THE COMING OF ANOTHER MOTHER
All that a young girl of twelve could do, a.s.sisted by a willing brother of ten, was done by Sarah and Abraham Lincoln to make that desolate cabin a home for their lonesome father, and for cousin Dennis Hanks, whose young life had been twice darkened by a double bereavement. But "what is home without a mother?" Thomas Lincoln, missing the balance and inspiration of a patient wife, became more and more restless, and, after a year, wandered back again to his former homes and haunts in Kentucky.
While visiting Elizabethtown he saw a former sweetheart, the Sally Bush of younger days, now Mrs. Daniel Johnston, widow of the county jailer who had recently died, leaving three children and considerable property, for that time and place. Thomas renewed his suit and won the pitying heart of Sarah Johnston, and according to the story of the county clerk:
"The next morning, December 2, 1819, I issued the license, and the same day they were married, bundled up, and started for home."
Imagine the glad surprise of the three children who had been left at home for weeks, when they saw a smart, covered wagon, drawn by four horses, driven up before the cabin door one bright winter day, and their father, active and alert, spring out and a.s.sist a pleasant-looking woman and three children to alight! Then they were told that this woman was to be their mother and they had two more sisters and another brother!
To the poor forlorn Lincoln children and their still more desolate cousin, it seemed too good to be true. They quickly learned the names of their new brother and sisters. The Johnston children were called John, Sarah and Matilda, so Sarah Lincoln"s name was promptly changed to Nancy for her dead mother, as there were two Sarahs already in the combined family.
Mrs. Sarah Bush Johnston Lincoln lost no time in taking poor Abe and Nancy Lincoln to her great motherly heart, as if they were her own. They were dirty, for they had been neglected, ill-used and deserted. She washed their wasted bodies clean and dressed them in nice warm clothing provided for her own children, till she, as she expressed it, "made them look more human."
Dennis Hanks told afterward of the great difference the stepmother made in their young lives:
"In fact, in a few weeks all had changed; and where everything had been wanting, all was snug and comfortable. She was a woman of great energy, of remarkable good sense, very industrious and saving, also very neat and tidy in her person and manners. She took an especial liking for young Abe. Her love for him was warmly returned, and continued to the day of his death. But few children love their parents as he loved his stepmother. She dressed him up in entire new clothes, and from that time on he appeared to lead a new life. He was encouraged by her to study, and a wish on his part was gratified when it could be done. The two sets of children got along finely together, as if they all had been the children of the same parents."
Dennis also referred to the "large supply of household goods" the new mother brought with her:
"One fine bureau (worth $40), one table, one set of chairs, one large clothes chest, cooking utensils, knives, forks, bedding and other articles."
It must have been a glorious day when such a splendid array of household furniture was carried into the rude cabin of Thomas Lincoln. But best of all, the new wife had sufficient tact and force of will to induce her good-hearted but shiftless husband to lay a floor, put in a window, and hang a door to protect his doubled family from the cold. It was about Christmas time, and the Lincoln children, as they nestled in warm beds for the first time in their lives, must have thanked their second mother from the bottoms of their grateful hearts.
CHAPTER VI
SCHOOL DAYS NOW AND THEN
Lincoln once wrote, in a letter to a friend, about his early teachers in Indiana:
"He (father) removed from Kentucky to what is now Spencer County, Indiana, in my eighth year. We reached our new home about the time the State came into the Union. It was a wild region with many bears and other wild animals still in the woods. There I grew up. There were some schools, so-called; but no qualification was ever required of a teacher beside readin", writin", and cipherin" to the Rule of Three (simple proportion). If a straggler supposed to understand Latin happened to sojourn in the neighborhood, he was looked upon as a wizard. There was absolutely nothing to excite ambition for education."
Abe"s first teacher in Indiana, however, was Hazel Dorsey. The school house was built of rough, round logs. The chimney was made of poles well covered with clay. The windows were s.p.a.ces cut in the logs, and covered with greased paper. But Abe was determined to learn. He and his sister thought nothing of walking four miles a day through snow, rain and mud.
"Nat" Grigsby, who afterward married the sister, spoke in glowing terms of Abe"s few school days:
"He was always at school early, and attended to his studies. He lost no time at home, and when not at work was at his books. He kept up his studies on Sunday, and carried his books with him to work, so that he might read when he rested from labor."
Thomas Lincoln had no use for "eddication," as he called it. "It will spile the boy," he kept saying. He--the father--had got along better without going to school, and why should Abe have a better education than his father? He thought Abe"s studious habits were due to "pure laziness, jest to git shet o" workin"." So, whenever there was the slightest excuse, he took Abe out of school and set him to work at home or for one of the neighbors, while he himself went hunting or loafed about the house.
This must have been very trying to a boy as hungry to learn as Abe Lincoln was. His new mother saw and sympathized with him, and in her quiet way, managed to get the boy started to school, for a few weeks at most. For some reason Hazel Dorsey stopped "keeping" the school, and there was a long "vacation" for all the children. But a new man, Andrew Crawford, came and settled near Gentryville. Having nothing better to do at first, he was urged to reopen the school.
