The Story of Young Abraham Lincoln | Page 9

as
he could, picking berries, dropping seeds and carrying water for the
men to drink. The farm at Knob Creek seems to have been a little more
fertile than the other two places on which his father had chosen to live.
Once while living in the White House, President Lincoln was asked if
he could remember his "old Kentucky home." He replied with
considerable feeling:
"I remember that old home very well. Our farm was composed of three
fields. It lay in the valley, surrounded by high hills and deep gorges.
Sometimes, when there came a big rain in the hills, the water would
come down through the gorges and spread all over the farm. The last
thing I remember of doing there was one Saturday afternoon; the other
boys planted the corn in what we called the big field--it contained
seven acres--and I dropped the pumpkin seed. I dropped two seeds in

every other row and every other hill. The next Sunday morning there
came a big rain in the hills--it did not rain a drop in the valley, but the
water, coming through the gorges, washed the ground, corn, pumpkin
seeds and all, clear off the field!"
Although this was the last thing Lincoln could remember doing on that
farm, it is not at all likely that it was the last thing he did there, for
Thomas Lincoln was not the man to plant corn in a field he was about
to leave. (The Lincolns moved away in the fall.)
Another baby boy was born at Knob Creek farm; a puny, pathetic little
stranger. When this baby was about three years old, the father had to
use his skill as a cabinet maker in making a tiny coffin, and the Lincoln
family wept over a lonely little grave in the wilderness.
About this time Abe began to learn lessons in practical patriotism.
Once when Mr. Lincoln was asked what he could remember of the War
of 1812, he replied:
"Nothing but this: I had been fishing one day and caught a little fish
which I was taking home. I met a soldier on the road, and, having been
told at home that we must be good to the soldiers, I gave him my fish."
An old man, Major Alexander Sympson, who lived not far from the
Lincolns at this period, left this description of "a mere spindle of a
boy," in one of his earliest attempts to defend himself against odds,
while waiting at the neighboring mill while a grist was being ground.
"He was the shyest, most reticent, most uncouth and
awkward-appearing, homeliest and worst-dressed of any in the crowd.
So superlatively wretched a butt could not hope to look on long
unmolested. He was attacked one day as he stood near a tree by a larger
boy with others at his back. But the crowd was greatly astonished when
little Lincoln soundly thrashed the first, the second, and third boy in
succession; and then, placing his back against the tree, he defied the
whole crowd, and told them they were a lot of cowards."
Evidently Father Tom, who enjoyed quite a reputation as a wrestler,

had give the small boy a few lessons in "the manly art of self-defense."
Meanwhile the little brother and sister were learning still better things
at their mother's knee, alternately hearing and reading stories from the
Bible, "The Pilgrim's Progress," "Æsop's Fables," "Robinson Crusoe,"
and other books, common now, but rare enough in the backwoods in
those days.
There were hard times, even in the wilderness of Kentucky, after the
War of 1812. Slavery was spreading, and Thomas and Nancy Lincoln
heartily hated that "relic of barbarism." To avoid witnessing its wrongs
which made it harder for self-respecting white men to rise above the
class referred to with contempt in the South as "poor white trash," Tom
Lincoln determined to move farther north and west--and deeper into the
wilds.
It is sometimes stated that Abraham Lincoln belonged to the indolent
class known as "poor whites," but this is not true. Shiftless and
improvident though his father was, he had no use for that class of white
slaves, who seemed to fall even lower than the blacks.
There was trouble, too, about the title to much of the land in Kentucky,
while Indiana offered special inducements to settlers in that new
territory.
In his carpenter work, Thomas Lincoln had learned how to build a
flatboat, and had made at least one trip to New Orleans on a craft which
he himself had put together. So, when he finally decided in the fall of
1816 to emigrate to Indiana, he at once began to build another boat,
which he launched on the Rolling Fork, at the mouth of Knob Creek,
about half a mile from