>>>  YOU ARE VIEWING A 200 LINE SAMPLE OF EBOOK# E01218  <<<

TITLE: THE BOYS' LIFE OF ABRAHAM LINCOLN
AUTHOR: HELEN NICOLAY
EBOOK: E01218 (O'Briens Book Cellar)

The Boys' Life of Abraham Lincoln

by Helen Nicolay

I. A PRESIDENT'S CHILDHOOD

Abraham Lincoln's forefathers were pioneers--men who left their
homes to open up the wilderness and make the way plain for others
to follow them. For one hundred and seventy years, ever since the
first American Lincoln came from England to Massachusetts in
1638, they had been moving slowly westward as new settlements
were made in the forest. They faced solitude, privation, and all
the dangers and hardships that beset men who take up their homes
where only beasts and wild men have had homes before; but they
continued to press steadily forward, though they lost fortune and
sometimes even life itself, in their westward progress. Back in
Pennsylvania and New Jersey some of the Lincolns had been men of
wealth and influence. In Kentucky, where the future President was
born on February 12, 1809, his parents lived in deep poverty
Their home was a small log cabin of the rudest kind, and nothing
seemed more unlikely than that their child, coming into the world
in such humble surroundings, was destined to be the greatest man
of his time. True to his race, he also was to be a pioneer--not
indeed, like his ancestors, a leader into new woods and
unexplored fields, but a pioneer of a nobler and grander sort,
directing the thoughts of men ever toward the right, and leading
the American people, through difficulties and dangers and a
mighty war, to peace and freedom.

The story of this wonderful man begins and ends with a tragedy,
for his grandfather, also named Abraham, was killed by a shot
from an Indian's rifle while peaceably at work with his three
sons on the edge of their frontier clearing. Eighty-one years
later the President himself met death by an assassin's bullet.
The murderer of one was a savage of the forest; the murderer of
the other that far more cruel thing, a savage of civilization.

When the Indian's shot laid the pioneer farmer low, his second
son, Josiah, ran to a neighboring fort for help, and Mordecai,
the eldest, hurried to the cabin for his rifle. Thomas, a child
of six years, was left alone beside the dead body of his father;
and as Mordecai snatched the gun from its resting-place over the
door of the cabin, he saw, to his horror, an Indian in his
war-paint, just stooping to seize the child. Taking quick aim at
a medal on the breast of the savage, he fired, and the Indian
fell dead. The little boy, thus released, ran to the house, where
Mordecai, firing through the loopholes, kept the Indians at bay
until help arrived from the fort.

It was this child Thomas who grew up to be the father of
President Abraham Lincoln. After the murder of his father the
fortunes of the little family grew rapidly worse, and doubtless
because of poverty, as well as by reason of the marriage of his
older brothers and sisters, their home was broken up, and Thomas
found himself, long before he was grown, a wandering laboring
boy. He lived for a time with an uncle as his hired servant, and
later he learned the trade of carpenter. He grew to manhood
entirely without education, and when he was twenty-eight years
old could neither read nor write. At that time he married Nancy
Hanks, a good-looking young woman of twenty-three, as poor as
himself, but so much better off as to learning that she was able
to teach her husband to sign his own name. Neither of them had
any money, but living cost little on the frontier in those days,
and they felt that his trade would suffice to earn all that they
should need. Thomas took his bride to a tiny house in
Elizabethtown, Kentucky, where they lived for about a year, and
where a daughter was born to them.

Then they moved to a small farm thirteen miles from
Elizabethtown, which they bought on credit, the country being yet
so new that there were places to be had for mere promises to pay.
Farms obtained on such terms were usually of very poor quality,
and this one of Thomas Lincoln's was no exception to the rule. A
cabin ready to be occupied stood on it, however; and not far
away, hidden in a pretty clump of trees and bushes, was a fine
spring of water, because of which the place was known as Rock
Spring Farm. In the cabin on this farm the future President of
the United States was born on February 12, 1809, and here the
first four years of his life were spent. Then the Lincolns moved
to a much bigger and better farm on Knob Creek, six miles from
Hodgensville, which Thomas Lincoln bought, again on credit,
selling the larger part of it soon afterward to another
purchaser. Here they remained until Abraham was seven years old.

About this early part of his childhood almost nothing is known.
He never talked of these days, even to his most intimate friends.
To the pioneer child a farm offered much that a town lot could
not give him--space; woods to roam in; Knob Creek with its
running water and its deep, quiet pools for a playfellow; berries
to be hunted for in summer and nuts in autumn; while all the year
round birds and small animals pattered across his path to people
the solitude in place of human companions. The boy had few
comrades. He wandered about playing his lonesome little games,
and when these were finished returned to the small and cheerless
cabin. Once, when asked what he remembered about the War of 1812
with Great Britain, he replied: "Only this: I had been fishing
one day and had caught a little fish, which I was taking home. I
met a soldier in the road, and having always been told at home
that we must be good to soldiers, I gave him my fish." It is only
a glimpse into his life, but it shows the solitary, generous
child and the patriotic household.

