CHAPTER II

I. THE PROBLEM OF A WORTHWHILE LIFE

Many of the early events entering into Lincoln's life seem too trivial to mention in the light of his great services to America. But the human struggle and the moral achievement of a supreme American ideal cannot be appreciated or understood unless the experiences buffeting the way to it, and their circumstances, are known for what they mean to his life. Trivial experiences have very much to do with forming our lives and without them we can neither appreciate nor understand the great events that we believe have given us our career and our destiny.

After being nominated for the presidency of the United States, Lincoln was asked for material from his early life out of which to make a biography.

"Why," he replied earnestly, as if this was a sacred privacy in his own profound struggle, "it is a great folly to attempt to make anything out of me or my early life. It can all be condensed in a single sentence; and that sentence you will find in Grey's Elegy: 'The short and simple annals of the poor.'"

His early friends all agree that he was lazy and idle, but, when we ask closer, they tell us that he spent his time "reading and writing and arguing." One of his most admiring friends hired him for a certain period and became greatly disgusted at the young man's preference for idling his time away reading. Another friend one day found him reading, and, with the intention of severely rebuking him, asked what he was doing. "Reading law," was the reply, without taking his eye from the page.

"Almighty Gosh!" was all the disgusted friend could say. Reading was bad enough waste of time, but to be reading law was beyond all use of words or censure.

So, it merely proves that no one can be understood by the historical student, except as the conditions of mental soil in which the character grew are understood. And especially is it good to learn why the prophet is without honor in his own country, sometimes not even known in his own age. Home people rarely or never understand the unusual worker, because they cannot measure outside of their own experience, and their opinions rarely give much insight into the great laborer born among them, with the great urge, if not the vision, of work and the way.

Lincoln is probably the last Great American who shall ever have to begin his mind-making as anything less than an "heir of all ages." In Lincoln's case it seemed as if all else was banished that a mind might build itself up anew to be a fundamental interpretation of American civilization. Like the great Newton, he built his world of principle out of the particulars of original experience, and found that it was the order of the universe. And yet, it might be said that he was a failure in particulars and minor matters, for he thought in terms of general humanity and swung the world into a new consciousness and vision of the moral law.

As Mr. Herndon says, "His origin was in that unknown and sunless bog in which history never made a footprint." The social origin and development of Christ were far less obscure, humble and lowly in destitute and helpless environment, before the special task of preserving a meaning in the earth as a home for man.

Julia Ward Howe expresses the seriousness attending the possibilities of every new-born soul, as she says, of Lincoln,

"Through the dim pageant of the years A wondrous tracery appears: A cabin of the western wild Shelters in sleep a new-born child, Nor nurse, nor parent dear, can know The way those infant feet must go; And yet a nation's help and hope Are sealed within that horoscope."

It was certainly impossible for a pioneer of the early frontier to imagine how the rich live now, but it is not so hard for any one now to imagine how people lived then, if he will go into the deep woods with only a few simple tools and try to live. It can be done and it will probably be a healthful experience, but not an experience that any person would be expected to try twice.

It is therefore not needful to the setting of our story about the making of a man, for any extended description to be made of the ignorance and the poverty common to those times.

It is enough for us to say with Maurice Thompson in his lines:

"He was the North, the South, the East, the West; The thrall, the master, all of us in one."

Ida Tarbell, after her extensive original researches into the early life of Lincoln, very thoughtfully, says,

"He seems to have had as nearly a universal human sympathy as any one in history. A man could not be so high or so low that Lincoln could not meet him and he could not be so much of a fool, or so many kinds of a fool. He could listen unruffled to cant, to violence, to criticism, just and unjust. Amazingly he absorbed from each man the real thing he had to offer, annexed him by showing him that he understood, and yet gave him somehow a sense of the impossibility of considering him alone, and leaving out the multitudes of other men as convinced and as loyal as he was."

II. THE LINCOLN BOY OF THE KENTUCKY WOODS

We may well believe that the little Lincoln boy was thrilled with stories of noxious "varmints" and wild "Injuns." As the fire crackled in the wide earthen fireplace and the sparks flew up the broad dirt chimney, we may well suppose the mystic superstitions of the ignorant times thrilled the young mind with vague fears and often with indescribable dread.

