Transcriber’s Note:

The cover image was created by the transcriber and is placed in the public domain.

THE EARLIEST PORTRAIT OF ABRAHAM LINCOLN.—HITHERTO UNPUBLISHED.
From a carbon enlargement, by Sherman and McHugh, New York, of a daguerreotype in the possession of the Hon. Robert T. Lincoln, and first published in the McClure’s Life of Lincoln. It is generally believed that Lincoln was not over thirty-five years old when this daguerreotype was taken, and it is certainly true that it shows the face of Lincoln as a young man. It is probably earlier by six or seven years, at least, than any other existing portrait of Lincoln.

THE EARLY LIFE
OF
ABRAHAM LINCOLN
CONTAINING MANY UNPUBLISHED DOCUMENTS AND UNPUBLISHED REMINISCENCES OF LINCOLN’S EARLY FRIENDS

BY

IDA M. TARBELL

ASSISTED BY

J. McCAN DAVIS

WITH 160 ILLUSTRATIONS, INCLUDING

20 PORTRAITS OF LINCOLN

NEW YORK

S. S. McCLURE, Limited

LONDON

1896

[All rights reserved]

Copyright, 1895, by

S. S. McCLURE, Limited

Copyright, 1896, by

S. S. McCLURE, Limited

Press of J. J. Little & Co.

Astor Place, New York

INTRODUCTION.

It has been only within the last ten years that the descent of Abraham Lincoln from the Lincolns of Hingham, Massachusetts, has been established with any degree of certainty. The satisfactory proof of his lineage is a matter of great importance. In a way it explains Lincoln. It shows that he came of a family endowed with the spirit of adventure, of daring, of patriotism, and of thrift; that his ancestors were men who for nearly two hundred years before he was born were active and well-to-do citizens of Massachusetts, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, or Virginia, men who everywhere played their parts well. Abraham Lincoln was but the flowering of generations of upright, honorable men.

The first we learn of the Lincolns in this country is between the years 1635 and 1645, when there came to the town of Hingham, Massachusetts, from the west of England, eight men of that name. Three of these, Samuel, Daniel, and Thomas, were brothers. Their relationship, if any, to the other Lincolns who came over from the same part of the country at about the same time is not clear. Two of these men, Daniel and Thomas, died without heirs; but Samuel left a large family, including four sons. Among the descendants of Samuel Lincoln’s sons were many good citizens and prominent public officers. One was a member of the Boston Tea Party, and served as a captain of artillery in the War of the Revolution. Others were privates in that war. Three served on the brig “Hazard” during the Revolution. Levi Lincoln, a great-great-grandson of Samuel, born in Hingham in 1749, and graduated from Harvard, was one of the minute-men at Cambridge immediately after the battle of Lexington, a delegate to the convention in Cambridge for framing a State Constitution, and in 1781 was elected to the Continental Congress, but declined to serve. He was a member of the House of Representatives and of the Senate of Massachusetts, and was appointed Attorney-General of the United States by Jefferson; for a few months preceding the arrival of Madison he was Secretary of State, and in 1807 he was elected Lieutenant-Governor of Massachusetts. In 1811 he was appointed Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court by President Madison, an office which he declined. From the close of the Revolutionary War he was considered the head of the Massachusetts bar.

His eldest son, Levi Lincoln, born in 1782, had also an honorable public career. He was a Harvard graduate, became Governor of the State of Massachusetts, and held other important public offices. He received the degree of LL.D. in 1824 from Williams College, and from Harvard in 1826.

Another son of Levi Lincoln, Enoch Lincoln, served in Congress from 1818 to 1826. He became Governor of Maine in 1827, holding the position until his death in 1829. Enoch Lincoln was a writer of more than ordinary ability.

The fourth son of Samuel Lincoln was called Mordecai (President Lincoln descended from him, being his great-great-great-grandson). Mordecai Lincoln was a rich “blacksmith,” as an iron-worker was called in those days, and the proprietor of numerous iron-works, saw-mills, and grist-mills, which with a goodly amount of money he distributed at his death among his children and grandchildren. Two of his children, Mordecai and Abraham, did not remain in Massachusetts, but removed to New Jersey, and thence to Pennsylvania, where both became rich, and dying, left fine estates to their children. Their descendants in Pennsylvania have continued to this day to be well-to-do people, some of them having taken prominent positions in public affairs. Abraham Lincoln, of Berks County, who was born in 1736 and died in 1806, filled many public offices, being a member of the General Assembly of Pennsylvania, of the State Convention of 1787, and of the State Constitutional Convention in 1790.

One of the sons of this second Mordecai, John (the great-grandfather of President Lincoln), received from his father “three hundred acres of land, lying in the Jerseys.” But evidently he did not care to cultivate his inheritance, for about 1758 he removed to Virginia. “Virginia” John, as this member of the family was called, had five sons, all of whom he established well. One of these sons, Jacob, entered the Revolutionary Army and served as a lieutenant at Yorktown.

The settlers of western Virginia were all in those days more or less under the fascination of the adventurous spirit which was opening up the West, and three of “Virginia” John’s sons decided to try their fortunes in the new country. One went to Tennessee, two to Kentucky. The first to go to Kentucky was Abraham (the grandfather of the President). He was already a well-to-do man when he decided to leave Virginia, for he sold his estate for some seventeen thousand dollars. A portion of this money he invested in land-office treasury warrants.

On emigrating to Kentucky he bought one thousand seven hundred acres of land. But almost at the beginning of his life in the new country, while still a comparatively young man, he was slain by the Indians. His estate seems to have been inherited by his eldest son, Mordecai, who afterward became prominent in the State; was a great Indian fighter, a famous story-teller, and, according to the traditions of his descendants, a member of the Kentucky legislature. This last item we have not, however, been able to verify. We have had the fullest collection of journals of the Kentucky legislature which exists, that of Dr. R. T. Durrett of Louisville, Kentucky, carefully searched, but no mention has been found in them of Mordecai Lincoln.

It is with the brother of Mordecai, the youngest son of the pioneer Abraham, we have to do, a boy who was left an orphan at ten years of age, and who in that rude time had to depend upon his own exertions. We find from newly discovered documents that he was the owner of a farm at twenty-five years of age, and from the contemporary evidence that he was a very good carpenter; from a document we have discovered in Kentucky we learn that he was even appointed a road surveyor, in 1816. We have found his Bible, a very expensive book at that time; we have also found that he had credit, and was able to purchase on credit a pair of suspenders costing one dollar and fifty cents, and we have learned from the recollections of Christopher Columbus Graham that in marrying the niece of his employer he secured a very good wife. The second child of Thomas Lincoln was Abraham Lincoln, who became the sixteenth President of the United States and the foremost man of his age.

The career of Abraham Lincoln is more easily understood in view of his ancestry. The story of his life, which is here told more fully and consecutively, and in many points, both minor and important, we believe more exactly than ever before, bears out our belief that Abraham Lincoln inherited from his ancestry traits and qualities of mind which made him a remarkable child and a young man of unusual promise and power. So far from his later career being unaccounted for in his origin and early history, it is as fully accounted for as in the case of any man.

So far as possible, the statements in this work are based on original documents. This explains why in several cases the dates differ from those commonly accepted. Thus the year of the death of the grandfather of Abraham Lincoln is made 1788, instead of 1784, because of the recently discovered inventory of his estate. The impression given of Thomas Lincoln is different from that of other biographies, because we believe the new documents we have found and the new contemporary evidence we have unearthed, justify us in it. We have not made it a sign of shiftlessness that Thomas Lincoln dwelt in a log cabin at a date when there was scarcely anything else in the State.

An effort has been made, too, to give what we believe to be a truer color to the fourteen years the Lincolns spent in southern Indiana. The poverty and the wretchedness of their life has been insisted upon until it is popularly supposed that Abraham Lincoln came from a home similar to those of the “poor white trash” of the South. There is no attempt made here to deny the poverty of the Lincoln household, but it is insisted that this poverty was a temporary condition incident to pioneer life and the unfortunate death of Thomas Lincoln’s father when he was but a boy. Thomas Lincoln’s restless efforts to better his condition by leaving Kentucky for Indiana in 1816, and afterwards, when he had discovered that his farm in Spencer County was barren, by trying his fortunes in Illinois, are sufficient proof that he had none of the indolent acceptance of fate which characterizes the “poor whites.”

In telling the story of the six years of Lincoln’s life in New Salem, we have attempted to give a consecutive narrative and to show the exact sequence of events, which has never been done before. We have shown, what seems to us very suggestive, the persistency and courage with which he seized every opportunity and carried on simultaneously his business as storekeeper and postmaster and surveyor and at the same time studied law. To establish the order of events in this New Salem period, the records of the county have been carefully examined, and many new documents concerning Lincoln have been found in this search, including his first vote, his first official document (an election return), and several new surveying plats. The latter show Lincoln to have been much more active as a surveyor than has commonly been supposed. We have also brought to light the grammar Lincoln studied, with a sentence written on the title page in Lincoln’s own hand.

For the first time, too, we publish documents signed by Lincoln as a postmaster. These two letters are also earlier than any other published letters of Lincoln. Many minor errors have been corrected, such as the real number of votes which he received on his first election to the legislature, and the times and places of his mustering out and into service in the Black Hawk War.

The number of illustrations in the work is many times greater than ever has before appeared in connection with the early life of Lincoln. The scenes of his life in Kentucky, Indiana, and Illinois have been photographed especially for us, and we have collected from various sources numbers of pictures illustrating the primitive surroundings of his boyhood and young manhood, together with portraits of many of his companions in those days. Our object in giving such a profusion of homely scenes and faces has been to make a history of Lincoln’s early life in pictures. We believe that one examining these prints independently of the text would have a good idea of Lincoln’s condition from 1809 to 1836.

By far the most important of the illustrations of the work is the collection of portraits. This is the first systematic effort to make a complete collection of portraits of the great President. Our success so far encourages us in believing that before we end our work on Lincoln we shall have such a collection. Already we have some seventy-five different portraits. Of these, the great majority are photographs, ambrotypes, and daguerreotypes. It was Mr. Lincoln’s custom, after the introduction of photography into Illinois, to sit for his picture whenever he visited a town to make a speech. This picture he usually gave to his host; the result was that there now remain, scattered among his old friends, a large number of interesting portraits, of which nobody but the owners knew until we undertook this work. Thus of the twenty portraits which appear in this volume, twelve have never before been published anywhere, so far as we know.

It has been through the generosity and courtesy of collectors and of our correspondents and readers that it has been possible for us to gather so great a number of portraits and documents. On all sides collections have been put freely at our service, and numbers of our readers have sent us unpublished ambrotypes, daguerreotypes, and photographs, glad, as they have written us, to aid in completing a Lincoln portrait gallery. It is not possible to mention here the names of all those to whom we are indebted, not only for portraits but for documents and manuscripts, but credit is given in inserting the material furnished.

Our effort has been to give in both text and notes as exact and full statements as the information we have been able to gather permitted us to do. If any reader of this volume discovers errors we shall be glad to receive corrections.

CONTENTS.

LINCOLN IN 1854.—HITHERTO UNPUBLISHED.
From a photograph owned by Mr. George Schneider of Chicago, Illinois, former editor of the “Staats Zeitung,” the most influential anti-slavery German newspaper of the West. Mr. Schneider first met Mr. Lincoln in 1853, in Springfield. “He was already a man necessary to know,” says Mr. Schneider. In 1854 Mr. Lincoln was in Chicago, and Mr. Isaac N. Arnold, a prominent lawyer and politician of Illinois, invited Mr. Schneider to dine with Mr. Lincoln. After dinner, as the gentlemen were going down town, they stopped at an itinerant photograph gallery, and Mr. Lincoln had the above picture taken for Mr. Schneider. The newspaper he holds in his hands is the “Press and Tribune.”

LINCOLN IN 1863.
From a photograph by Brady, taken in Washington.

THE EARLY LIFE

OF

ABRAHAM LINCOLN.

