Lincoln | Page 8

not have peace till this was done.
Shadowy as she is, ghostlike across the page of history, it is plain that
she was a reality to her son. He not only loved her but revered her. He
believed that from her he had inherited the better part of his genius.
Many years after her death he said, "God bless my mother; all that I am
or ever hope to be I owe to her."
Nancy was not long without a successor. Thomas Lincoln, the next
year, journeyed back to Kentucky and returned in triumph to Indiana,
bringing as his wife, an old flame of his who had married, had been
widowed, and was of a mind for further adventures. This Sarah Bush
Lincoln, of less distinction than Nancy, appears to have been
steadier-minded and stronger-willed. Even before this, Thomas had left
the half-faced camp and moved into a cabin. But such a cabin! It had
neither door, nor window, nor floor. Sally Lincoln required her
husband to make of it a proper house--by the standards of Pigeon Creek.
She had brought with her as her dowry a wagonload of furniture. These
comforts together with her strong will began a new era of relative
comfort in the Lincoln cabin.[1]
Sally Lincoln was a kind stepmother to Abraham who became strongly
attached to her. In the rough and nondescript community of Pigeon
Creek, a world of weedy farms, of miserable mud roads, of log
farm-houses, the family life that was at least tolerable. The sordid
misery described during her regime emerged from wretchedness to a
state of by all the recorders of Lincoln's early days seems to have ended
about his twelfth year. At least, the vagrant suggestion disappeared.
Though the life that succeeded was void of luxury, though it was rough,
even brutal, dominated by a coarse, peasant-like view of things, it was

scarcely by peasant standards a life of hardship. There was food
sufficient, if not very good; protection from wind and weather; fire in
the winter time; steady labor; and social acceptance by the community
of the creekside. That the labor was hard and long, went without saying.
But as to that--as of the whippings in Kentucky--what else, from the
peasant point of view, would you expect? Abraham took it all with the
same stoicism with which he had once taken the whippings. By the
unwritten law of the creekside he was his father's property, and so was
his labor, until he came of age. Thomas used him as a servant or hired
him out to other farmers. Stray recollections show us young Abraham
working as a farm-hand for twenty-five cents the day, probably with
"keep" in addition; we glimpse him slaughtering hogs skilfully at
thirty-one cents a day, for this was "rough work." He became noted as
an axman.
In the crevices, so to speak, of his career as a farm-hand, Abraham got
a few months of schooling, less than a year in all. A story that has been
repeated a thousand times shows the raw youth by the cabin fire at
night doing sums on the back of a wooden shovel, and shaving off its
surface repeatedly to get a fresh page. He devoured every book that
came his way, only a few to be sure, but generally great ones--the Bible,
of course, and Aesop, Crusoe, Pilgrim's Progress, and a few histories,
these last unfortunately of the poorer sort. He early displayed a bent for
composition, scribbling verses that were very poor, and writing
burlesque tales about his acquaintances in what passed for a Biblical
style.[2]
One great experience broke the monotony of the life on Pigeon Creek.
He made a trip to New Orleans as a "hand" on a flatboat. Of this trip
little is known though much may be surmised. To his deeply poetic
nature what an experience it must have been: the majesty of the vast
river; the pageant of its immense travel; the steamers heavily laden; the
fleets of barges; the many towns; the nights of stars over wide sweeps
of water; the stately plantation houses along the banks; the old French
city with its crowds, its bells, the shipping, the strange faces and the
foreign speech; all the bewildering evidence that there were other
worlds besides Pigeon Creek!

What seed of new thinking was sown in his imagination by this
Odyssey we shall never know. The obvious effect in the ten years of his
life in Indiana was produced at Pigeon Creek. The "settlement" was
within fifteen miles of the Ohio. It lay in that southerly fringe of
Indiana which received early in the century many families of much the
same estate, character and origin as the Lincolns,--poor whites of the
edges of the great forest working outward toward the prairies. Located
on good