"Abe wasn't in early life a religious man. He was a moral man strictly.... In after life he became more religious; but the Bible puzzled him, especially the miracles" (Every-Day Life of Lincoln, p. 54).
"'Religious songs did not appear to suit him at all,' says Dennis Hanks; but of profane ballads and amorous ditties he knew the words of a vast number.
"Another was:
'Hail Columbia, happy land!
If you ain't drunk, I'll be damned,'
a song which Dennis thinks should be warbled only in the 'fields;' and tells us they knew and enjoyed all such songs as this'" (Lamon's Life of Lincoln, pp. 58, 59).
The fitness of the above coarse travesty to be warbled, even in the fields, may well be doubted. Lamon would hardly have recorded it, and I certainly should not quote it, but for the fact that it strikingly illustrates one phase of Lincoln's "youthful piety."
Among the many Christian hymns which Lincoln parodied, Mr. Hanks recalls the following:
"How tedious and tasteless the hours."
"When I can read my title clear."
"Oh! to grace how great a debtor!"
"Come, thou fount of every blessing."
MRS. MATILDA MOORE.
Lincoln's first husband was named Johnston. By him she had three children, a son and two daughters. The latter, like their mother, developed into noble specimens of womanhood; and both loved Lincoln as tenderly as though he had been their own brother. The elder was married to Dennis Hanks; the younger, Matilda, married Lincoln's cousin, Levi Hall, and, after his death, a gentleman named Moore.