Life of Abraham Lincoln | Page 2

President, the second child, was born February 12, 1809, in a log cabin, three miles from Hodgensville, then Hardin, now LaRue County, Kentucky. When little Abraham was seven years old his father moved to Indiana and took up a claim near Gentryville, Spencer County, and built a rude shelter of unhewn logs without a floor, the large opening protected only by hanging skins. In this discomfort they lived for a year, when they erected a log cabin. There was plenty of game, but otherwise the fare was very poor and the life was hard. In 1818 little Abraham's mother, delicate, refined, pathetic and too frail for such rude life, sickened and felt that the end was near. She called her little children to her bed of leaves and skins and told them to "love their kindred and worship God," and then she died and left them only the memory of her love.
Thomas Lincoln made a rude coffin himself, but there were no ceremonies at that most pathetic funeral when he laid his young wife in her desolate grave in the forest. Little Lincoln was nine years old, and the mystery of death, the pitiless winter, the lone grave, the deep forest--shivering with his sister in the cold cabin--it all made a deep impression on the sensitive boy.
Late in the year 1819 Thomas Lincoln went back to Kentucky, and there courted and married a widow named Sarah Buck Johnston, who had once been his sweetheart. She brought with her some household goods and her own three children. She dressed the forlorn little Lincolns in some of the clothing belonging to her children. She was described as tall, straight as an Indian, handsome, fair, talkative and proud. Also she had the abundant strength for hard labor. She and little Abraham learned to love each other dearly.
Abraham went to school in all less than a year, but this good step-mother encouraged him to study at home and he read every book he heard of within a circuit of many miles. He read the Bible, Aesop's Fables, Murray's English Reader, Robinson Crusoe, The Pilgrim's Progress, A History of the United States, Weem's Life of Washington and the Revised Statutes of Indiana. He studied by the fire-light and practiced writing with a pen made from a buzzard's quill dipped in ink made from brier roots. He practiced writing on the subjects of Temperance, Government, and Cruelty to Animals. The unkindness so often common to those frontier folks shocked his sensitive soul. He practiced speaking by imitating the itinerant preacher and by telling stories to any who would give him an audience. He walked fifteen miles to Boonville to attend court and listen to the lawyers.
At nineteen he was six feet and two inches tall, weighed one hundred and fifty pounds, had long arms and legs, slender body, large and awkward hands and feet, but not a large head. He is pictured as wearing coon-skin cap, linsey-woolsey shirt, and buckskin breeches that were often too short. He said that his father taught him to work but never taught him to love it--but he did work hard and without complaining. He was said to do much more work than any ordinary man at splitting rails, chopping, mowing, ploughing, doing everything that he was asked to do with all his might. It was at this age that he went on the first trip with a flat boat down to New Orleans. This was an interesting adventure; and there had been sorrows, also; his sister Sarah had married and died in child-birth.
In the spring of 1830 the roving spirit of Thomas Lincoln felt the call of the West and they set out for Illinois. John Hanks met them five miles northwest of Decatur in Macon County, where on a bluff overlooking the muddy Sangamon they built a cabin, split rails, fenced fifteen acres and broke the prairie. Young Lincoln was twenty-one and free, but he remained at home during the summer, helping his father and his devoted step-mother to establish their new home. The following winter he split the historic rails for Mrs. Nancy Miller--"four hundred for every yard of jeans dyed with walnut juice necessary to make him a pair of trowsers."
In the spring, a pioneer adventurer, Denton Offut, engaged Abraham, with Hanks and one other helper, to take a boat load of provisions to New Orleans, for the wages of fifty cents a day and a bonus of sixty dollars for the three. This and the preceding trip down the river gave Lincoln the sight of slavery which caused him to say, "If ever I get a chance to hit that thing I'll hit it hard."
New Salem was a very small village destined to be of only a few years duration. Here Offut erected a small general