One evening Abe came in from his work and his stepmother greeted him with:
"Another chance for you to go to school."
"Where?"
"That man Crawford that moved in a while ago is to begin school next week, and two miles and back every day will be just about enough for you to walk to keep your legs limber."
The tactful wife accomplished it somehow and Abe started off to school with Nancy, and a light heart. A neighbor described him as he appeared in Crawford"s school, as "long, wiry and strong, while his big feet and hands, and the length of his legs and arms, were out of all proportion to his small trunk and head. His complexion was swarthy, and his skin shriveled and yellow even then. He wore low shoes, buckskin breeches, linsey-woolsey shirt, and a c.o.o.nskin cap. The breeches hung close to his legs, but were far from meeting the tops of his shoes, exposing "twelve inches of shinbone, sharp, blue and narrow.""
"Yet," said Nat Grigsby, "he was always in good health, never sick, and had an excellent const.i.tution."
HELPING KATE ROBY SPELL
Andrew Crawford must have been an unusual man, for he tried to teach "manners" in his backwoods school! Spelling was considered a great accomplishment. Abe shone as a speller in school and at the spelling-matches. One day, evidently during a period when young Lincoln was kept from school to do some outside work for his father, he appeared at the window when the cla.s.s in spelling was on the floor. The word "defied" was given out and several pupils had misspelled it. Kate Roby, the pretty girl of the village, was stammering over it. "D-e-f," said Kate, then she hesitated over the next letter. Abe pointed to his eye and winked significantly. The girl took the hint and went on glibly "i-e-d," and "went up head."
"I DID IT!"
There was a buck"s head nailed over the school house door. It proved a temptation to young Lincoln, who was tall enough to reach it easily. One day the schoolmaster discovered that one horn was broken and he demanded to know who had done the damage. There was silence and a general denial till Abe spoke up st.u.r.dily:
"I did it. I did not mean to do it, but I hung on it--and it broke!"
The other boys thought Abe was foolish to "own up" till he had to--but that was his way.
It is doubtful if Abe Lincoln owned an arithmetic. He had a copybook, made by himself, in which he entered tables of weights and measures and "sums" he had to do. Among these was a specimen of schoolboy doggerel:
"Abraham Lincoln, His hand and pen, He will be good-- But G.o.d knows when!"
In another place he wrote some solemn reflections on the value of time:
"Time, what an empty vapor "tis, And days, how swift they are!
Swift as an Indian arrow-- Fly on like a shooting star.
The present moment, just, is here, Then slides away in haste, That we can never say they"re ours, But only say they"re past."
As he grew older his handwriting improved and he was often asked to "set copies" for other boys to follow. In the book of a boy named Richardson, he wrote this prophetic couplet:
"Good boys who to their books apply Will all be great men by and by."
A "MOTHER"S BOY"--HIS FOOD AND CLOTHING
Dennis Hanks related of his young companion: "As far as food and clothing were concerned, the boy had plenty--such as it was--"corndodgers," bacon and game, some fish and wild fruits. We had very little wheat flour. The nearest mill was eighteen miles. A hoss mill it was, with a plug (old horse) pullin" a beam around; and Abe used to say his dog could stand and eat the flour as fast as it was made, _and then be ready for supper_!
"For clothing he had jeans. He was grown before he wore all-wool pants.
It was a new country, and he was a raw boy, rather a bright and likely lad; but the big world seemed far ahead of him. We were all slow-goin"
folks. But he had the stuff of greatness in him. He got his rare sense and sterling principles from both parents. But Abe"s kindliness, humor, love of humanity, hatred of slavery, all came from his mother. I am free to say Abe was a "mother"s boy.""
Dennis used to like to tell of Abe"s earliest ventures in the fields of literature: "His first readin" book was Webster"s speller. Then he got hold of a book--I can"t rickilect the name. It told about a feller, a n.i.g.g.e.r or suthin", that sailed a flatboat up to a rock, and the rock was magnetized and drawed the nails out of his boat, an" he got a duckin", or drownded, or suthin", I forget now. (This book, of course, was "The Arabian Nights.") Abe would lay on the floor with a chair under his head, and laugh over them stories by the hour. I told him they was likely lies from end to end; but he learned to read right well in them."
His stock of books was small, but they were the right kind--the Bible, "The Pilgrim"s Progress," aesop"s Fables, "Robinson Crusoe," a history of the United States, and the Statutes of Indiana. This last was a strange book for a boy to read, but Abe pored over it as eagerly as a lad to-day might read "The Three Guardsmen," or "The Hound of the Baskervilles." He made notes of what he read with his turkey-buzzard pen and brier-root ink. If he did not have these handy, he would write with a piece of charcoal or the charred end of a stick, on a board, or on the under side of a chair or bench. He used the wooden fire shovel for a slate, shaving it off clean when both sides were full of figures. When he got hold of paper enough to make a copy-book he would go about transferring his notes from boards, beams, under sides of the chairs and the table, and from all the queer places he had put them down, on the spur of the moment.
Besides the books he had at hand, he borrowed all he could get, often walking many miles for a book, until, as he once told a friend, he "read through every book he had ever heard of in that country, for a circuit of fifty miles"--quite a circulating library!