I must add a further word about the custom of deferred funerals. Although the burial was conducted without religious service, it was not permitted to be celebrated in neglect. The news that a man was dying would bring the sympathetic neighbors from miles around, and horses would be tied up the creek and down while people waited in friendly sorrow and conversed in hushed voices in the presence of the solemn dignity of death. That night a group of neighbors would "sit up" with the dead, and keep the family awake with frequent and lugubrious song.
Next day the grave must be dug; and that required a considerable part of the male population of the settlement. If only two or three men came in the morning they would sit and wait for others and go home for the dinner and come back. It thus has happened more than once in my experience that we have brought the body to the burial and have had to wait an hour or more in sun or wind for the finishing of the digging of the grave.
I remember well an instance in which death occurred in the family of one of the county officials. His wife died suddenly, and under sad conditions. I mounted my horse and rode four or five miles to his home. I hitched my horse to the low-swinging limb of a beech tree and threaded my way among other horses into the yard, which was filled with men, and up to the porch, which was crowded with women. Passing inside, I spoke my word of sympathy to the grief-stricken husband and his children. Then I passed out into the yard and moved from group to group among the men. Presently a neighbor of the sorrowing husband approached me and asked me to step aside with him for private converse. This was strictly in accordance with the custom of the country, and I walked with him behind the corn-crib. He said to me: "Mr. McCune"—naming the bereaved husband—"wants to know whether you have come here as a preacher or as a neighbor?" I answered, "Tell him that I have come as a neighbor." With this word he returned to the house. Up on the hillside I could see the leisurely movements of the grave-diggers. From the shed behind the house came the rhythmic tap of the hammer driving in the tacks that fastened the white glazed muslin lining of the home-made coffin. We had some little time still to wait before either the grave or the coffin would be finished. Presently the neighbor returned to where I waited behind the corn-crib and brought with him Mr. McCune. The latter shook my hand warmly and said, in substance: "I appreciate your coming and the respect which you thus show for me and for my dead wife. I was glad to see you come when you entered the house, but was a little embarrassed because I knew it to be your custom to preach the funeral sermon at the time of the burial. I have no objection to that custom; and while we are Baptists [he pronounced it Babtist, and so I have no doubt did Thomas Lincoln], there is no man whom I would rather have preach my wife's sermon than you. We shall undoubtedly have a Baptist preacher when the time for the funeral comes, but I hope you also will be present and participate in the service. But it is not our custom to hold the service at the time of the burial, and we have distant friends who should be notified. Moreover, there is another consideration. I have been twice married, and I never yet have got round to it to have my first wife's funeral preached. It seems to me that it would be a discourtesy to my first wife's memory to have my second wife's sermon preached before the first. What I now plan to do is to have the two funerals at once, and I hope you will be present and participate."
I need only add that before I departed from that region he was comfortably married to his third wife, not having gotten round to it to have the funeral sermon of either of his first two wives. I am unable to say whether when he finally got round to it there was any increase in the number. It never was my fortune to conduct the joint funeral of two wives of the same man at the same time; but I have more than once been present where a second wife was prominent among the mourners; and I sometimes believed her to be sincerely sorry that the first wife was dead.
It is not easy for people who have not lived amid these conditions and at the same time to have known other conditions to estimate aright the religious life of a backwoods community. Morse, whose biography of Lincoln is to be rated high, is completely unable to view this situation from other than his New England standpoint. He says:
"The family was imbued with a peculiar, intense, but unenlightened form of Christianity, mingled with curious superstition, prevalent in the backwoods, and begotten by the influence of the vast wilderness upon illiterate men of a rude native force. It interests scholars to trace the evolution of religious faiths, but it might not be less suggestive to study the retrogression of religion into superstition. Thomas Lincoln was as restless in matters of creed as of residence, and made various changes in both during his life. These were, however, changes without improvement, and, so far as he was concerned, his son Abraham might have grown up to be what he himself was contented to remain" (I, 10).
This criticism is partly just, but not wholly so. There was superstition enough in the backwoods religion, and Abraham Lincoln never wholly divested himself of it; but it was not all superstition. There was a very real religion on Pigeon Creek.
In like manner, also, it is difficult for Lincoln's biographers to strike an even balance between adoring idealization of log-cabin life and horrified exaggeration of its squalor. Here again Morse is a classic example of the attempt to be so honest about Lincoln's poverty as to miss some part of the truth about it.
The Lincoln family was poor, even as poverty was estimated in the backwoods. Lincoln himself was painfully impressed with the memory of it, and Herndon and Lamon, who understood it better than most of his biographers, felt both for themselves and for Lincoln the pathos of his descent from "the poor whites"; but there is no evidence that Lincoln felt this seriously at the time. His melancholy came later, and was not the direct heritage of his childhood poverty. Life had its joys for families such as his. Poverty was accepted as in some sort the common lot, and also as a temporary condition out of which everybody expected sometime to emerge. Meantime the boy Abraham Lincoln had not only the joy of going to mill and to meeting, but also the privilege of an occasional frolic. We know of one or two boisterous weddings where he behaved himself none too well. Besides these there were other unrecorded social events on Pigeon Creek where the platter rolled merrily and he had to untangle his long legs from under the bench and move quickly when his number was called or pay a forfeit and redeem it. He played "Skip-to-My-Lou" and "Old Bald Eagle, Sail Around," and "Thus the Farmer Sows His Seed," and he moved around the room singing about the millwheel and had to grab quickly when partners were changed or stand in the middle and be ground between the millstones. As large a proportion of people's known wants were satisfied on Pigeon Creek as on some fashionable boulevards. We need not seek to hide his poverty nor idealize it unduly; neither is it necessary to waste overmuch of pity upon people who did not find their own condition pitiable.