I think they lived on the farm four years after he was born. Another boy was born in Hodgensville, or, I should say, buried there. The sister, Sally, was older than Abe, I think. I think the paper now owned by Henry Cleveland is the “marriage lines” written by Rev. Jesse Head, a well-known Methodist preacher. I do not think the old Bible it was found in was that of Tom Lincoln. It would cost too much for him. All of the records in it were those of the father’s family—the John M. Hewetts—of the wife of Dr. Theodore S. Bell. Dr. Bell was only about twenty years younger than I am, and probably got the certificate in 1858 or 1860, when assertions were made that Tom Lincoln and Nancy Hanks were not married when Abe was born.
He was reputed to have been born February 12, 1809, and I see no good reason to dispute it. Sally, I am sure, was the first child, and Nancy was a fresh and good-looking girl—I should say past twenty. Nancy lived with the Sparrow family a good bit. It was likely Tom had the family Bible from Virginia, through his father, called Abraham Linkhorn. His brothers, however, were older—if they were brothers, and not uncles, as some say. I was hunting roots for my medicines, and just went to the wedding to get a good supper, and got it.
Bibles cost as much as the spinning-wheel, or loom, or rifle, and were imported in the main. A favorite with the Methodists was Fletcher’s, or one he wrote a preface for. Preachers used it, and had no commentaries. A book dedicated to King James or any other king did not take well in Revolutionary times. The Bibles I used to see had no printed records or blanks, but a lot of fine linen hand-made paper would be bound in front or back. On this, family history and land matters were written out fully like a book. Some had fifty pages. The court-houses even were made of logs, and the meeting-houses too, if they had any. No registers were kept as in English parish churches, and are not yet. Before a license could be had, a bond and security was taken of the bridegroom, and the preacher had to return to the court all marriages of the year. This was often a long list, and at times papers were lost or forgotten, but not often. The “marriage lines” given by the preacher to the parties were very important in case the records were burned up by accident. Such is the paper that Henry Cleveland has shown to me. The ring was not often used, as so few had one to use. The Methodist Church discipline forbid “the putting on of gold or costly apparel,” and I think a preacher with a gold watch—if not an inherited one—would have been dismissed. A preacher that married was “located,” and that ended his itinerancy in the Methodist Church. The Presbyterians were educated and married; Baptists not educated.
Tom Lincoln was a carpenter, and a good one for those days, when a cabin was built mainly with the axe, and not a nail or bolt or hinge in it, only leathers and pins to the door, and no glass, except in watches and spectacles and bottles. Tom had the best set of tools in what was then and now Washington County. Larue County, where the farm was settled, was then Hardin.
Jesse Head, the good Methodist preacher that married them, was also a carpenter or cabinet-maker by trade, and as he was then a neighbor, they were good friends. He had a quarrel with the bishops, and was not an itinerant for several years, but an editor, and county judge afterwards, in Harrodsburg. Mr. Henry Cleveland has his commission from Governor Isaac Shelby.
Many great men of the South and North were then opposed to slavery, mainly because the new negroes were as wild as the Indians, and might prove as dangerous. Few of the whites could read, and yet Pope and Dryden and Shakespeare were as well known as Bunyan’s “Pilgrim’s Progress” and Baxter’s “Saints’ Rest.” Some were educated in Virginia and North Carolina before they came, and these, when they became teachers, wrote out their school-books entirely by hand.
Thomas Lincoln, like his son after him, had a notion that fortunes could be made by trips to New Orleans by flatboat. This was dangerous, from snags and whirlpools in the rivers, from Indians, and even worse—pirates of the French, Canadians, and half-breeds. Steam was unknown, and the flats had to be sold in New Orleans, as they could not be rowed back against the currents. The neighbors joked Tom for building his boat too high and narrow, from an idea he had about speed, that has since been adopted by ocean steamships. But he lacked in ballast. He loaded her up with deer and bear hams and buffalo, which last was then not so plenty for meat or hides as when the Boone brothers came in. Besides, he had wax, for bees seemed to follow the white people, and he had wolf and coon and mink and beaver skins, gentian root (that folks then called “gensang” or “‘sang”), nuts, honey, peach-brandy and whiskey, and jeans woven by his wife and Sally Bush, that he married after Nancy died. Some said she died of heart trouble, from slanders about her and old Abe Enloe, called Inlow, while her Abe, named for the pioneer Abraham Linkhorn, was still little. But I am ahead of my story, for Nancy had just got married where I was telling it, and the flatboat and Sally Bush Lincoln come in before he goes over to what people called “Indiany.” I will finish that, and then go back.
He started down Knob Creek when it was flush with rains; but the leaves held water like a sponge, and the ground was shaded with big trees and papaw and sassafras thickets and “cain,” as Bible-read folks spelt the cane, and streams didn’t dry up in summer like they do now. When he got to the Ohio it was flush, too, and full of whirlpools and snags. He had his tool-chest along, intending to stop and work in Indiana and take down another boat. But he never got to the Mississippi with that, for it upset, and he only saved his chest and part of his load because he was near to the Indiana shore. He stored what he saved under bark, and came home a-foot, and in debt to neighbors who had helped him. But people never pressed a man that lost by Indians or water.
Now I go back for a spell. Thomas and Nancy both could read and write, and little Abe went to school about a year. He was eight years old at the time of the accident to Tom Lincoln’s down-the-river venture. Thomas and Nancy were good common people, not above nor below their neighbors, and I did not take much notice of them, because there was no likelihood that their wedding would mean more than other people’s did.
The preacher Jesse Head often talked to me on religion and politics, for I always liked the Methodists. I have thought it might have been as much from his free-spoken opinions as from Henry Clay’s American-African colonization scheme in 1817, that I lost a likely negro man, who was leader of my musicians. It is said that Tom Corwin met him in Ohio on his way to Canada, and asked if I was along. The boy said no, he was going for his freedom. Governor Corwin said he was a fool; he had never been whipped or abused, but dressed like a white man, with the best to eat, and that hundreds of white people would be glad of such a good place, with no care, but cared for.