CHAPTER I.
THE ORIGIN OF THE LINCOLN FAMILY.—THE LINCOLNS IN KENTUCKY.

The family from which Abraham Lincoln descended came to America from Norfolk, England, in 1637. A brief table[^[1]] will show at a glance the line of descent:

Samuel Lincoln, born in 1620. Emigrated from Norfolk County, England, to Hingham, Massachusetts, in 1637. His fourth son was

Mordecai Lincoln, born in 1667. His eldest son was

Mordecai Lincoln, born in 1686. Emigrated to New Jersey and Pennsylvania, 1714. His eldest son was

John Lincoln, born before 1725. In 1758 went to Virginia. His third son was

Abraham Lincoln, date of birth uncertain. In 1780, or thereabouts, emigrated to Kentucky. His third son was

Thomas Lincoln, born in 1778, whose first son was

Abraham Lincoln,

Sixteenth President of the United States.

LAND WARRANT ISSUED TO ABRAHAM LINCOLN, GRANDFATHER OF PRESIDENT LINCOLN.
From the original, owned by R. T. Durrett, LL.D., of Louisville, Kentucky. The land records of Kentucky show that Abraham Lincoln entered two tracts of land when in Kentucky in the spring and summer of 1780. These entries, furnished us by Dr. Durrett, are as follows:
May 29, 1780.—“Abraham Linkhorn enters four hundred acres of land on Treasury Warrant, laying on Floyd’s Fork, about two miles above Tice’s Fork, beginning at a Sugar Tree S. B., thence east three hundred poles, then north, to include a small improvement.”—Land Register, page 107.
June 7, 1780.—“Abraham Linkhorn enters eight hundred acres upon Treasury Warrant, about six miles below Green River Lick, including an improvement made by Jacob Gum and Owen Diver.”—Page 126.
The first tract of land was surveyed May 7, 1785 (see page [23]), and the second on October 12, 1784. In 1782 he entered a third tract of land, a record of which is found in Daniel Boone’s field-book. This entry reads: “Abraham Lincoln enters five hundred acres of land on a Treasury Warrant, No. 5994, beginning opposite Charles Yancey’s upper line, on the south side of the river, running south two hundred poles, then up the river for quantity; December 11, 1782.” This is supposed by some authorities to be a tract of five hundred acres of land in Campbell County, surveyed and patented in Abraham Lincoln’s name, but after his death. The spelling of the name Linkhorn instead of Lincoln, as it is invariably in other records of the family, has caused some to doubt that the Treasury warrant above was really issued to the grandfather of the President. The family traditions, however, all say that the elder Abraham owned a tract on Floyd’s Fork. The misspelling and mispronunciation of the name Lincoln is common in Kentucky, Indiana, and Illinois. The writer of this note has frequently heard persons in Illinois speak of “Abe Linkhorn” and “Abe Linkern.”

FIELD NOTES OF SURVEY OF FOUR HUNDRED ACRES OF LAND OWNED BY ABRAHAM LINCOLN, GRANDFATHER OF PRESIDENT LINCOLN.
From the record of surveys in the surveyor’s office of Jefferson County, Kentucky, Book B., page 60.

HUGHES STATION, ON FLOYD’S CREEK, JEFFERSON COUNTY, KENTUCKY, WHERE ABRAHAM LINCOLN, GRANDFATHER OF THE PRESIDENT, LIVED.—NOW FIRST PUBLISHED.
From the original, owned by R. T. Durrett, LL.D., of Louisville, Kentucky. “The first inhabitants of Kentucky,” says Dr. Durrett, “on account of the hostility of the Indians, lived in what were called forts. They were simple rows of the conventional log cabins of the day, built on four sides of a square or parallelogram, which remained as a court, or open space, between them. This open space served as a playground, a muster field, a corral for domestic animals, and a store-house for implements. The cabins which formed the fort’s walls were dwelling-houses for the people.” At Hughes Station, on Floyd’s Creek, lived Abraham Lincoln and his family. One morning in 1788—the date of the death of Abraham Lincoln is placed in 1784, 1786, and 1788 by different authorities; the inventory of his estate (page [28]) is dated 1788; for this reason we adopt 1788—the pioneer Lincoln and his three sons, Mordecai, Josiah, and Thomas, were in their clearing, when a shot from an Indian killed the father. The two elder sons ran for help, the youngest remaining by the dead body. The Indian ran to the side of his victim, and was just seizing the son Thomas, when Mordecai, who had reached the cabin and secured a rifle, shot through a loophole in the logs and killed the Indian. It was this tragedy, it is said, that made Mordecai Lincoln one of the most relentless Indian haters in Kentucky.

For our present purpose it is not necessary to examine the lives of these ancestors farther back than the grandfather, Abraham Lincoln, who has been supposed to have been born in Virginia in 1760. A consideration of the few facts we have of his early life shows clearly that this date is wrong. It is known that in 1773 Abraham Lincoln’s father, John Lincoln, conveyed to his son a tract of two hundred and ten acres of land in Virginia, which he hardly would have done if the boy had been but thirteen years of age. We know, too, that in 1780 Abraham Lincoln had a wife and five children, the youngest of whom was at least two years old. Evidently he must have been over twenty years of age, and have been born before 1760. Probably, too, his birthplace was Pennsylvania, whence his father moved into Virginia about 1758.

Daniel Boone

RELICS OF DANIEL BOONE.
Photographed for this work from the originals, in the collection of pioneer relics owned by R. T. Durrett, LL.D., of Louisville, Kentucky. The articles are a rifle, scalping-knife, powder-horn, tomahawk, and hunting-shirt. Dr. Durrett has all the documents needful to establish the authenticity of each of these articles. They unquestionably were used by Boone through a long period of hunting and Indian stalking; all of the articles are well preserved, and even the leather coat is still fit for service. The rifle, says Dr. Durrett, is as true as it ever was. In this same collection are a large number of similar relics of other Kentucky pioneers.

Abraham Lincoln was a farmer, and, by 1780, a rich one for his time. This we know from the fact that in 1780 he sold a tract of two hundred and forty acres of land for “five thousand pounds of current money of Virginia;” a sum equal to about $17,000 at that date. This sale was made, presumably, because the owner wished to move to Kentucky. He and his family had for several generations back been friends of the Boones. The spell the adventurous spirit of Daniel Boone cast over all his friends, Abraham Lincoln felt; and in 1780, soon after selling his Virginia estate, he visited Kentucky, and entered two large tracts of land. Some months later he moved with his family from Virginia into Kentucky.

Abraham Lincoln was ambitious to become a landed proprietor in the new country, and he entered a generous amount of land—four hundred acres on Long Run, in Jefferson County; eight hundred acres on Green River, near Green River Lick; five hundred acres in Campbell County. He settled near the first tract, where he undertook to clear a farm. It was a dangerous task, for the Indians were still troublesome, and the settlers, for protection, were forced to live in or near forts or stations. In 1784, when John Filson published his “History of Kentucky,” though there was a population of thirty thousand in the territory, there were but eighteen houses outside of the stations. Of these stations, or stockades, there were but fifty-two. According to the tradition in the Lincoln family, Abraham Lincoln lived in one of these stockades.

LONG RUN BAPTIST MEETING-HOUSE.
From the original drawing, owned by R. T. Durrett, LL.D., of Louisville, Kentucky. This meeting-house was built on the land Abraham Lincoln, grandfather of the President, was clearing when killed by Indians. It was erected about 1797.

All went well with him and his family until 1788. Then, one day, while he and his three sons were at work in their clearing, an unexpected Indian shot killed the father. His death was a terrible blow to the family. The large tracts of land which he had entered were still wild, and his personal property was necessarily small. The difficulty of reaching the country at that date, as well as its wild condition, made it impracticable for even a wealthy pioneer to own more stock or household furniture than was absolutely essential. Abraham Lincoln was probably as well provided with personal property as most of his neighbors, and much better than many. He had, for a pioneer, an unusual amount of stock, of farming implements, and of tools; and his cabin contained comforts which were rare at that date. The inventory of his estate, recently found at Bardstown, Kentucky, and here published for the first time, gives a clearer idea of the life of the pioneer Lincoln, and of the condition in which his wife and children were left, than any description could do:

INVENTORY OF ABRAHAM LINCOLN’S ESTATE.[^[2]]—NOW FIRST PUBLISHED.

“At the meeting of the Nelson County Court, October 10, 1788, present Benjamin Pope, James Rogers, Gabriel Cox, and James Baird, on the motion of John Coldwell, he was appointed administrator of the goods and chattels of Abraham Lincoln, and gave bond in one thousand pounds, with Richard Parker security.

“At the same time John Alvary, Peter Syburt, Christopher Boston, and William [John (?)] Stuck, or any three of them, were appointed appraisers.

“March 10, 1789, the appraisers made the following return:

Peter Syburt,

Christopher Boston,

John Stuck.”

THE REV. JESSE HEAD.
From an original drawing in the possession of R. T. Durrett, LL.D., of Louisville, Kentucky. The Rev. Jesse Head was a Methodist preacher of Washington County, Kentucky, who married Thomas Lincoln and Nancy Hanks. Christopher Columbus Graham, who was at the wedding, and who knew Mr. Head well, says: “Jesse Head, the good Methodist preacher who 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 an itinerant for several years, but an editor and county judge afterwards in Harrodsburg.... 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.... But Jesse Head never encouraged any runaway, nor had any ‘underground railroad.’ He only talked freely and boldly, and had plenty of true Southern men with him, such as Clay.”—See Appendix.

Soon after the death of Abraham Lincoln, his widow moved from Jefferson County to Washington County. The eldest son, Mordecai, who inherited nearly all of the large estate, became a well-to-do and popular citizen. The deed-book of Washington County still contains a number of records of lands bought and sold by him. At one time he was sheriff of his county, and, again, its representative in the legislature of the State. Mordecai Lincoln is remembered especially for his sporting tastes and his bitter hatred of the Indians. General U. F. Linder of Illinois, who, as a boy, lived near Mordecai Lincoln in Kentucky, says: “I knew him from my boyhood, and he was naturally a man of considerable genius; he was a man of great drollery, and it would almost make you laugh to look at him. I never saw but one other man whose quiet, droll laugh excited in me the same disposition to laugh, and that was Artemus Ward. He was quite a story-teller. He was an honest man, as tender-hearted as a woman, and, to the last degree, charitable and benevolent.

“Lincoln had a very high opinion of his uncle, and on one occasion said to me: ‘Linder, I have often said that Uncle Mord had run off with all the talents of the family.’

“Old Mord, as we sometimes called him, had been in his younger days a very stout man, and was quite fond of playing a game of fisticuffs with any one who was noted as a champion. His sons and daughters were not talented like the old man, but were very sensible people, noted for their honesty and kindness of heart.” Mordecai remained in Kentucky until late in life, when he removed to Hancock County, Illinois.

MARRIAGE BOND OF THOMAS LINCOLN.
From a tracing of the original, made by Henry Whitney Cleveland.

Of Josiah, the second son, we know very little more than that the records show that he owned and sold land. He left Kentucky when a young man, to settle on the Blue River, in Harrison County, Indiana, and there he died. The two daughters married into well-known Kentucky families: the elder, Mary, marrying Ralph Crume; the younger, Nancy, William Brumfield.

MARRIAGE CERTIFICATE OF THOMAS LINCOLN AND NANCY HANKS.—HITHERTO UNPUBLISHED.
From the original, in the possession of Henry Whitney Cleveland of Louisville, Kentucky. This interesting document, discovered by Mr. Cleveland, and published for the first time in this biography, completes the list of documentary evidence of the marriage of Thomas Lincoln and Nancy Hanks. The bond given by Thomas Lincoln and the returns of Jesse Head, the officiating clergyman, were discovered some years ago, but the marriage certificate was unknown until recently discovered by Mr. Cleveland.

THOMAS LINCOLN’S BOYHOOD AND YOUNG MANHOOD.

