For a few months he attended log-cabin schools with his sister Sarah, but he learned little more than his letters. It is amazing to think that this man, whose Gettysburg address is accepted as one of the noblest classics of English literature, did not have much more than six months of schooling in his whole life.
In 1816 Thomas Lincoln decided to move from Kentucky to Indiana. He built a raft, loaded it with a kit of carpenter’s tools and four hundred gallons of whiskey, and, depending on his rifle for food, floated down into the Ohio River in search of a new home. Having picked out a place in the Indiana forest, he walked home and, with a borrowed wagon and two horses, he took his wife and children into the wilderness, actually cutting a way through the woods for them.
Near Little Pigeon Creek the carpenter and his wife, assisted by young Abraham, now seven years old, built a shed of logs and poles, partly open to the weather, and here the family lived for a year. Meanwhile a patch of land was cleared, corn was planted, and as soon as a log-cabin, without windows, could be built, the Lincolns moved into it.
The forest swarmed with game and the carpenter’s rifle kept his family supplied with venison and deer hides for clothing. They relied on the rifle and the corn patch for life. Little Lincoln “climbed at night to his bed of leaves in the loft by a ladder of wooden pins driven into the logs.”
Not only were the means of life hard to get, but it was a malarial country, and in 1818 the small group of pioneers who came to dwell at Pigeon Creek near the Lincolns were attacked by a pestilence known as the milk-sickness.
In October the mother of Abraham Lincoln died. Her husband sawed a coffin out of the forest trees and buried her in a little clearing. Several months later a wandering frontier clergyman preached a sermon over her lonely, snow-covered grave.
No wonder the countenance of the great Emancipator moved all who beheld it by its deep melancholy. He knew what sorrow was forty-five years before he paced his office in the White House all night, with white face and bowed head, sorrowing over the bloody defeat of Chancellorsville, wondering whether he was to be the last President of the United States, and praying for the victory that came at Gettysburg.
All that year the sensitive boy grieved for the mother who had gone out of his life; but in time his father went back to Elizabethtown, Kentucky, where he married the widow of the town jailer, and presently a four-horse wagon creaked up to the door of the Lincoln cabin in the Indiana forest, with the bride, her son and two daughters, and a load of comfortable household goods, including a feather bed and a walnut bureau, valued at fifty dollars.
Sarah Bush Lincoln, the stepmother of Abraham Lincoln, was a woman of thrift and energy, tall, straight, fair, and a kind-hearted motherly Christian. The American people owe a debt to this noble matron who did so much to influence and develop the character of the boy who was yet to save the nation from destruction.
She was good to the Lincoln orphans whose mother lay out in the wild forest grave. She gave them warm clothes. She threw away the mat of corn husks and leaves on which they slept and replaced it with a soft feather tick. She loved little Abe, and the lonely boy returned her kindness and affection. In a primitive cabin, set in the midst of a savage country, she created that noblest and best result of a good woman’s heart and brain, a happy home.