Doubtless he often heard his father tell the story of his own desperate boyhood, how Mordecai, the elder brother, had, just in the nick of time, saved his life from the tomahawk.

Abe's father when a child went out to their clearing with his two brothers and their father, whose name was Abraham. We may be sure that their watchful eyes looked closely into every pile of brush or clump of bushes that might hide an Indian. But the Indians were trained to hide like snakes or foxes. So that which was ever expected and feared happened. There was a shot from an unseen form in the bushes, and the father of the family fell dead.

Mordecai, the eldest, ran for the cabin, the other boy ran for help, but the younger boy, too bewildered and not comprehending what had happened, remained by the side of his fallen father.

As Mordecai looked out through the chinks of the cabin to see the enemy, which he supposed to be in numbers, he saw a lone Indian come out and seize the boy. With quick aim he fired and the Indian fell dead. The little boy, now understanding, began to scream, when Mordecai ran to him and carried him into the cabin.

It was in the death of this pioneer that the Lincolns became subjected to such poverty. And yet it is doubtful if their poverty was much worse than most of those around them. In this vision of frontier life we can get some idea at what great cost has been achieved the civilization that composes the foundations of this country.

Lives seem insignificant and their experiences trivial, but in them are the making of all that is good and great. In the making of typical lives is to be seen the meaning and the making of the nation. It is said that Lincoln's first attempts to write his name were made with a stick upon the ground. Those letters have long since vanished and yet that name is written in sentiments and deeds of gold throughout the earth.

Wilbur Nesbit holds up the jewel of Lincoln's life in the following lines:

"Not as the great who grew more great, Until they have a mystic fame-- No stroke of pastime or of fate Gave Lincoln his undying name. A common man, earth-bred, earth-born, One of the breed who work and wait,-- His was a soul above all scorn, His was a heart above all hate."

III. HOME-SEEKERS IN THE WILD WEST

Thomas Lincoln became a home-seeking wanderer soon after the death of his father. According to the laws of that time, all the property went to the eldest, and it may be supposed that little attention was paid in that rough destitute life to the raising of Thomas. He grew up simply "a wandering, laboring boy," whose hard circumstances left little ambition or hope in him. But, in the course of all wondrous events and time, he became a carpenter, well respected, and married his cousin, the niece of the man in whose shop he worked. This niece was Nancy Hanks, daughter of Joseph Hanks, who had married Nannie Shipley, a Quaker girl. From all authentic accounts that can be gathered concerning Nancy Hanks, she was one of God's great women.

This much at least is sufficiently verified that she was a strong, handsome girl, noted for her religious zeal, and was one of the most sought-for singers at the marvellous camp-meetings of those days. That the marriage of Thomas Lincoln and Nancy Hanks was regarded as an important community event is the testimony of several who were present, for every social enjoyment known to the times was there, and the occasion was celebrated with unusual demonstrations of good will.

The wedding took place June 12, 1806, and the documents of the marriage show that she had enough property left her by her father to require a guardian appointed by the court. The uncle with whom she lived was her guardian, appointed on the death of her parents when she was nine years old.

Documents in existence also show that Thomas Lincoln owned a large tract of land, that he held responsible public position, and was well respected in his community. The stories of shiftlessness and shame so long told as truth must be cast out as among the curiosities of envious gossip, sometimes accepted even by those it injures as true history.

A year after the marriage of Thomas Lincoln and Nancy Hanks their first child was born, a girl, which they named Nancy. Twelve years later, after the death of her mother and the marriage of her father to Sarah Bush Johnson, this daughter renamed herself Sarah, by which name she was known until her death at the age of twenty.

Sarah was born at Elizabethtown, Kentucky, but soon after the family moved to a farm, bought several years before by Thomas Lincoln, about fourteen miles away. There on February 12, 1809, was born one of the greatest of all Americans, Abraham Lincoln.