The death of Abraham Lincoln was saddest for the youngest of the children, a lad of ten years at the time, named Thomas, for it turned him adrift to become a “wandering laboring-boy” before he had learned even to read. Thomas seems not to have inherited any of the father’s estate, and from the first to have been obliged to shift for himself. For several years he supported himself by rough farm work of all kinds, learning, in the meantime, the trade of carpenter and cabinet-maker. According to one of his acquaintances, “Tom had the best set of tools in what was then and now Washington County,” and was “a good carpenter for those days, when a cabin was built mainly with the axe, and not a nail or bolt-hinge in it; only leathers and pins to the door, and no glass, except in watches and spectacles and bottles.”[^[3]] Although a skilful craftsman for his day, he never became a thrifty or ambitious man. “He would work energetically enough when a job was brought to him, but he would never seek a job.” But if Thomas Lincoln plied his trade spasmodically, he shared the pioneer’s love for land, for when but twenty-five years old, and still without the responsibility of a family, he bought a farm in Hardin County, Kentucky. None of his biographers have ever called attention to this fact, if they knew it. A search made for this work in the records of Hardin County first revealed it to us, and we cannot but regard it as of importance, proving as it does that Thomas Lincoln was not the shiftless man he has hitherto been pictured. Certainly he must have been above the grade of the ordinary country boy, to have had the energy and ambition to learn a trade and secure a farm through his own efforts by the time he was twenty-five. He was illiterate, never doing more “in the way of writing than to bunglingly write his own name.” Nevertheless, he had the reputation in the country of being good-natured and obliging, and possessing what his neighbors called “good strong horse-sense.” Although he was “a very quiet sort of man,” he was known to be determined in his opinions, and quite competent to defend his rights by force if they were too flagrantly violated. He was a moral man, and, in the crude way of the pioneer, religious.

RETURN OF MARRIAGE OF THOMAS LINCOLN AND NANCY HANKS.
From a tracing of the original, made by Henry Whitney Cleveland. This certificate was discovered about 1885 by W. F. Booker, Esq., Clerk of Washington County, Kentucky.

LINCOLN IN FEBRUARY, 1860, AT THE TIME OF THE COOPER INSTITUTE SPEECH.
From a photograph by Brady. The debate with Douglas in 1858 gave Lincoln a national reputation, and the following year he received many invitations to lecture. One came from a young men’s Republican club in New York,—which was offering a series of lectures designed for an audience of men and women of the class apt to neglect ordinary political meetings. Lincoln consented, and in February, 1860 (about three months before his nomination for the Presidency), delivered what is known, from the hall in which it was delivered, as the “Cooper Institute speech”—a speech which more than confirmed his reputation. While in New York he was taken by the committee of entertainment to Brady’s gallery, and sat for the portrait reproduced above. It was a frequent remark with Lincoln that this portrait and the Cooper Institute speech made him President.

From a photograph by Klauber of Louisville, Kentucky. Mr. Graham, born in 1784, lived until 1885, and was the only man of our generation who could be called a contemporary of Thomas Lincoln and Nancy Hanks. Long before the documentary evidence of their marriage was found, Mr. Graham gave his reminiscences of that event. Recent discoveries made in the public records of Kentucky regarding the Lincolns, bear out in every particular his recollections. He is, in fact, the most important witness we have as to the character of the parents of President Lincoln and their condition in life. The accuracy of his memory and the trustworthiness of his character are affirmed by the leading citizens of Louisville, Kentucky, of which city he was a resident. In the Appendix will be found a full statement by Mr. Graham of what he knew of Thomas Lincoln and his life.

FACSIMILE OF A PASSAGE FROM LINCOLN’S EXERCISE-BOOK.

HOUSE IN WHICH ABRAHAM LINCOLN WAS BORN.—HITHERTO UNPUBLISHED.
Thomas Lincoln moved into this cabin on the Big South Fork of Nolin Creek, three miles from Hodgensville, in La Rue County, Kentucky, in 1808; and here, on February 12, 1809, Abraham Lincoln was born. In 1813 the Lincolns removed to Knob Creek. The Nolin Creek farm has been known as the “Creal Farm” for many years; recently it was bought by New York people. The cabin was long ago torn down, but the logs were saved. The new owners, in August, 1895, rebuilt the old cabin on the original site. This, the first and only picture which has been taken of it, was made for this biography.

Thomas Lincoln learned his trade as carpenter in Elizabethtown, in the shop of one Joseph Hanks. There he met a niece of his employer, Nancy Hanks, whom, when he was twenty-eight years old, he married. Nancy Hanks was, like her husband, a Virginian. Her experience in life had, too, been similar to her husband’s, for the Hanks family had been drawn into Kentucky by the fascination of Boone, as had the Lincolns. But it was only in her surroundings and her family that Nancy Hanks was like Thomas Lincoln. In nature, in education, and in ambition she was, if tradition is to be believed, quite another person. Certainly a fair and delicate woman, who could read and write, who had ideas of refinement, and a desire to get more from life than fortune had allotted her, was hardly enough like Thomas Lincoln to be very happy with him. She was still more unfit to be his wife because of a sensitive nature which made her brood over her situation—a situation made the more hopeless by the fact that she had neither the force of character nor strength of body to do anything to improve it; if, indeed, she had any clear notion of what it lacked. Hers was that pitiful condition where one feels with vague restlessness that life has something better than one has found, something not seen or understood, but without which life will never be complete.

THOMAS LINCOLN’S BIBLE.—NOW FIRST PUBLISHED.
From the original, in the collection of O. H. Oldroyd, Washington, D. C. It is not known when or how Thomas Lincoln obtained this Bible. After his death it passed to his step-children, the Johnstons, and was sold by them to the “Lincoln Log Cabin Company,” to be exhibited at the World’s Fair. It was purchased from this company for the Oldroyd collection. The family record, reproduced on pages [58] and [59], belongs to this Bible. It was taken out and sold to Mr. C. F. Gunther before the Bible was sold to Mr. Oldroyd.

VIEW OF ROCK SPRING FARM, WHERE PRESIDENT LINCOLN WAS BORN.
From a photograph taken in September, 1895, for this biography. The house in which Lincoln was born is seen to the right, in the background. Rock Spring is in a hollow, under a clump of trees, in the left centre of the picture.

ROCK SPRING ON THE FARM WHERE LINCOLN WAS BORN.
From a photograph taken in September, 1895, for this biography. The spring is in a hollow at the foot of the gentle slope on the top of which the house stands.

Thomas and Nancy Lincoln were married near Beechland, in Washington County, Kentucky, on June 12, 1806. The wedding was celebrated in the boisterous style of one hundred years ago, and was followed by an infare, given by the bride’s guardian. To this celebration came all the neighbors, and, according to that entertaining Kentucky centenarian, Dr. Christopher Columbus Graham, even those who happened in the neighborhood were made welcome. He tells how he heard of the wedding while “out hunting for roots,” and went “just to get a good supper.” “I saw Nancy Hanks Lincoln at her wedding,” continues Mr. Graham, “a fresh-looking girl, I should say over twenty. I was at the infare, too, given by John H. Parrott, her guardian—and only girls with money had guardians appointed by the court. We had bear-meat; ... venison; wild turkey and ducks; eggs, wild and tame, so common that you could buy them at two bits a bushel; maple sugar, swung on a string, to bite off for coffee or whiskey; syrup in big gourds; peach-and-honey; a sheep that the two families barbecued whole over coals of wood burned in a pit, and covered with green boughs to keep the juices in; and a race for the whiskey bottle.”

After his marriage Thomas Lincoln settled in Elizabethtown. His home was a log cabin, but at that date few people in the State had anything else. Kentucky had been in the Union only fourteen years. When admitted, the few brick structures within its boundaries were easily counted, and there were only log schoolhouses and churches. Fourteen years had brought great improvements, but the majority of the population still lived in log cabins, so that the home of Thomas Lincoln was as good as those of most of his neighbors. Little is known of his position in Elizabethtown, though we have proof that he had credit in the community, for the descendants of two of the early storekeepers of the place still remember seeing on their grandfathers’ account books sundry items charged to T. Lincoln. Tools and groceries were the chief purchases he made, though on one of the ledgers a pair of “silk suspenders,” worth one dollar and fifty cents, was entered. He not only enjoyed a certain credit with the merchants of Elizabethtown; he was sufficiently respected by the public authorities to be appointed in 1816 a road surveyor, or, as the office is known in some localities, supervisor. It was not, to be sure, a position of great importance, but it proves that he was considered fit to oversee a body of men at a task of considerable value to the community. Indeed, all of the documents which we have been able to discover, mentioning Thomas Lincoln, show him to have had a much better position in Hardin County than he has been credited with.

LINCOLN IN 1858.—HITHERTO UNPUBLISHED.
After a faded ambrotype of Mr. Lincoln, now in the Lincoln Monument collection at Springfield, Illinois. All that is known of it is that it was taken at Beardstown in 1858. Mr. Lincoln wore a linen coat on the occasion. The picture is regarded as a good likeness of him as he appeared during the Lincoln Douglas campaign.

APPOINTMENT OF THOMAS LINCOLN AS ROAD SURVEYOR.—HITHERTO UNPUBLISHED.
From a tracing made by Henry Whitney Cleveland. The original of this document is in the records of Hardin County, at Elizabethtown, Kentucky. It has hitherto been entirely overlooked by the biographers of Lincoln, and was discovered in the course of a search for documents instituted for this work. The appointment was made on May 13, 1816, only a few months before the Lincolns moved to Indiana. It shows that Thomas Lincoln had a standing in the community, which his biographers have always ignored. The appointment, if modest, would not have been made, we have a right to believe, if Lincoln had been the “easy-going” and idle fellow he has been asserted to be.

CHAPTER II.
THE BIRTH OF ABRAHAM LINCOLN.—HIS EARLY EDUCATION AND FRIENDS.

It was at Elizabethtown that the first child of the Lincolns was born, a daughter. Soon after this event Thomas Lincoln decided to combine farming with his trade, and moved to the farm he had bought in 1803 on the Big South Fork of Nolin Creek, in Hardin County, now La Rue County, three miles from Hodgensville, and about fourteen miles from Elizabethtown. Here he was living when, on February 12, 1809, his second child, a boy, was born. The little new-comer was called Abraham, after his grandfather—a name which had persisted through many preceding generations of the Lincolns.

The home into which the child came was the ordinary one of the poorer Western pioneer—a one-roomed cabin with a huge outside chimney, no windows, and only a rude door. The descriptions of its squalor and wretchedness, which are so familiar, have been overdrawn. Dr. Graham, than whom there is no better authority on the life of that day, and who knew Thomas Lincoln well, declares:

“It is all stuff about Tom Lincoln keeping his wife in an open shed in a winter when the wild animals left the woods and stood in the corners next the stick-and-clay chimneys, so as not to freeze to death; or, if climbers, got on the roof. The Lincolns had a cow and calf, milk and butter, a good feather bed,—for I have slept in it, while they took the buffalo-robes on the floor, because I was a doctor. They had home-woven ‘kiverlids,’ big and little pots, a loom and wheel; and William Hardesty, who was there too, can say with me that Tom Lincoln was a man, and took care of his wife.”

DEED OF SALE SIGNED BY THOMAS LINCOLN AND WIFE.—HITHERTO UNPUBLISHED.
The Book of Deeds in Hardin County, Kentucky, shows that in 1803, three years before his marriage, Thomas Lincoln bought a farm in Hardin County. The same records contain a deed of the sale in 1814 of this same farm, it is supposed, signed by Thomas Lincoln. The deed is evidently written and signed by one person. Nancy Lincoln affixes her mark. This is not proof that she could not write; it not infrequently happens that people in remote country districts make a mark rather than labor with a pen, to which they are unaccustomed. All accounts of Nancy Lincoln agree that she was well educated for her day.

The Lincoln home was undoubtedly rude, and in many ways uncomfortable, but it sheltered a happy family, and its poverty affected the new child but little. He was robust and active; and life is full of interest to the child fortunate enough to be born in the country. He had several companions. There was his sister Nancy, or Sarah—both names are given her—two years his senior; there was a cousin of his mother’s, ten years older, Dennis Hanks, an active and ingenious leader in sports and mischief; and there were the neighbors’ boys. One of the latter, Austin Gollaher, still tells with pleasure of how he played with young Lincoln in the shavings of his father’s carpenter shop, of how he hunted coons and ran the woods with him, and once even saved his life.

