Great suffering taught him great sympathy. His great sympathy for men gave him great influence over men. As a lonely motherless little boy living in the pitiless poverty of the backwoods he learned both humility and appreciation. Then from a gentle stepmother he learned the beauty of kindness.
As a clerk in a small store that failed, as a defeated candidate for the legislature, as Captain in the Black Hawk War, as student of Law in his leisure moments, as partner in a small store that failed, as Postmaster at the little village of New Salem, as Deputy Surveyor of Sangamon County, as successful candidate for the legislature, as member of the legislature and as country lawyer, he was learning to love his fellow men and to get along well with them, while keeping his own conscience and building a reputation for honesty. When as a member of Congress and as a successful lawyer his proved ability brings him a measure of security and comfort he is not elated. And when his fellow men, reciprocating his great love for them, and manifesting their confidence in his integrity, make him President of the Republic he still remains the humble brother of the common people.
But fate did not decree that he should enjoy the honors he had so richly deserved. The White House was not a resting place for him. In the hour of his election the Nation for which he prayed was divided and the men that he loved as brothers were rushing headlong toward fratricidal war. He who loved peace was to see no more peace except just a few hopeful days before his own tragic end. He who hated war must captain his dear people through their long and mighty struggle and share in his gentle heart their great sacrifices. As the kindly harmonizer of jealous rivals, as the unifier of a distracted people, as the sagacious leader of discordant factions, he proved his true greatness in the hours of the nation's peril. In many a grave crisis when it seemed that the Confederacy would win and the Union be lost the almost superhuman wisdom of Lincoln would see the one right way through the storm. For good reasons, the followers of Lincoln came to believe that he was being guided by God Himself to save the Union.
The genealogists of Lincoln trace his ancestry back to Virginia and to Massachusetts and to those Lincolns who came from England about 1635. The name Abraham recurs frequently among the Lincolns and our President seems to have been named after his grandfather Abraham who was killed by the Indians in Kentucky in 1778, when Thomas, the father of the President, was only ten years of age. Thus left fatherless at a tender age in a rude pioneer community, Thomas did not even learn to read. He worked about as best he could to live, became a carpenter, and in 1806 married his cousin, Nancy Hanks, the daughter of Joseph Hanks and his wife, Nannie Shipley, a sister of Thomas Lincoln's mother, Mary.
The first child of Thomas Lincoln and his wife Nancy was a daughter. Our President, the second child, was born February 12, 1809, in a log cabin, three miles from Hodgensville, then Hardin, now LaRue County, Kentucky. When little Abraham was seven years old his father moved to Indiana and took up a claim near Gentryville, Spencer County, and built a rude shelter of unhewn logs without a floor, the large opening protected only by hanging skins. In this discomfort they lived for a year, when they erected a log cabin. There was plenty of game, but otherwise the fare was very poor and the life was hard. In 1818 little Abraham's mother, delicate, refined, pathetic and too frail for such rude life, sickened and felt that the end was near. She called her little children to her bed of leaves and skins and told them to "love their kindred and worship God," and then she died and left them only the memory of her love.
Thomas Lincoln made a rude coffin himself, but there were no ceremonies at that most pathetic funeral when he laid his young wife in her desolate grave in the forest. Little Lincoln was nine years old, and the mystery of death, the pitiless winter, the lone grave, the deep forest—shivering with his sister in the cold cabin—it all made a deep impression on the sensitive boy.
Late in the year 1819 Thomas Lincoln went back to Kentucky, and there courted and married a widow named Sarah Buck Johnston, who had once been his sweetheart. She brought with her some household goods and her own three children. She dressed the forlorn little Lincolns in some of the clothing belonging to her children. She was described as tall, straight as an Indian, handsome, fair, talkative and proud. Also she had the abundant strength for hard labor. She and little Abraham learned to love each other dearly.
Abraham went to school in all less than a year, but this good stepmother encouraged him to study at home and he read every book he heard of within a circuit of many miles. He read the Bible, Aesop's Fables, Murray's English Reader, Robinson Crusoe, The Pilgrim's Progress, A History of the United States, Weem's Life of Washington and the Revised Statutes of Indiana. He studied by the fire-light and practiced writing with a pen made from a buzzard's quill dipped in ink made from brier roots. He practiced writing on the subjects of Temperance, Government, and Cruelty to Animals. The unkindness so often common to those frontier folks shocked his sensitive soul. He practiced speaking by imitating the itinerant preacher and by telling stories to any who would give him an audience. He walked fifteen miles to Boonville to attend court and listen to the lawyers.
At nineteen he was six feet and two inches tall, weighed one hundred and fifty pounds, had long arms and legs, slender body, large and awkward hands and feet, but not a large head. He is pictured as wearing coon-skin cap, linsey-woolsey shirt, and buckskin breeches that were often too short. He said that his father taught him to work but never taught him to love it—but he did work hard and without complaining. He was said to do much more work than any ordinary man at splitting rails, chopping, mowing, ploughing, doing everything that he was asked to do with all his might. It was at this age that he went on the first trip with a flat boat down to New Orleans. This was an interesting adventure; and there had been sorrows, also; his sister Sarah had married and died in child-birth.
In the spring of 1830 the roving spirit of Thomas Lincoln felt the call of the West and they set out for Illinois. John Hanks met them five miles northwest of Decatur in Macon County, where on a bluff overlooking the muddy Sangamon they built a cabin, split rails, fenced fifteen acres and broke the prairie. Young Lincoln was twenty-one and free, but he remained at home during the summer, helping his father and his devoted step-mother to establish their new home. The following winter he split the historic rails for Mrs. Nancy Miller—"four hundred for every yard of jeans dyed with walnut juice necessary to make him a pair of trowsers."