The Lincoln home was so rude that descriptions of it, in comparison with present poverty-stricken homes, sounds like distressful destitution, but it was the home of frontiersmen in pioneer days. All testimony agrees that no one suffered and that the boy grew strong and manly, in the abiding favor of friends, and in the noble aspirations of a superior destiny.

When Abraham Lincoln was seven years old and his sister Sarah was near nine, his father desired to seek a better home, which the pioneer always dreamed of as farther on. He built a flatboat in a creek half a mile from his house, put his household goods upon it, and floated down the Rolling Fork on a voyage of discovery to Salt River, and down Salt River to the Ohio. At Thompson's Ferry on the Indiana shore he landed, stored his goods, and went back after his family, which he brought through on horseback.

IV. A WONDERFUL FAMILY IN THE DESOLATE WILDERNESS

Lincoln tells us of one thing his mother said to him which he never forgot, though he was not yet nine years old. Her thought for him became his dream of her.

"Mother wants her little boy to be honest, truthful, and kind to everybody, and always to trust in God."

The words of his "angel mother," as he named her, were always the guiding star of his life. He always wanted to be what his mother said was her desire for him to be. He often said, "All I am or hope to be I owe to my angel mother," and yet, as a poet has said it, that mother

"Gave us Lincoln and never knew."

An epidemic carried away Lincoln's mother in 1818 when he was nine years of age. It was the beginning of that great man's acquaintance with grief, but the impression she had made on him never forsook him. Her last words to the surrounding friends were, "I pray you to love your kindred and worship God."

When Elizabeth Barrett Browning asked Charles Kingsley for the secret of his splendid life, he answered, "I once had a friend." So it was with Lincoln. He once had a friend, and he always spoke of her as his "angel mother."

So deeply had she impressed the nine-year-old boy with her religious faith that he could never be satisfied until he induced a preacher to preach a sermon and offer a prayer over her grave.

In that profoundly earnest incident of sympathy is to be seen the love that leavened his life to the making of a man nobler than kings among men.

Of these early years Lincoln spoke but little, and the gossip of old people, who might have told interesting incidents, has not proven altogether reliable. One of these personal incidents told by Lincoln of his childhood may be regarded as typical of his life. It was from a dim memory of what he had been taught concerning soldiers and war.

Lincoln said that he had a memory of only one incident relating to the War of 1812. This happened near the close of the war. He had been fishing and had caught a little fish. On the way home he met a soldier returning from the war. He had been told that he must be kind to soldiers. Thinking of this, he went up to the soldier and gave him the fish.

Even the wilderness has a succession of new scenes and offers an endless variety of revelations for the growing mind. Only the will of disordered interests is able to get bad things into the desires of a child. The Lincoln boy was fortunate in living with good people. There was no one to impress him with false ideas of life.

We may be sure that there was something superior in Thomas Lincoln that he sought out only noble women, and that noble women were willing to trust their happiness and welfare to him.

Thomas Lincoln could not hope to make a living after his wife died and care properly for his household needs, including the two motherless children. His own homeless childhood made him tender toward his little unmothered family, and, presently, he returned to Kentucky and married Sarah Bush Johnson, another of God's own mother-women.

She came with abundance of household goods and there was soon a comfortable Lincoln home. She loved the little boy she found on her arrival in the Indiana household, and encouraged him in his eager desire to know things.

The ten-year-old Lincoln was eager to learn of the wondrous world beyond the woods and he asked many questions of wayfarers passing that way. One day a very trivial event happened, but in the wondrous revelation of things to the blooming mind it may have been one of the greatest in Lincoln's life.

An emigrant wagon broke down near their place. The wife and two little daughters staid in Lincoln's home two or three days, till the wagon was repaired.

"The woman had books," so Lincoln tells us about it, "and she read us stories." It was the first books he had ever seen and the first book-stories he had ever heard. In fact, it was also the first educated people he had ever seen. One of the little girls seems to have impressed him deeply, to have awakened in him a spiritual reverence for beautiful girlhood, and to have given him a never-dying vision of possible sympathy and character for a nobler social life.