A KENTUCKY HAND-MILL.
From a photograph of the original, owned by R. T. Durrett, LL.D., of Louisville, Kentucky. This mill was formerly the property of Joseph Brooks, a prominent pioneer of Kentucky. Similar ones were used by all Western pioneers.

“Yes,” said Mr. Gollaher, “the story that I once saved Abraham Lincoln’s life is true, but it is not correct as generally related.

“Abraham Lincoln and I had been going to school together for a year or more, and had become greatly attached to each other. Then school disbanded on account of there being so few scholars, and we did not see each other much for a long while. One Sunday my mother visited the Lincolns, and I was taken along. Abe and I played around all day. Finally, we concluded to cross the creek to hunt for some partridges young Lincoln had seen the day before. The creek was swollen by a recent rain, and, in crossing on the narrow footlog, Abe fell in. Neither of us could swim. I got a long pole and held it out to Abe, who grabbed it. Then I pulled him ashore. He was almost dead, and I was badly scared. I rolled and pounded him in good earnest. Then I got him by the arms and shook him, the water meanwhile pouring out of his mouth. By this means I succeeded in bringing him to, and he was soon all right.

MAP SHOWING POINTS OF INTEREST IN LINCOLN’S LIFE.—MADE SPECIALLY FOR THIS BIOGRAPHY.
The above map shows where Abraham Lincoln’s grandfather first took land in Kentucky, where his father and mother were married, where they first lived, where he was born, and where he lived from 1809 to 1816. It shows the Rolling Fork, Salt River, and the Ohio, which Thomas Lincoln followed in going into Indiana in 1816; the new home in Indiana; the point where Lincoln kept the ferry about 1826; Boonville, where he went to hear trials; the grave of his mother; the route by which it is supposed he went to Illinois in 1830 (see page [87] for note correcting this route); the location of both of Thomas Lincoln’s farms in Illinois, and his grave, near Farmington, Coles County. Sangamon, New Salem, Vandalia, Springfield, and the chief places where Mr. Lincoln practised law are shown, as well as the points where the Lincoln and Douglas debates and the important political events of the campaign of 1860 took place.

“Then a new difficulty confronted us. If our mothers discovered our wet clothes they would whip us. This we dreaded from experience, and determined to avoid. It was June, the sun was very warm, and we soon dried our clothing by spreading it on the rocks about us. We promised never to tell the story, and I never did until after Lincoln’s tragic end.

“Abraham Lincoln had a sister. Her name was Sallie, and she was a very pretty girl. Sallie Lincoln was about my age; she was my sweetheart. I loved her and claimed her, as boys do. I suppose that was one reason for my warm regard for Abe. When the Lincoln family moved to Indiana, I was prevented by circumstances from bidding good-by to either of the children, and I never saw them again.”[^[4]]

ABRAHAM LINCOLN’S INDIANA HOME.
After an old photograph showing the cabin as it appeared in 1869. Thomas Lincoln built this house in 1817, and moved into it about a year after he reached his farm. At first it had neither windows, door, nor floor; but after the advent of Sally Bush Lincoln it was greatly improved. When he decided to leave Indiana he was preparing the lumber for a better house.

All the young people went to school. At that day the schools in the West were usually accidental, depending upon the coming of some poor and ambitious young man who was willing to teach a few terms while he looked for an opening to something better. The terms were irregular, their length being decided by the time the settlers felt able to board the master and pay his small salary. The chief qualification for a school-master seems to have been enough strength to keep the “big boys” in order, though one high authority affirms that pluck went “for a heap sight more’n sinnoo with boys.”

LINCOLN FARM IN INDIANA.
From a photograph taken for this biography. Present appearance of the quarter section of government land in Spencer County, Indiana, entered by Thomas Lincoln, October 15, 1817, view looking east. Thomas Lincoln selected this tract in 1816, and, to identify it, he blazed the trees, and piled up brush at the corners to establish boundary lines. When he returned with his family he was obliged to cut his way to the spot chosen for his cabin, and to fell trees to find space for the “half-face camp” in which he first lived. This land was entered under the old credit system. Later Mr. Lincoln gave up to the United States the east half, and the amount paid on it was passed to his credit to complete paying for the west half. The patent issued for the latter tract was dated June 6, 1827.

Many of the itinerant masters were Catholics—strolling Irishmen from the colony in Tennessee, or French priests from Kaskaskia. Lincoln’s first teacher, Zachariah Riney, was a Catholic. Of his second teacher, Caleb Hazel, we know even less than of Riney. Mr. Gollaher says that Abraham Lincoln, in those days when he was his schoolmate, was “an unusually bright boy at school, and made splendid progress in his studies. Indeed, he learned faster than any of his schoolmates. Though so young, he studied very hard. He would get spice-wood brushes, hack them up on a log, and burn them two or three together, for the purpose of giving light by which he might pursue his studies.”

Probably the boy’s mother had something to do with the spice-wood illuminations. Tradition has it that Mrs. Lincoln took great pains to teach her children what she knew, and that at her knee they heard all the Bible lore, fairy tales, and country legends that she had been able to gather in her poor life.

Besides the “A B C schools,” as Lincoln called them, the only other medium of education in the country districts of Kentucky in those days was “preaching.” Itinerants like the schoolmasters, the preachers, of whatever denomination, were generally uncouth and illiterate; the code of morals they taught was mainly a healthy one, and they, no doubt, did much to keep the consciences of the pioneers awake. It is difficult to believe that they ever did much for the moral training of young Lincoln, though he certainly got his first notion of public speaking from them; and for years in his boyhood one of his chief delights was to get his playmates about him, and preach and thump until he had his auditors frightened or in tears.

GRAVE OF NANCY HANKS LINCOLN.
From a photograph loaned by W. W. Admire. The grave of Abraham Lincoln’s mother is on a wooded knoll about half a mile southeast of the site of her Indiana home. Near her are buried Thomas and Betsey Sparrow, who followed the Lincolns to Indiana, and who died a few days before Mrs. Lincoln, and of the same disease; and also Levi Hall and his wife, who died several years later. There are two or three other graves in the vicinity. Until 1879 the only mark about the grave of Nancy Lincoln was the names of visitors to the spot, cut in the bark of the trees which shaded it; then Mr. P. E. Studebaker of South Bend, Indiana, erected the stone, and soon after a fence was purchased by a few of the leading citizens of Rockport, Indiana. The inscription on the stone runs: “Nancy Hanks Lincoln, Mother of President Lincoln, died October 5, A.D., 1818. Aged thirty-five years. Erected by a friend of her martyred son.”

LINCOLN IN 1857.
From a photograph loaned by H. W. Fay of De Kalb, Illinois. The original was taken early in 1857 by Alexander Hesler of Chicago. Mr. Fay writes of the picture: “I have a letter from Mr. Hesler stating that one of the lawyers came in and made arrangements for the sitting, so that the members of the bar could get prints. Lincoln said at the time that he did not know why the boys wanted such a homely face.” Mr. Joseph Medill of Chicago went with Mr. Lincoln to have the picture taken. He says that the photographer insisted on smoothing down Lincoln’s hair, but Lincoln did not like the result, and ran his fingers through it before sitting. The original negative was burned in the Chicago fire.

MARRIAGE LICENSE OF THOMAS LINCOLN AND SARAH JOHNSTON.—NOW FIRST PUBLISHED.
From a tracing made by Henry Whitney Cleveland.

CHAPTER III.
THE LINCOLNS LEAVE KENTUCKY.—THEY SETTLE IN SOUTHERN INDIANA—CONDITIONS OF LIFE IN THEIR NEW HOME.

In 1816 a great event happened to the little boy. His father emigrated to Indiana from Knob Creek (Thomas Lincoln had removed from the farm on Nolin Creek to one some fifteen miles northeast, on Knob Creek, when Abraham was four years old). “This removal was partly on account of slavery, but chiefly on account of the difficulty in land titles in Kentucky,” says his son. It was due, as well, no doubt, to the fascination which an unknown country has always for the adventurous, and to that restless pioneer spirit which drives even men of sober judgment continually towards the frontier, in search of a place where the conflict with nature is less severe—some spot farther on, to which a friend or a neighbor has preceded, and from which he sends back glowing reports. It may be that Thomas Lincoln was tempted into Indiana by the reports of his brother Josiah, who had settled on the Big Blue River in that State. At all events, in the fall of 1816 he started with wife and children and household stores to journey by horseback and by wagon from Knob Creek to a farm selected on a previous trip he had made. This farm, located near Little Pigeon Creek, about fifteen miles north of the Ohio River, and a mile and a half east of Gentryville, Spencer County, was in a forest so dense that the road for the travellers had to be hewed out as they went.

SARAH BUSH LINCOLN.
From a photograph in the possession of her granddaughter, Mrs. Harriet Chapman of Charleston, Illinois. Sarah Bush was born in Kentucky, December 13, 1788. She was a friend of Thomas Lincoln and Nancy Hanks, and it is said that Thomas Lincoln had been her suitor before she married Daniel Johnston. Her husband died in October, 1818. In November, 1819, Thomas Lincoln went to Kentucky to seek her a second time in marriage. An incident of the courtship is told by Mr. J. L. Nall, a cousin of President Lincoln: “Uncle Thomas came back to Kentucky after the death of his first wife, Nancy Hanks, and proposed marriage to the widow Johnston; she told him that she would be perfectly willing to marry him, as she had known him a long time, and felt that the marriage would be congenial and happy; but it would be impossible for her even to think of marrying, and leaving the State, as she was considerably in debt. Uncle Thomas told her that need make no difference, as he had plenty of money, and would take care of her financial affairs; and when he had ascertained the amount of her indebtedness and the names of the parties to whom the money was due, he went around and redeemed all her paper and presented it to her, and told her, when she showed so much honor about debts, he was more fully satisfied than ever that she would make him a good wife. She said, as he had displayed so much generosity in her behalf, she was willing then to marry and go with him to Spencer County, Indiana.” Sarah Bush Lincoln changed the character of the Lincoln home completely when she entered it, and there is no question of the importance of her influence upon the development of her step-son Abraham. She was a woman of great natural dignity and kindliness, and highly esteemed by all who knew her. She died on the 10th of December, 1869, at the old homestead in Coles County, Illinois.

THE MARRIAGE BOND GIVEN BY THOMAS LINCOLN AT HIS MARRIAGE WITH SARAH JOHNSTON.—NOW FIRST PUBLISHED.
From a tracing made by Henry Whitney Cleveland.

BUCKTHORN VALLEY, WHERE LINCOLN WORKED AND HUNTED.
After a photograph made for this biography. In this valley are located nearly all the farms on which Lincoln worked in his boyhood, including the famous Crawford place, where he and his sister Sarah were both employed as “help.” Visitors to the locality have pointed out to them numberless items associated with his early life—fields he helped to clear and till, fences he built, houses he repaired, wells he dug, paths he walked, playgrounds he frequented. Indeed, the inhabitants of Buckthorn Valley take the greatest pride in Lincoln’s connection with it.

To a boy of seven years, free from all responsibility, and too vigorous to feel its hardships, such a journey must have been, as William Cooper Howells, the father of the novelist, says of his own trip from Virginia to Ohio, in 1813, “a panorama of delightful novelty.” Life suddenly ceased its routine, and every day brought forth new scenes and adventures. Little Abraham saw forests greater than he had ever dreamed of, peopled by strange birds and beasts, and he crossed a river so wide that it must have seemed to him like the sea. To Thomas and Nancy Lincoln the journey was probably a hard and sad one; but to the children beside them it was a wonderful voyage into the unknown.

A NEW HOME IN INDIANA.

