbors. Whatever else he might have seen and learnt, when he was a boy he knew what his two mothers thought religion meant, and he never got away from that.