V. WAY-MARKS OF RIGHT LIFE

Lincoln's new mother had three children of her own, but under her management they all lived together, in the one-room house, in perfect harmony and friendship.

Of the little Lincoln boy she said, "His mind and mine, what little I had, seemed to run together." She said that there had never been a cross word or look between them and that she loved the little fellow as her own child. One thing is sure, to the American people, Sarah Bush Lincoln has forever given a sacred meaning to the name stepmother and hallowed its duties near to the meaning of mother.

In her old age she was visited by a biographer of Lincoln, to whom she said, "I had a son John, who was raised with Abe. Both were good boys, but I must say, both now being dead, that Abe was the best boy I ever saw, or expect to see."

Lincoln's sister Sarah, or Nancy, as she was also called, was a noble girl and was of inestimable help to Mrs. Lincoln in the labors of a pioneer home. She was quick to learn and she did her share in helping her brother in his desire to learn. There was nothing remarkable about that brother, he was not wondrous, except in one thing, and that was his unceasing zeal to have a greater mind, and for that mind to be a right mind.

His first real school life was to travel a deer path through the deep woods, nine miles each day, to school.

He had no time to waste on useless knowledge. Josh Billings once exclaimed, lamenting, "What's the use of larnin' so much that ain't so." Lincoln thought there was no use in such foolishness, and he sought to fill his mind only with useful information, valuable toward a greater life.

For instance, he got hold of a small dictionary and he read it through and through with the eagerness that many people give to baseball news or a novel. When the book called the "Statutes of Indiana" fell into his hands he could hardly eat or sleep till he had read it through. When he finally got hold of a grammar, it was no dry reading to him and no task. He literally devoured its information and committed its principles to memory, as a value of the finest wealth. He was indeed remarkable or wondrous in nothing but the divine inspiration to enlarge a useful mind. These are the minds that make life worth living and invariably characterize the builders of the world.

It appears that the first approach of Lincoln to the formation of a life-ideal, his first patriotic vision of American citizenship, was derived from reading a life of Washington. A friendly neighbor loaned him the book. His book-shelf was a chink in the log house. One night it rained into his book-shelf and the next morning he found his borrowed book bucked up into a most unreadable shape. Lincoln's introduction to Washington was unhappy and significant. Trivial as the incident might seem, it supplies suggestions of character on the way of superior worth to civilization. Events, one by one, build up or tear down together the structure of self or of the public system.

The Lincoln boy could have shielded himself, as to the damaged book, behind personal irresponsibility for an accident, or he could have flatly refused to make good. If so, we may well guess that he would never have been President of the United States, and would never have served America in its dire peril so as to be honored by the whole world. He was not that kind of a character. As we trace the steps of moral integrity, the trivial incident becomes powerfully significant. The Lincoln boy made good. He worked three days for the owner of the damaged book, so that another should not suffer loss through any kindness or good-will to him; also, beyond that, he could have no rest nor peace while any wrong existed between him and another man.

From that time on he had before him the vision of a great American. Washington became his ideal type of character, and that ideal no doubt helped much to make him the patient power he was in the great crisis of his nation's existence.

The rough and hard never hurt any one if they are healthy interests; the rude and uncultured wrong no taste if they are moral; and poverty injures nobody when it is clean and persevering and safe. So the hard requirements, rude living and destitute means only strengthened the boy more and more for the heroic responsibilities requiring such a type of manhood.

It is said that he memorized and often repeated for self-encouragement the homely old verses of the song, "Try, Try Again."

"When you strive, it's no disgrace Though you fail to win the race; Bravely, then, in such a case, Try, try again. That which other folks can do, Why, with patience, may not you? All that's been done, you may do, If you will but try."

In a copy book the following lines, still preserved, were written by Lincoln:

"Abraham Lincoln his hand and pen. he will be good but God knows when."

This pathetic glimpse of the childhood dream may account for his profound interest in boys and boyhood. When he had reached world-wide fame he said, "The boy is the inventor and owner of the present, and he is our supreme hope for the future. Men and things everywhere minister unto him, and let no one slight his needs."