On arriving at the new farm an axe was put into the boy’s hands, and he was set to work to aid in clearing a field for corn, and to help build the “half-face camp” which for a year was the home of the Lincolns. There were few more primitive homes in the wilderness of Indiana in 1816 than this of young Lincoln’s, and there were few families, even in that day, who were forced to practise more makeshifts to get a living. The cabin which took the place of the “half-face camp” had but one room, with a loft above. For a long time there was no window, door, or floor; not even the traditional deer-skin hung before the exit; there was no oiled paper over the opening for light; there was no puncheon covering on the ground.

THE OLD SWIMMING-HOLE.
A secluded part of Little Pigeon Creek, not far from Gentryville, where Lincoln, Dennis Hanks, John Johnston, the Gentry boys, and others of the neighborhood used to bathe. It is still pointed out as “the place where Abe went in swimming.”

BRICK-MOULD USED BY THOMAS LINCOLN.
From a photograph loaned by Jesse W. Weik.

The furniture was of their own manufacture. The table and chairs were of the rudest sort—rough slabs of wood in which holes were bored and legs fitted in. Their bedstead, or, rather, bed-frame, was made of poles held up by two outer posts, and the ends made firm by inserting the poles in auger-holes that had been bored in a log which was a part of the wall of the cabin; skins were its chief covering. Little Abraham’s bed was even more primitive. He slept on a heap of dry leaves in the corner of the loft, to which he mounted by means of pegs driven into the wall.

WELL DUG BY LINCOLN.
In a field near the Crawford house is a well which is pointed out to sight-seers as one which Lincoln helped to dig. Many things about the Crawford place—fences, corn-cribs, house, barn—were built in part by Lincoln.

HICKORY-BARK OX-MUZZLE.
After a drawing made from the original, in the collection of pioneer articles in the United States National Museum, at Washington, D. C. Hickory bark was used freely by the Western pioneers. From it and from corn husks they were obliged, in fact, to make most of their harness.

Their food, if coarse, was usually abundant; the chief difficulty in supplying the larder was to secure any variety. Of game there was plenty—deer, bear, pheasants, wild turkeys, ducks, birds of all kinds. There were fish in the streams, and wild fruits of many kinds in the woods in the summer, and these were dried for winter use; but the difficulty of raising and milling corn and wheat was very great. Indeed, in many places in the West the first flour cake was an historical event.[^[5]] Corn dodger was the every-day bread of the Lincoln household, the wheat cake being a dainty reserved for Sunday mornings.

THE CRAWFORD HOUSE, WHERE LINCOLN WAS A FARM-HAND.
The house of Josiah Crawford, near Gentryville, Indiana. Here Lincoln worked by the day for several months, while his sister was a “hired girl” for Mrs. Crawford. In 1829 Lincoln cut down timber and whip-sawed it into planks for a new house which his father proposed to build; but Thomas Lincoln decided to go to Illinois before the new house was begun, and Abraham sold his planks to Mr. Crawford, who worked them into the southeast room of his house, where relic-seekers have since cut them to pieces to make canes. This picture is made after a photograph taken before the death of Mr. and Mrs. Crawford, both of whom are shown here.

Potatoes were the only vegetables raised in any quantity, and there were times in the Lincoln family when they were the only food on the table; a fact proved to posterity by the oft-quoted remark of Abraham to his father after the latter had asked a blessing over a dish of roasted potatoes—that they were “mighty poor blessings.” Not only were they all the Lincolns had for dinner sometimes; one of their neighbors tells of calling there when raw potatoes, pared and washed, were passed around instead of apples or other fruit.

By permission, from Herndon and Weik’s “Life of Abraham Lincoln.”
Copyright 1892, by D. Appleton & Co.
LINCOLN FAMILY RECORD.
Written by Abraham Lincoln in his Father’s Bible. From original in possession of C. F. Gunther, Esq., Chicago.

The food was prepared in the rudest way, for the supply of both groceries and cooking utensils was limited. The former were frequently wanting entirely, and as for the latter, the most important item was the Dutch oven. An indispensable article in the primitive kitchen outfit was the “gritter.” It was made by flattening out an old piece of tin, punching it full of holes, and nailing it to a board. Upon this all sorts of things were grated, even ears of corn, in which slow way enough meal was sometimes secured for bread. Old tin was used for many other little contrivances besides the “gritter,” and every scrap was carefully saved. Most of the dishes were of pewter; the spoons, iron; the knives and forks, horn-handled.

The Lincolns of course made their own soap and candles, and if they had cotton or wool to wear they had literally to grow it. One of the “old settlers” of Illinois says of her experience in clothing her family:

“As for our clothes, we had to raise, pick, spin, and weave cotton for winter and summer. We also made linsey of wool and flax. The first indigo we had we raised. Besides that we used sumac berries, white-walnut bark, and other barks for coloring.

DENNIS HANKS.
From a photograph in the Libby Prison Museum of Chicago, by permission of Mr. C. F. Gunther. Dennis Hanks, a cousin of Nancy Hanks Lincoln, was born in Kentucky, in 1799, and was brought up by his uncle Thomas Sparrow. The year after Thomas Lincoln moved to Indiana, Thomas Sparrow followed him, but both he and his wife died there in 1818. Dennis then became an inmate of the Lincoln household. He afterwards married one of the daughters of Sally Bush Lincoln. It was largely through his influence that the Lincolns moved into Illinois in 1830. Dennis Hanks has been one of the most prolific contributors to the early period of Mr. Lincoln’s life, his letters to Mr. Herndon being full of curious and valuable matter. He died in October, 1892. One of his daughters, Mrs. Harriet Chapman, is still living at Charleston, Illinois.

“Now for cotton picking. We children had to lie before the fire and pick the seed from the cotton bolls before we could go to bed. The warmer the cotton the better it picked; so we would take a good sweat. The next day that had to be carded and spun; so some would soap the cotton, some card, and some spin; and when we would get enough spun and colored to make a dress apiece we would put it in the loom and weave it. It did not take fifteen or twenty yards to make a dress then; six or eight yards of linsey were enough for any woman.”

It is probable that young Abraham Lincoln wore little cotton or linsey-woolsey. His trousers were of roughly tanned deer-skin, his foot-covering a home-made moccasin, his cap a coonskin; it was only the material for his shirt or blouse which was woven at home. If this costume had some obvious disadvantages, it was not to be despised. So good an authority as Governor Reynolds says of one of its articles—the linsey-woolsey shirt—“It was an excellent garment. I have never felt so happy and healthy since I put it off.”

These “pretty pinching times,” as Abraham Lincoln once described the early days in Indiana, lasted until 1819. The year before, Nancy Lincoln had died, and for many months no more forlorn place could be conceived than this pioneer home bereft of its guiding spirit; but finally Thomas Lincoln went back to Kentucky and returned with a new wife—Sally Bush Johnston, a widow with three children, John, Sarah, and Matilda. The new mother came well provided with household furniture, bringing many things unfamiliar to little Abraham—“one fine bureau, one table, one set of chairs, one large clothes-chest, cooking utensils, knives, forks, bedding, and other articles.” She was a woman of energy, thrift, and gentleness, and at once made the cabin home-like, and taught the children habits of cleanliness and comfort.

MOUTH OF ANDERSON CREEK, WHERE LINCOLN KEPT THE FERRY-BOAT.
From a photograph taken for this biography. This ferry, at the mouth of Anderson Creek, was first established and owned by James McDaniel, and was afterwards kept by his son-in-law James Taylor. It was the latter who hired Abraham Lincoln, about 1826, to attend the ferry-boat. As the boat did not keep him busy all the time, he acted as man-of-all-work around the farm. A son of James Taylor, Captain Green B. Taylor of South Dakota, is still alive, and remembers distinctly the months Lincoln spent in his father’s employ. Captain Taylor says that Lincoln “slept up-stairs” with him, and used to read “till near midnight.”

JOSIAH CRAWFORD.
Among those whom Lincoln served in Indiana as “hired boy” was Josiah Crawford, a well-to-do farmer living near Gentryville. Mr. Crawford owned a copy of Weems’s “Life of Washington,” a precious book in those days, and Lincoln borrowed it to read. “Late in the night, before going to rest, he placed the borrowed book in his only bookcase, the opening between two logs of the walls of the cabin, and retired to dream of its contents. During the night it rained; the water dripping over the ‘mud-daubing’ on to the book stained the leaves and warped the binding. Abe valued the book in proportion to the interest he had in the hero, and felt that the owner must value it beyond his ability to pay. It was with the greatest trepidation he took the book home and told the story, and asked how he might hope to make restitution. Mr. Crawford answered: ‘Being as it is you, Abe, I won’t be hard on you. Come over and shuck corn three days, and the book is yours.’ Shuck corn three days and receive a hero’s life! He felt that the owner was giving him a magnificent present. After reading the book he used to tell the Crawfords: ‘I do not always intend to delve, grub, shuck corn, split rails, and the like.’ His whole mind was devoted to books, and he declared he ‘was going to fit himself for a profession.’ These declarations were often made to Mrs. Crawford, who took almost a mother’s interest in him, and she would ask: ‘What do you want to be now?’ His answer was invariably: ‘I’ll be President.’ As he was generally playing a joke on some one, she would answer: ‘You’d make a purty President with all your tricks and jokes. Now, wouldn’t you?’ He would then declare: ‘Oh, I’ll study and get ready, and then the chance will come.’”[^[6]]

ABRAHAM BECOMES A LABORER.

Abraham was ten years old when his new mother came from Kentucky, and he was already an important member of the family. He was remarkably strong for his years, and the work he could do in a day was a decided advantage to Thomas Lincoln. The axe which had been put into his hand to help in making the first clearing, he had never been allowed to drop; indeed, as he says himself, “from that till within his twenty-third year he was almost constantly handling that most useful instrument.” Besides, he drove the team, cut the elm and linn brush with which the stock was often fed, learned to handle the old shovel-plough, to wield the sickle, to thresh the wheat with a flail, to fan and clean it with a sheet, to go to mill and turn the hard-earned grist into flour. In short, he learned all the trades the settler’s boy must know, and so well that when his father did not need him he could hire him to the neighbors. Thomas Lincoln also taught him the rudiments of carpentry and cabinet-making, and kept him busy much of the time as his assistant in his trade. There are houses still standing, in and near Gentryville, on which it is said he worked. The families of Lamar, Jones, Crawford, Gentry, Turnham, and Richardson, all claim the honor of having employed him upon their cabins.

A MISSISSIPPI “BROAD-HORN.”
From a model in the exhibit of the United States National Museum at the Atlanta Exposition of 1895. The flatboat which Abraham Lincoln piloted to New Orleans was not, probably, as well built a boat as the above model represents; but it was built on the same general plan. The hold was enclosed to protect the produce, and on the deck was a cabin in which the boatmen lived. In going down the river, rough sails were sometimes rigged up on these broad-horns, though they floated usually, directed by huge paddles. If the boat was brought back, it was warped and poled by hand up the river. More often, however, the boatmen sold both boat and cargo at New Orleans, and came back by the steamers as deck passengers. Boats like the two models on this page are still seen in great numbers on the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers.

A RIVER PRODUCE BOAT.
From a model in the exhibit of the United States National Museum at the Atlanta Exposition of 1895. The photograph of this model, and of the one above, we owe to the courtesy of the director of the Museum, Mr. G. Brown Goode.

As he grew older he became one of the strongest and most popular “hands” in the vicinity, and much of his time was spent as a “hired boy” on some neighbor’s farm. For twenty-five cents a day—paid to his father—he was hostler, ploughman, wood-chopper, and carpenter, besides helping the women with the “chores.” For them he was ready to carry water, make the fire, even tend the baby. No wonder that a laborer who never refused to do anything asked of him, who could “strike with a mall heavier blows” and “sink an axe deeper into the wood” than anybody else in the community, and who at the same time was general help for the women, never lacked a job in Gentryville.

JOSEPH GENTRY.
One of the few companions of Lincoln’s youth in Indiana, now living, is Joseph Gentry. He resides on a farm one-fourth mile west from the Lincoln farm, where he has lived about sixty years. When a boy he lived in Gentryville—a town founded by the Gentrys. He was present at the funeral of Nancy Hanks Lincoln, and remembers hearing the minister say it was through the efforts of the little son of the dead woman that his services had been secured.