It was while living on this farm that Abraham and his sister
Sarah first began going to A-B-C schools. Their earliest teacher
was Zachariah Riney, who taught near the Lincoln cabin; the next
was Caleb Hazel, four miles away.

In spite of the tragedy that darkened his childhood, Thomas
Lincoln seems to have been a cheery, indolent, good-natured man.
By means of a little farming and occasional jobs at his trade, he
managed to supply his family with the absolutely necessary food
and shelter, but he never got on in the world. He found it much
easier to gossip with his friends, or to dream about rich new
lands in the West, than to make a thrifty living in the place
where he happened to be. The blood of the pioneer was in his
veins too--the desire to move westward; and hearing glowing
accounts of the new territory of Indiana, he resolved to go and
see it for himself. His skill as a carpenter made this not only
possible but reasonably cheap, and in the fall of 1816 he built
himself a little flatboat, launched it half a mile from his
cabin, at the mouth of Knob Creek on the waters of the Rolling
Fork, and floated on it down that stream to Salt River, down Salt
River to the Ohio, and down the Ohio to a landing called
Thompson's Ferry on the Indiana shore.

Sixteen miles out from the river, near a small stream known as
Pigeon Creek, he found a spot in the forest that suited him; and
as his boat could not be made to float up-stream, he sold it,
stored his goods with an obliging settler, and trudged back to
Kentucky, all the way on foot, to fetch his wife and children--
Sarah, who was now nine years old, and Abraham, seven. This time
the journey to Indiana was made with two horses, used by the
mother and children for riding, and to carry their little camping
outfit for the night. The distance from their old home was, in a
straight line, little more than fifty miles, but they had to go
double that distance because of the very few roads it was
possible to follow.

Reaching the Ohio River and crossing to the Indiana shore, Thomas
Lincoln hired a wagon which carried his family and their
belongings the remaining sixteen miles through the forest to the
spot he had chosen--a piece of heavily wooded land, one and a
half miles east of what has since become the village of
Gentryville in Spencer County. The lateness of the autumn made it
necessary to put up a shelter as quickly as possible, and he
built what was known on the frontier as a half-faced camp, about
fourteen feet square. This differed from a cabin in that it was
closed on only three sides, being quite open to the weather on
the fourth. A fire was usually made in front of the open side,
and thus the necessity for having a chimney was done away with.
Thomas Lincoln doubtless intended this only for a temporary
shelter, and as such it would have done well enough in pleasant
summer weather; but it was a rude provision against the storms
and winds of an Indiana winter. It shows his want of energy that
the family remained housed in this poor camp for nearly a whole
year; but, after all, he must not be too hastily blamed. He was
far from idle. A cabin was doubtless begun, and there was the
very heavy work of clearing away the timber--cutting down large
trees, chopping them into suitable lengths, and rolling them
together into great heaps to be burned, or of splitting them into
rails to fence the small field upon which he managed to raise a
patch of corn and other things during the following summer.

Though only seven years old, Abraham was unusually large and
strong for his age, and he helped his father in all this heavy
labor of clearing the farm. In after years, Mr. Lincoln said that
an ax "was put into his hands at once, and from that till within
his twenty-third year he was almost constantly handling that most
useful instrument--less, of course, in ploughing and harvesting
seasons." At first the Lincolns and their seven or eight
neighbors lived in the unbroken forest. They had only the tools
and household goods they brought with them, or such things as
they could fashion with their own hands. There was no sawmill to
saw lumber. The village of Gentryville was not even begun.
Breadstuff could be had only by sending young Abraham seven miles
on horseback with a bag of corn to be ground in a hand
grist-mill.

About the time the new cabin was ready relatives and friends
followed from Kentucky, and some of these in turn occupied the
half-faced camp. During the autumn a severe and mysterious
sickness broke out in their little settlement, and a number of
people died, among them the mother of young Abraham. There was no
help to be had beyond what the neighbors could give each other.
The nearest doctor lived fully thirty miles away. There was not
even a minister to conduct the funerals. Thomas Lincoln made the
coffins for the dead out of green lumber cut from the forest
trees with a whip-saw, and they were laid to rest in a clearing
in the woods. Months afterward, largely through the efforts of
the sorrowing boy, a preacher who chanced to come that way was
induced to hold a service and preach a sermon over the grave of
Mrs. Lincoln.

Her death was indeed a serious blow to her husband and children.
Abraham's sister, Sarah, was only eleven years old, and the tasks
and cares of the little household were altogether too heavy for
her years and experience. Nevertheless they struggled bravely

<<<  END OF SAMPLE... (THE FULL EBOOK HAS 326329 TOTAL CHARACTERS)  >>>