The Life of Abraham Lincoln | Page 5

or contrasting her with others, we may attest our admiration of this one as a "woman nobly planned." In the midst of her household cares, which were neither few nor light, she had the courage to undertake to teach her husband to read and write. She also gave her children a start in learning. Of her the president, nearly half a century after her death, said to Seward, with tears,--"All that I am or hope to be, I owe to my angel mother-- blessings on her memory."
Mr. Lincoln himself never manifested much interest in his genealogy. At one time he did give out a brief statement concerning his ancestors because it seemed to be demanded by the exegencies of the campaign. But at another time, when questioned by Mr. J. L. Scripps, editor of the Chicago Tribune, he answered: "Why, Scripps, it is a great piece of folly to attempt to make anything out of me or my early life. It can all be condensed into a single sentence, and that sentence you will find in Gray's Elegy:
'The short and simple annals of the poor.'
That's my life, and that's all you or any one else can make out of it."
In all this he was neither proud nor depreciative of his people. He was simply modest. Nor did he ever outgrow his sympathy with the common people.
CHAPTER III.
EARLY YEARS.
The year 1809 was fruitful in the birth of great men in the Anglo-Saxon race. In that year were born Charles Darwin, scientist, Alfred Tennyson, poet, William E. Gladstone, statesman, and, not least, Abraham Lincoln, liberator.
Thomas Lincoln was left fatherless in early boyhood, and grew up without any schooling or any definite work. For the most part he did odd jobs as they were offered. He called himself a carpenter. But in a day when the outfit of tools numbered only about a half dozen, and when every man was mainly his own carpenter, this trade could not amount to much. Employment was unsteady and pay was small.
Thomas Lincoln, after his marriage to Nancy Hanks, lived in Elizabethtown, Ky., where the first child, Sarah, was born. Shortly after this event he decided to combine farming with his trade of carpentering, and so removed to a farm fourteen miles out, situated in what is now La Rue County, where his wife, on the twelfth day of February, 1809, gave birth to the son who was named Abraham after his grandfather. The child was born in a log cabin of a kind very common in that day and for many years later. It was built four-square and comprised only one room, one window, and a door.
[Illustration: Lincoln's Boyhood Home in Kentucky.]
Here they lived for a little more than four years, when the father removed to another farm about fifteen miles further to the northeast.
The occasion of this removal and of the subsequent one, two or three years later, was undoubtedly the uncertainty of land titles in Kentucky in that day. This "roving disposition" cannot fairly be charged to shiftlessness. In spite of the extraordinary disadvantages of Thomas Lincoln's early life, he lived as well as his neighbors, though that was humble enough, and accumulated a small amount of property in spite of the low rate of compensation.
In the year 1816 Thomas determined to migrate to Indiana. He sold out his farm, receiving for it the equivalent of $300. Of this sum, $20 was in cash and the rest was in whisky--ten barrels--which passed as a kind of currency in that day. He then loaded the bulk of his goods upon a flat boat, floating down the stream called Rolling Fork into Salt Creek, thence into the Ohio River, in fact, to the bottom of that river. The watercourse was obstructed with stumps and snags of divers sorts, and especially with "sawyers," or trees in the river which, forced by the current, make an up-and-down motion like that of a man sawing wood.
The flat boat became entangled in these obstructions and was upset, and the cargo went to the bottom. By dint of great labor much of this was rescued and the travelers pushed on as far as Thompson's Ferry in Perry County, Indiana. There the cargo was left in the charge of friends, and Lincoln returned for his family and the rest of his goods.
During his father's absence, the boy Abe had his first observation of sorrow. A brother had been born in the cabin and had died in infancy. The little grave was in the wilderness, and before leaving that country forever, the mother, leading her six-year-old boy by the hand, paid a farewell visit to the grave. The child beheld with awe the silent grief of the mother and carried in his memory that scene to his dying day.
The father returned with glowing