Of all the tasks his rude life brought him, none seems to have suited him better than going to the mill. It was, perhaps, as much the leisure enforced by this trip as anything else that attracted him. The machinery was primitive, and each man waited his turn, which sometimes was long in coming. A story is told by one of the pioneers of Illinois of going many miles with a grist, and waiting so long for his turn that, when it came, he and his horse had eaten all the corn, and he had none to grind. This waiting with other men and boys on like errands gave an opportunity for talk, story-telling, and games, which were Lincoln’s delight.

In 1826 he spent several months as a ferryman at the mouth of Anderson Creek, where it joins the Ohio. This experience suggested new possibilities to him. It was a custom among the farmers of Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois at this date to collect a quantity of produce, and float down to New Orleans on a raft, to sell it. Young Lincoln saw this, and wanted to try his fortune as a produce merchant. An incident of his projected trip he related once to Mr. Seward:

“Seward,” he said, “did you ever hear how I earned my first dollar?”

“No,” said Mr. Seward.

Carbon enlargement, made by Sherman & McHugh of New York City.
LINCOLN IN 1858.
From a photograph loaned by W. J. Franklin of Macomb, Illinois, and taken in 1866 from an ambrotype made in 1858 in Macomb. This portrait figures in the collection in the Lincoln Home at Springfield, Illinois, and on the back of the photograph is the following inscription: “This likeness of Abraham Lincoln is a faithful copy of an original ambrotype, now in possession of James K. Magie. It was taken August 25, 1858, by Mr. T. P. Pierson, at Macomb, in this State, and is believed to be of anterior date to any other likeness of Mr. Lincoln ever brought before the public. Mr. Magie happened to remain over night at Macomb, at the same hotel with Mr. Lincoln, and the next morning took a walk about town, and upon Mr. Magie’s invitation they stepped into Mr. Pierson’s establishment, and the ambrotype of which this is a copy was the result. Mr. Lincoln, upon entering, looked at the camera as though he was unfamiliar with such an instrument, and then remarked: ‘Well, do you want to take a shot at me with that thing?’ He was shown to a glass, where he was told to ‘fix up,’ but declined, saying it would not be much of a likeness if he fixed up any. The old neighbors and acquaintances of Mr. Lincoln in Illinois, upon seeing this picture, are apt to exclaim: ‘There! that’s the best likeness of Mr. Lincoln that I ever saw!’ The dress he wore in this picture is the same in which he made his famous canvass with Senator Douglas.” This inscription was written by J. C. Power, now dead, but for many years custodian of the Lincoln monument in Springfield.

“Well,” replied he, “I was about eighteen years of age, and belonged, as you know, to what they call down South the ‘scrubs;’ people who do not own land and slaves are nobody there; but we had succeeded in raising, chiefly by my labor, sufficient produce, as I thought, to justify me in taking it down the river to sell. After much persuasion I had got the consent of my mother to go, and had constructed a flatboat large enough to take the few barrels of things we had gathered to New Orleans. A steamer was going down the river. We have, you know, no wharves on the Western streams, and the custom was, if passengers were at any of the landings, they were to go out in a boat, the steamer stopping, and taking them on board. I was contemplating my new boat, and wondering whether I could make it stronger or improve it in any part, when two men with trunks came down to the shore in carriages, and looking at the different boats, singled out mine, and asked, ‘Who owns this?’ I answered modestly, ‘I do.’ ‘Will you,’ said one of them, ‘take us and our trunks out to the steamer?’ ‘Certainly,’ said I. I was very glad to have the chance of earning something, and supposed that each of them would give me a couple of bits. The trunks were put in my boat, the passengers seated themselves on them, and I sculled them out to the steamer. They got on board, and I lifted the trunks and put them on the deck. The steamer was about to put on steam again, when I called out, ‘You have forgotten to pay me.’ Each of them took from his pocket a silver half-dollar and threw it on the bottom of my boat. I could scarcely believe my eyes as I picked up the money. You may think it was a very little thing, and in these days it seems to me like a trifle, but it was a most important incident in my life. I could scarcely credit that I, the poor boy, had earned a dollar in less than a day; that by honest work I had earned a dollar. I was a more hopeful and thoughtful boy from that time.”

SAMUEL CRAWFORD.
Only living son of Josiah Crawford, who lent Lincoln the Weems’s “Life of Washington.” To our representative in Indiana, who secured this picture of Mr. Crawford, he said, when asked if he remembered the Lincolns: “Oh, yes; I remember them, although I was not Abraham’s age. He was twelve years older than I. One day I ran in, calling out, ‘Mother! mother! Aaron Grigsby is sparking Sally Lincoln; I saw him kiss her!’ Mother scolded me, and told me I must stop watching Sally, or I wouldn’t get to the wedding. [It will be remembered that Sally Lincoln was ‘help’ in the Crawford family, and that she afterwards married Aaron Grigsby.] Neighbors thought lots more of each other then than now, and it seems like everybody liked the Lincolns. We were well acquainted, for Mr. Thomas Lincoln was a good carpenter, and made the cupboard, mantels, doors, and sashes in our old home that was burned down.”

Soon after this, while he was working for Mr. Gentry, the leading citizen of Gentryville, his employer decided to send a load of produce to New Orleans, and chose young Lincoln to go as “bow-hand,” “to work the front oars.” For this trip he received eight dollars a month and his passage back.

ABRAHAM LINCOLN.—NOW FIRST PUBLISHED.
After a photograph in the collection of Mr. J. C. Browne of Philadelphia.

MISSISSIPPI RIVER FLATBOAT.

CHAPTER IV.
EARLY EDUCATION.—BOOKS ABRAHAM READ.—THE JONES GROCERY STORE.—LIFE ON THE RIVER.

With all his hard living and hard work, Lincoln was getting, in this period, a desultory kind of education. Not that he received much schooling. He went to school “by littles,” he says; “in all it did not amount to more than a year.” And, if we accept his own description of the teachers, it was, perhaps, just as well that it was only “by littles.” “No qualification was ever required of a teacher beyond ‘readin’, writin’, and cipherin’ to the rule of three.’ If a straggler supposed to understand Latin happened to sojourn in the neighborhood, he was looked upon as a wizard.” But more or less of the schoolroom is a matter of small importance if a boy has learned to read, and to think of what he reads. And that, this boy had learned. His stock of books was small, but he knew them thoroughly, and they were good books to know: the Bible, “Æsop’s Fables,” “Robinson Crusoe,” Bunyan’s “Pilgrim’s Progress,” a “History of the United States,” Weems’s “Life of Washington,” and the “Statutes of Indiana.” These are the chief ones we know about. He did not own them all, but sometimes had to borrow them from the neighbors: a practice which resulted in at least one casualty, for Weems’s “Life of Washington” he allowed to get wet, and to make good the loss he had to pull fodder three days. No matter. The book became his then, and he could read it as he would. Fortunately he took this curious work in profound seriousness, which a wide-awake boy would hardly be expected to do to-day. Washington became an exalted figure in his imagination; and he always contended later, when the question of the real character of the first President was brought up, that it was wiser to regard him as a godlike being, heroic in nature and deeds, as Weems did, than to contend that he was only a man who, if wise and good, still made mistakes and indulged in follies, like other men.

In 1861, addressing the Senate of the State of New Jersey, he said:

“May I be pardoned if, upon this occasion, I mention that away back in my childhood, the earliest days of my being able to read, I got hold of a small book, such a one as few of the younger members have ever seen—Weems’s ‘Life of Washington.’ I remember all the accounts there given of the battlefields and struggles for the liberties of the country, and none fixed themselves upon my imagination so deeply as the struggle here at Trenton, New Jersey. The crossing of the river, the contest with the Hessians, the great hardships endured at that time, all fixed themselves on my memory more than any single Revolutionary event; and you all know, for you have all been boys, how these early impressions last longer than any others. I recollect thinking then, boy even though I was, that there must have been something more than common that these men struggled for.”

Besides these books he borrowed many. He once told a friend that he “read through every book he had ever heard of in that country, for a circuit of fifty miles.” From everything he read he made long extracts, using a turkey-buzzard pen and brier-root ink. When he had no paper he would write on a board, and thus preserve his selections until he secured a copy-book. The wooden fire-shovel was his usual slate, and on its back he ciphered with a charred stick, shaving it off when covered. The logs and boards in his vicinity he filled with his figures and quotations. By night he read and worked as long as there was light, and he kept a book in the crack of the logs in his loft, to have it at hand at peep of day. When acting as ferryman, in his nineteenth year, anxious, no doubt, to get through the books of the house where he boarded, before he left the place, he read every night “till midnight.”[^[7]]

Copyright, 1894 by D. Appleton & Co., publishers of Herndon’s “Life of Lincoln,” and reproduced by special permission.
JOHN HANKS.
The son of Joseph Hanks, with whom Thomas Lincoln learned the carpenter’s trade, and a cousin of Nancy Hanks Lincoln. John Hanks lived with Thomas Lincoln in Indiana, from about 1823 to 1827, then returned to Kentucky, and from there emigrated to Illinois. It was largely through his influence that Thomas Lincoln and Dennis Hanks went to the Sangamon country in 1830. When Mr. Lincoln first left home he and John Hanks worked together. In 1831 they made a trip to New Orleans on a flatboat. It was John Hanks who, in 1860, accompanied Governor Oglesby to the old Lincoln farm in Macon County, to select the rails Lincoln had split, and it was he who carried them into the convention of the Republican party of Illinois, which nominated Lincoln as its candidate. John Hanks was an illiterate man, being able neither to read nor write; but he was honest and kindly, and his reminiscences of Mr. Lincoln’s early life, gathered by Mr. Herndon and others, are regarded by all who knew him as trustworthy. After Mr. Lincoln’s election to the Presidency, he desired an Indian agency; but his lack of even a rudimentary education made it impossible to give it to him.

Every lull in his daily labor he used for reading, rarely going to his work without a book. When ploughing or cultivating the rough fields of Spencer County, he found frequently a half hour for reading. At the end of every long row the horse was allowed to rest, and Lincoln had his book out, and was perched on stump or fence, almost as soon as the plough had come to a standstill. One of the few people still left in Gentryville who remembers Lincoln, Captain John Lamar, tells to this day of riding to mill with his father, and seeing, as they drove along, a boy sitting on the top rail of an old-fashioned stake-and-rider worm fence, reading so intently that he did not notice their approach. His father, turning to him, said: “John, look at that boy yonder, and mark my words, he will make a smart man out of himself. I may not see it, but you’ll see if my words don’t come true.” “That boy was Abraham Lincoln,” adds Mr. Lamar, impressively.

Copyright, 1894, by D Appleton & Co., publishers of Herndon’s “Life of Lincoln,” and reproduced by special permission.
JUDGE JOHN PITCHER.
A lawyer of Rockport, Indiana, at the time the Lincolns lived near Gentryville. An essay of Mr. Lincoln’s, composed when he was about nineteen, was submitted to Mr. Pitcher, who declared the “world couldn’t beat it;” and he seems to have taken a kindly interest in the author from that time forward, lending him books freely from his law office. Mr. Pitcher was still living in 1889, in Mt. Vernon, Indiana, having reached the age of ninety-three years. His reminiscences of the boyhood of Lincoln are embodied in Herndon’s “Life.”

In his habits of reading and study the boy had little encouragement from his father, but his step-mother did all she could for him. Indeed, between the two there soon grew up a relation of touching gentleness and confidence. In one of the interviews a biographer of Mr. Lincoln sought with her before her death, Mrs. Lincoln said:

“I induced my husband to permit Abe to read and study at home, as well as at school. At first he was not easily reconciled to it, but finally he too seemed willing to encourage him to a certain extent. Abe was a dutiful son to me always, and we took particular care when he was reading not to disturb him—would let him read on and on till he quit of his own accord.”

