The Early Life of Abraham Lincoln (Illustrated Edition). Ida M. Tarbell
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to either of the children, and I never saw them again.”4
ABRAHAM LINCOLN’S INDIANA HOME.
After an old photograph showing the cabin as it appeared in 1869. Thomas Lincoln built this house in 1817, and moved into it about a year after he reached his farm. At first it had neither windows, door, nor floor; but after the advent of Sally Bush Lincoln it was greatly improved. When he decided to leave Indiana he was preparing the lumber for a better house.
All the young people went to school. At that day the schools in the West were usually accidental, depending upon the coming of some poor and ambitious young man who was willing to teach a few terms while he looked for an opening to something better. The terms were irregular, their length being decided by the time the settlers felt able to board the master and pay his small salary. The chief qualification for a school-master seems to have been enough strength to keep the “big boys” in order, though one high authority affirms that pluck went “for a heap sight more’n sinnoo with boys.”
LINCOLN FARM IN INDIANA.
From a photograph taken for this biography. Present appearance of the quarter section of government land in Spencer County, Indiana, entered by Thomas Lincoln, October 15, 1817, view looking east. Thomas Lincoln selected this tract in 1816, and, to identify it, he blazed the trees, and piled up brush at the corners to establish boundary lines. When he returned with his family he was obliged to cut his way to the spot chosen for his cabin, and to fell trees to find space for the “half-face camp” in which he first lived. This land was entered under the old credit system. Later Mr. Lincoln gave up to the United States the east half, and the amount paid on it was passed to his credit to complete paying for the west half. The patent issued for the latter tract was dated June 6, 1827.
Many of the itinerant masters were Catholics—strolling Irishmen from the colony in Tennessee, or French priests from Kaskaskia. Lincoln’s first teacher, Zachariah Riney, was a Catholic. Of his second teacher, Caleb Hazel, we know even less than of Riney. Mr. Gollaher says that Abraham Lincoln, in those days when he was his schoolmate, was “an unusually bright boy at school, and made splendid progress in his studies. Indeed, he learned faster than any of his schoolmates. Though so young, he studied very hard. He would get spice-wood brushes, hack them up on a log, and burn them two or three together, for the purpose of giving light by which he might pursue his studies.”
Probably the boy’s mother had something to do with the spice-wood illuminations. Tradition has it that Mrs. Lincoln took great pains to teach her children what she knew, and that at her knee they heard all the Bible lore, fairy tales, and country legends that she had been able to gather in her poor life.
Besides the “A B C schools,” as Lincoln called them, the only other medium of education in the country districts of Kentucky in those days was “preaching.” Itinerants like the schoolmasters, the preachers, of whatever denomination, were generally uncouth and illiterate; the code of morals they taught was mainly a healthy one, and they, no doubt, did much to keep the consciences of the pioneers awake. It is difficult to believe that they ever did much for the moral training of young Lincoln, though he certainly got his first notion of public speaking from them; and for years in his boyhood one of his chief delights was to get his playmates about him, and preach and thump until he had his auditors frightened or in tears.
GRAVE OF NANCY HANKS LINCOLN.
From a photograph loaned by W. W. Admire. The grave of Abraham Lincoln’s mother is on a wooded knoll about half a mile southeast of the site of her Indiana home. Near her are buried Thomas and Betsey Sparrow, who followed the Lincolns to Indiana, and who died a few days before Mrs. Lincoln, and of the same disease; and also Levi Hall and his wife, who died several years later. There are two or three other graves in the vicinity. Until 1879 the only mark about the grave of Nancy Lincoln was the names of visitors to the spot, cut in the bark of the trees which shaded it; then Mr. P. E. Studebaker of South Bend, Indiana, erected the stone, and soon after a fence was purchased by a few of the leading citizens of Rockport, Indiana. The inscription on the stone runs: “Nancy Hanks Lincoln, Mother of President Lincoln, died October 5, A.D., 1818. Aged thirty-five years. Erected by a friend of her martyred son.”
LINCOLN IN 1857.
From a photograph loaned by H. W. Fay of De Kalb, Illinois. The original was taken early in 1857 by Alexander Hesler of Chicago. Mr. Fay writes of the picture: “I have a letter from Mr. Hesler stating that one of the lawyers came in and made arrangements for the sitting, so that the members of the bar could get prints. Lincoln said at the time that he did not know why the boys wanted such a homely face.” Mr. Joseph Medill of Chicago went with Mr. Lincoln to have the picture taken. He says that the photographer insisted on smoothing down Lincoln’s hair, but Lincoln did not like the result, and ran his fingers through it before sitting. The original negative was burned in the Chicago fire.
MARRIAGE LICENSE OF THOMAS LINCOLN AND SARAH JOHNSTON.—NOW FIRST PUBLISHED.
From a tracing made by Henry Whitney Cleveland.
Chapter III.
The Lincolns Leave Kentucky.—They Settle in Southern Indiana—Conditions of Life in Their New Home.
In 1816 a great event happened to the little boy. His father emigrated to Indiana from Knob Creek (Thomas Lincoln had removed from the farm on Nolin Creek to one some fifteen miles northeast, on Knob Creek, when Abraham was four years old). “This removal was partly on account of slavery, but chiefly on account of the difficulty in land titles in Kentucky,” says his son. It was due, as well, no doubt, to the fascination which an unknown country has always for the adventurous, and to that restless pioneer spirit which drives even men of sober judgment continually towards the frontier, in search of a place where the conflict with nature is less severe—some spot farther on, to which a friend or a neighbor has preceded, and from which he sends back glowing reports. It may be that Thomas Lincoln was tempted into Indiana by the reports of his brother Josiah, who had settled on the Big Blue River in that State. At all events, in the fall of 1816 he started with wife and children and household stores to journey by horseback and by wagon from Knob Creek to a farm selected on a previous trip he had made. This farm, located near Little Pigeon Creek, about fifteen miles north of the Ohio River, and a mile and a half east of Gentryville, Spencer County, was in a forest so dense that the road for the travellers had to be hewed out as they went.
SARAH BUSH LINCOLN.
From a photograph in the possession of her granddaughter, Mrs. Harriet Chapman of Charleston, Illinois. Sarah Bush was born in Kentucky, December 13, 1788. She was a friend of Thomas Lincoln and Nancy Hanks, and it is said that Thomas Lincoln had been her suitor before she married Daniel Johnston. Her husband died in October, 1818. In November, 1819, Thomas Lincoln went to Kentucky to seek her a second time in marriage. An incident of the courtship is told by Mr. J. L. Nall, a cousin of President Lincoln: “Uncle Thomas came back to Kentucky after the death of his first wife, Nancy Hanks, and proposed marriage to the widow Johnston; she told him that she would be perfectly willing to marry him, as she had known him a long time, and felt that the marriage would be congenial and happy; but it would be impossible for her even to think