This consideration of his step-mother won the boy’s confidence, and he rarely copied anything that he did not take it to her to read, asking her opinion of it; and often, when she did not understand it, explaining the meaning in his plain and simple language.

No newspaper ever escaped him. One man in Gentryville, Mr. Jones, the storekeeper, took a Louisville paper, and here Lincoln went regularly to read and discuss its contents. All the men and boys of the neighborhood gathered there, and everything which the paper related was subjected to their keen, shrewd common-sense. It was not long before young Lincoln became the favorite member of the group, the one listened to most respectfully. Politics were warmly discussed by these Gentryville citizens, and it may be that sitting on the counter of Jones’s grocery Lincoln even argued on slavery. It certainly was one of the live questions in Indiana at that date.

CORN-HUSK COLLAR.
Drawn from the original, in the United States National Museum, at Washington, D.C. These collars were used in Indiana and Illinois in Lincoln’s day.

For several years after the organization of the Territory, and in spite of the Ordinance of 1787, a system of thinly disguised slavery had existed; and it took a sharp struggle to bring the State in without some form of the institution. So uncertain was the result that, when decided, the word passed from mouth to mouth all over Hoosierdom, “She has come in free, she has come in free!” Even in 1820, four years after the admission to Statehood, the census showed one hundred and ninety slaves, nearly all of them in the southwest corner, where the Lincolns lived, and it was not, in reality, until 1821 that the State Supreme Court put an end to the question. In Illinois in 1822–1824 there was carried on one of the most violent contests between the friends and opponents of slavery which occurred before the repeal of the Missouri Compromise. The effort to secure slave labor was nearly successful. In the campaign, pamphlets pro and con literally inundated the State; the pulpits took it up; and “almost every stump in every county had its bellowing, indignant orator.” So violent a commotion so near their borders could hardly have failed to reach Gentryville.

PUNCHED SHEET-IRON LANTERN.
Drawn from the original, in the United States National Museum, at Washington, D.C. Oiled paper was sometimes used in the lanterns.

JOHN W. LAMAR.
Mr. Lamar was a young boy in Spencer County when Lincoln left Indiana, but was old enough to have seen much of him and to have known his characteristics and his reputation in the county. He is still living near his old home.

There had been other anti-slavery agitation going on within hearing for several years. In 1804 a number of Baptist ministers of Kentucky started a crusade against the institution, which resulted in a hot contest in the denomination, and the organization of the “Baptist Licking-Locust Association Friends of Humanity.” The Rev. Jesse Head, the minister who married Thomas Lincoln and Nancy Hanks, talked freely and boldly against slavery; and one of their old friends, Christopher Columbus Graham, the man who was present at their wedding, says: “Tom and Nancy Lincoln and Sally Bush were just steeped full of Jesse Head’s notions about the wrong of slavery and the rights of man as explained by Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Paine.” In 1806 Charles Osborn began to preach “immediate emancipation” in Tennessee. Ten years later he started a paper in Ohio, devoted to the same idea, and in 1819 he transferred his crusade to Indiana. In 1821 Benjamin Lundy started, in Tennessee, the famous “Genius,” devoted to the same doctrine; and in 1822, at Shelbyville, only about one hundred miles from Gentryville, was started a paper similar in its views, the “Abolition Intelligencer.”

At that time there were in Kentucky five or six abolition societies, and in Illinois was an organization called the “Friends of Humanity.” Probably young Lincoln heard but vaguely of these movements; but of some of them he must have heard, and he must have connected them with the “Speech of Mr. Pitt on the Slave Trade;” with Merry’s elegy, “The Slaves;” and with the discussion given in his “Kentucky Preceptor,” “Which has the Most to complain of, the Indian or the Negro?” all of which tradition declares he was fond of repeating. It is not impossible that, as Frederick Douglas first realized his own condition in reading a school-speaker, the “Columbian Orator,” so Abraham Lincoln first felt the wrong of slavery in reading his “American Preceptor.”

REV. ALLEN BROONER.
An Indiana acquaintance of Lincoln, still living near Gentryville. “Mr. Brooner’s mother was a friend of Nancy Hanks Lincoln. In the fall of 1818 Mrs. Brooner was very sick, and Mrs. Lincoln called to see her. The sick woman was very despondent, and said: ‘Mrs. Lincoln, I am going to die. You will not see me again while living.’ ‘Tut te tut. You must not say that. Why, you will live longer than I. So cheer up,’ answered Mrs. Lincoln. Then, after a few parting words, Mrs. Lincoln went home. The next day she was very ill and in a few days she died. A few days later Mrs. Brooner died. When the tombstone was placed at Mrs. Lincoln’s grave, no one could state positively which was Mrs. Brooner’s and which Mrs. Lincoln’s grave. Mr. Allen Brooner gave his opinion, and the stone was placed; but the iron fence encloses both graves, which lie in a half-acre tract of land owned by the United States Government. Mr. Allen Brooner, after his mother’s death, became a minister of the United Brethren Church, and moved to Illinois. Like all of the old settlers of Gentryville, he remembers the departure of the Lincolns for Illinois. ‘When the Lincolns were getting ready to leave,’ says Mr. Brooner, ‘Abraham and his step-brother, John Johnston, came over to our house to swap a horse for a yoke of oxen. John did all the talking. If any one had been asked that day which would make the greatest success in life, I think the answer would have been John Johnston.’”[^[8]]

Lincoln was not only winning in these days in the Jones grocery store a reputation as a talker and story-teller; he was becoming known as a kind of backwoods orator. He could repeat with effect all the poems and speeches in his various school-readers, he could imitate to perfection the wandering preachers who came to Gentryville, and he could make a political speech so stirring that he drew a crowd about him every time he mounted a stump. The applause he won was sweet; and frequently he indulged his gifts when he ought to have been at work—so thought his employers and Thomas his father. It was trying, no doubt, to the hard-pushed farmers, to see the men who ought to have been cutting grass or chopping wood throw down their sickles or axes and group around a boy, whenever he mounted a stump to develop a pet theory or repeat with variations yesterday’s sermon. In his fondness for speech-making he attended all the trials of the neighborhood, and frequently walked fifteen miles to Boonville to attend court.

LINES FROM LINCOLN’S COPY-BOOK.
These lines were written on a leaf of a copy-book in which Lincoln wrote out the tables of weights and measures, and the sums in connection with them. His step-mother, Sarah Bush Lincoln, gave the leaf, with a few others from the book, to Mr. Herndon. It is now owned by Jesse W. Weik.

He wrote as well as spoke, and some of his productions were even printed, through the influence of his admiring neighbors. Thus a local Baptist preacher was so struck with one of Abraham’s essays on temperance that he sent it to Ohio, where it appeared in some paper. Another article, on “National Politics,” so pleased a lawyer of the vicinity that he declared the “world couldn’t beat it.”

INFLUENCE OF THE RIVER LIFE.

In considering the different opportunities for development which the boy had at this time, his months spent on the Ohio as a ferryman and his trips down the Mississippi should not be forgotten. In fact, all that Abraham Lincoln saw of men and the world outside of Gentryville and its neighborhood, until after he was twenty-one years of age, he saw on these rivers. For many years the Ohio and the Mississippi were the Appian Way, the one route to the world for the Western settlers. To preserve it they had been willing in early times to go to war with Spain or with France, to secede from the Union, even to join Spain or France against the United States if either country would insure their right to their highway. In the long years in which the ownership of the great river was unsettled, every man of them had come to feel with Benjamin Franklin, “a neighbor might as well ask me to sell my street-door.” In fact, this water-way was their “street-door,” and all that many of them ever saw of the world passed here. Up and down the rivers was a continual movement. Odd craft of every kind possible on a river went by: “arks” and “sleds,” with tidy cabins where families lived, and where one could see the washing stretched, the children playing, the mother on pleasant days rocking and sewing; keel-boats, which dodged in and out and turned inquisitive noses up all the creeks and bayous; great fleets from the Alleghanies, made up of a score or more of timber rafts, and manned by forty or fifty rough boatmen; “Orleans boats,” loaded with flour, hogs, produce of all kinds; pirogues, made from great trees; “broad-horns;” curious nondescripts worked by a wheel; and, after 1812, steamboats.

FRAGMENT FROM A LEAF OF LINCOLN’S EXERCISE-BOOK.

SEE APPENDIX.

WILLIAM JONES.
The store in Gentryville in which Lincoln first made his reputation as a debater and story-teller was owned by Mr. Jones. The year before the Lincolns moved to Illinois Abraham clerked in the store, and it is said that when he left Indiana Mr. Jones sold him a pack of goods which he peddled on his journey. Mr. Jones was the representative from Spencer County in the State legislature from 1838 to 1841. He is no longer living. His son, Captain William Jones, is still in Gentryville.

All this traffic was leisurely. Men had time to tie up and tell the news and show their wares. Even the steamboats loitered as it pleased them. They knew no schedule. They stopped anywhere to let passengers off. They tied up wherever it was convenient, to wait for fresh wood to be cut and loaded, or for repairs to be made. Waiting for repairs seems, in fact, to have absorbed a great deal of the time of these early steamers. They were continually running on to “sawyers,” or “planters,” or “wooden islands,” and they blew up with a regularity which was monotonous. Even as late as 1842, when Charles Dickens made the trip down the Mississippi, he was often gravely recommended to keep as far aft as possible, “because the steamboats generally blew up forward.”

It was this varied river life with which Abraham Lincoln came into contact as a ferryman and boatman. Who can believe that he could see it and be part of it without learning much of the life and the world beyond him? Every time a steamboat or raft tied up near Anderson Creek and he with his companions boarded it and saw its mysteries and talked with its crew, every time he rowed out with passengers to a passing steamer, who can doubt that he came away with new ideas and fresh energy? The trips to New Orleans were, to a thoughtful boy, an education of no mean value. It was the most cosmopolitan and brilliant city of the United States at that date, and there young Lincoln saw life at its intensest.

CHAPTER V.
LINCOLN’S REPUTATION IN INDIANA.—REMINISCENCES OF HIS ASSOCIATES.

In spite of the crudeness of these early opportunities for learning; in spite of the fact that he had no wise direction, that he was brought up by a father with no settled purpose, and that he lived in a pioneer community, where a young man’s life at best is but a series of makeshifts, Lincoln soon developed a determination to make something out of himself, and a desire to know, which led him to neglect no opportunity to learn.

The only unbroken outside influence which directed and stimulated him in his ambitions was that coming first from his mother, then from his step-mother. These two women, both of them of unusual earnestness and sweetness of spirit, were one or the other of them at his side throughout his youth and young manhood. The ideal they held before him was the simple ideal of the early American, that if a boy is upright and industrious he may aspire to any place within the gift of the country. The boy’s nature told him they were right. Everything he read confirmed their teachings, and he cultivated, in every way open to him, his passion to know and to be something.

LINCOLN IN 1858.
From a photograph in the possession of Mr. Stuart Brown of Springfield, Illinois. The original of this photograph was bought in 1860, in a Springfield gallery, by Mr. D. McWilliams of Dwight, Illinois. Mr. McWilliams sent the picture to Mr. Milton Hay Jopingfield, an intimate friend of Mr. Lincoln’s, and from him received the following letter: “I am greatly pleased with this picture of Lincoln. I think it reproduces the man as he was, in the sober expression most habitual with him, better than any other photograph I have seen of him; and this is the opinion of all the old familiar acquaintances of his to whom I have shown it.”

There are many proofs that Lincoln’s characteristics were recognized at this period by his associates; that his determination to excel, if not appreciated, yet made its imprint. In 1865, thirty-five years after he left Gentryville, a biographer, anxious to save all that was known of Lincoln in Indiana, went among his old associates, and with a sincerity and thoroughness worthy of respect, interviewed them. At that time there were still living numbers of the people with whom Lincoln had been brought up. They all remembered something of him. It is curious to note that all of these people tell of his doing something different from what other boys did, something sufficiently superior to have made a keen impression upon them. In almost every case each person had his own special reason for admiring Lincoln. A facility in making rhymes and writing essays was the admiration of many, who considered it the more remarkable because “essays and poetry were not taught in school,” and “Abe took it up on his own account.”

GREEN B. TAYLOR, A BOYHOOD FRIEND OF LINCOLN.
Son of James Taylor, for whom Lincoln ran the ferry-boat at the mouth of Anderson Creek. Mr. Taylor, now in his eighty-second year, lives in South Dakota. He remembers Mr. Lincoln perfectly, and says that his father hired Abraham Lincoln for one year, at six dollars a month, and that he was “well pleased with the boy.”

Many others were struck by the clever use he made of his gift for writing. The wit he showed in taking revenge for a social slight by a satire on the Grigsbys, who had failed to invite him to a wedding, made a lasting impression in Gentryville. That he should write so well as to be able to humiliate his enemies more deeply than if he had resorted to the method of taking revenge current in the country, and thrashed them, seemed to his friends a mark of surprising superiority.

Others remembered his quick-wittedness in helping his friends.

“We are indebted to Kate Roby,” says Mr. Herndon, “for an incident which illustrates alike his proficiency in orthography and his natural inclination to help another out of the mire. The word ‘defied’ had been given out by Schoolmaster Crawford, but had been misspelled several times when it came Miss Roby’s turn. ‘Abe stood on the opposite side of the room,’ related Miss Roby to me in 1865, ‘and was watching me. I began d-e-f—, and then I stopped, hesitating whether to proceed with an i or a y. Looking up, I beheld Abe, a grin covering his face, and pointing with his index finger to his eye. I took the hint, spelled the word with an i, and it went through all right.’”

This same Miss Roby it was who said of Lincoln, “He was better read then than the world knows or is likely to know exactly.... He often and often commented or talked to me about what he had read—seemed to read it out of the book as he went along—did so to others. He was the learned boy among us unlearned folks. He took great pains to explain; could do it so simply. He was diffident then, too.”

CABINET MADE BY ABRAHAM LINCOLN.
This cabinet is now in the possession of Captain J. W. Wartmann of Evansville, Indiana. It is of walnut, two feet in height, and very well put together. Thomas Lincoln is said to have aided his son in making it.

One man was impressed by the character of the sentences he had given him for a copy. “It was considered at that time,” said he, “that Abe was the best penman in the neighborhood. One day, while he was on a visit at my mother’s, I asked him to write some copies for me. He very willingly consented. He wrote several of them, but one of them I have never forgotten, although a boy at that time. It was this:

“‘Good boys who to their books apply

Will all be great men by and by.’”

All of his comrades remembered his stories and his clearness in argument. “When he appeared in company,” says Nat Grigsby, “the boys would gather and cluster around him to hear him talk. Mr. Lincoln was figurative in his speech, talks, and conversation. He argued much from analogy, and explained things hard for us to understand by stories, maxims, tales, and figures. He would almost always point his lesson or idea by some story that was plain and near us, that we might instantly see the force and bearing of what he said.”

PIGEON CREEK CHURCH, WHICH THE LINCOLNS ATTENDED IN INDIANA.
From a photograph loaned by W. W. Admire of Chicago. This little log church, or “meetin’ house,” is where the Lincolns attended services in Indiana. The pulpit is said to have been made by Thomas Lincoln. The building was razed about fifteen years ago, after having been used for several years as a tobacco barn.

There are many proofs that he was an authority on all subjects, even the country jockeys bringing him their stories and seeking to inspire his enthusiasm. Captain John Lamar of Gentryville, who was a very small boy in the neighborhood when Lincoln was a young man, is still fond of describing a scene he witnessed once, which shows with what care even the “heroes” of the country tried to impress young Lincoln. “Uncle Jimmy Larkins, as everybody called him,” says Mr. Lamar, “was a great hero in my childish eyes. Why, I cannot now say, without it was his manners. There had been a big fox-chase, and Uncle Jimmy was telling about it. Of course he was the hero. I was only a little shaver, and I stood in front of Uncle Jimmy, looking up into his eyes; but he never noticed me. He looked at Abraham Lincoln, and said: ‘Abe, I’ve got the best horse in the world; he won the race and never drew a long breath.’ But Abe paid no attention to Uncle Jimmy, and I got mad at the big, overgrown fellow, and wanted him to listen to my hero’s story. Uncle Jimmy was determined that Abe should hear, and repeated the story. ‘I say, Abe, I have the best horse in the world; after all that running he never drew a long breath.’ Then Abe, looking down at my little dancing hero, said: ‘Well, Larkins, why don’t you tell us how many short breaths he drew?’ This raised a laugh on Uncle Jimmy, and he got mad, and declared he’d fight Abe if he wasn’t so big. He jumped around until Abe quietly said: ‘Now, Larkins, if you don’t shut up I’ll throw you in that water.’ I was very uneasy and angry at the way my hero was treated, but I lived to change my views about heroes.”

THE FIRST LINCOLN MONUMENT.
From a photograph made for this work. When Abraham Lincoln left Indiana, in 1830, his friend James Gentry planted, in remembrance of him, near the Lincoln cabin, a cedar tree. It still stands, sturdy and strong, though it is stripped of twigs as high as one can reach. Those who point out the tree explain the bareness by saying: “The folks who come lookin’ around have taken twigs until you can’t reach any more very handy.”

There is one other testimony to his character as a boy which should not be omitted. It is that of his step-mother:

“Abe was a good boy, and I can say what scarcely one woman—a mother—can say in a thousand: Abe never gave me a cross word or look, and never refused, in fact or appearance, to do anything I requested him. I never gave him a cross word in all my life.... His mind and mine—what little I had—seemed to run together. He was here after he was elected President. He was a dutiful son to me always. I think he loved me truly. I had a son, John, who was raised with Abe. Both were good boys; but I must say, both now being dead, that Abe was the best boy I ever saw, or expect to see.”

OLD POST FORD ACROSS THE WABASH RIVER, WHERE THE LINCOLNS CROSSED FROM INDIANA TO ILLINOIS.
From a photograph made for this work. The route by which the Lincolns went into Illinois from Indiana has always been a question in dispute. Some of the acquaintances of the family still living in Indiana claim that they followed the line marked on our map (page [45]). Others say that they went from Gentryville to the Old Post Ford across the Wabash. The route on the map was drawn on the supposition that they would have taken the road by which they would have avoided the greatest number of watercourses. Information has come to us since the map was made which shows that they went by Vincennes. Mr. Jesse W. Weik says that Dennis Hanks, who was in the party, told him in 1886 that they went through Vincennes. Colonel Chapman of Charleston, the grandson of Sarah Bush Lincoln, told Mr. Weik that in February, 1861, when Mr. Lincoln visited his mother for the last time, he told him that the settlers passed through Vincennes, where they remained a day. There, Lincoln said, they saw a printing-press for the first time. At Palestine, on the Illinois side of the Wabash, he remembered seeing a large crowd around the United States Land Office, and a travelling juggler performing sleight-of-hand tricks. We also know that they entered Decatur from the south, near the present line of the Illinois Central. This Mr. Lincoln told Mr. H. C. Whitney.

CHAPTER VI.
AMUSEMENTS OF LINCOLN’S LIFE IN INDIANA.—HIS FIRST SORROWS.

If Abraham Lincoln’s early struggle for both livelihood and education was rough and hard, his life was not without amusements. At home the rude household was overflowing with life. There were Abraham and his sister, a step-brother and two step-sisters, and a cousin of Nancy Hanks Lincoln, Dennis Hanks, whom misfortune had made an inmate of the Lincoln home—quite enough to plan sports and mischief and keep time from growing dull. Thomas Lincoln and Dennis Hanks were both famous story-tellers, and the Lincolns spent many a cozy evening about their cabin fire, repeating the stories they knew.

GRAVE OF LINCOLN’S SISTER.
From a photograph taken for this work. Sarah, or Nancy, Lincoln was born in Elizabethtown, Kentucky, in 1807. In 1826 she married Aaron Grigsby, and a year later died. She was buried not far from Gentryville, in what is now called “Old Pigeon Cemetery.” Her grave is marked by the rude stone directly over the star. The marble monument in the centre is that of her husband.

CORN-HUSK BROOMS AND MOPS.
Photographed for this work from the originals, in the United States National Museum at Washington. Corn-husks were used by the pioneers of the West to make brooms, brushes, mats, and horse-collars.

Of course the boys hunted. Not that Abraham ever became a true sportsman; indeed, he seems to have lacked the genuine sporting instinct. In a curious autobiography, written entirely in the third person, which Mr. Lincoln prepared at the request of a friend in 1860,[^[9]] he says of his exploits as a hunter: “A few days before the completion of his eighth year, in the absence of his father, a flock of wild turkeys approached the new log cabin; and Abraham, with a rifle gun, standing inside, shot through a crack and killed one of them. He has never since pulled the trigger on any larger game.” This exploit is confirmed by Dennis Hanks, who says: “No doubt about A. Lincoln’s killing the turkey. He done it with his father’s rifle, made by William Lutes of Bullitt County, Kentucky. I have killed a hundred deer with her myself; turkeys too numerous to mention.”

A LINCOLN CHAIR.
This chair was made from rails split by Abraham Lincoln when he was living in Spencer County, Indiana.

But there were many other country sports which he enjoyed to the full. He went swimming in the evenings; fished with the other boys in Pigeon Creek, and caught chubs and suckers enough to delight any boy; he wrestled, jumped, and ran races at the noon rests. He was present at every country horse-race and fox-chase. The sports he preferred were those which brought men together: the spelling-school, the husking-bee, the “raising;” and of all these he was the life by his wit, his stories, his good nature, his doggerel verses, his practical jokes, and by a rough kind of politeness—for even in Indiana in those times there was a notion of politeness, and one of Lincoln’s schoolmasters had even given “lessons in manners.” Lincoln seems to have profited in a degree by them; for Mrs. Crawford, at whose home he worked some time, declares that he always “lifted his hat and bowed” when he made his appearance.

PIONEER KITCHEN UTENSILS.
Drawn for this work from the original articles, in the United States National Museum, through the courtesy of the director, Mr. G. Brown Goode. The articles in the group are a hominy mortar and pestle, water gourd and gourd dipper, wooden pails and tub, and a wooden piggin.

There was, of course, a rough gallantry among the young people; and Lincoln’s old comrades and friends in Indiana have left many tales of how he “went to see the girls,” of how he brought in the biggest back-log and made the brightest fire; then of how the young people, sitting around it, watching the way the sparks flew, told their fortunes. He helped pare apples, shell corn, and crack nuts. He took the girls to meeting and to spelling-school, though he was not often allowed to take part in the spelling-match, for the one who “chose first” always chose “Abe Lincoln,” and that was equivalent to winning, as the others knew that “he would stand up the longest.”

The nearest approach to sentiment at this time, of which we know, is recorded in a story Lincoln once told to an acquaintance in Springfield. It was a rainy day, and he was sitting with his feet on the window-sill, his eyes on the street, watching the rain. Suddenly he looked up and said:

THE HILL NEAR GENTRYVILLE FROM WHICH THE LINCOLNS TOOK THEIR LAST LOOK AT THEIR INDIANA HOME.

“Did you ever write out a story in your mind? I did when I was a little codger. One day a wagon with a lady and two girls and a man broke down near us, and while they were fixing up, they cooked in our kitchen. The woman had books and read us stories, and they were the first I ever had heard. I took a great fancy to one of the girls; and when they were gone I thought of her a great deal, and one day when I was sitting out in the sun by the house I wrote out a story in my mind. I thought I took my father’s horse and followed the wagon, and finally I found it, and they were surprised to see me. I talked with the girl and persuaded her to elope with me; and that night I put her on my horse, and we started off across the prairie. After several hours we came to a camp; and when we rode up we found it was the one we had left a few hours before, and we went in. The next night we tried again, and the same thing happened—the horse came back to the same place; and then we concluded that we ought not to elope. I stayed until I had persuaded her father to give her to me. I always meant to write that story out and publish it, and I began once; but I concluded it was not much of a story. But I think that was the beginning of love with me.”[^[10]]