Chapter I T IS early evening in the latter part of October, 1808, four months before Abraham Lincoln, the son of Thomas Lincoln and Nancy Hanks, is to be born.The moon is at its full and through the open cabin door, for it is Indian Summer and the air is balmy, a flood of soft light falls across the puncheon floor and touches the prospective mother as she moves about the cabin, preparing the simple evening meal. Outside in a sycamore tree a mocking bird pours forth a flood of melody. A cricket chirps under the drying boughs in the fireplace. A horned owl punctuates the stillness with its solemn "too-whoo.". The rugged pioneer, ax on shoulder, emerges from the forest, returning to his evening meal of coarse bread of corn meal and venison. The rough pine table holds a few cracked dishes, a jug of maple syrup, and the tin cups from which to drink the parched corn coffee, or, if fortune has been favorable, a limited draught of weak tea. Luxuries, there are none. The cloth that covers the table is of some coarse fibre of home weaving, colored to disguise the stains with which constant use and wear have marred it. Rough, home-made chairs or stools are drawn up at the board. Distant neighbors drop in to exchange news, stumps supplying the extra seats at the table. There is a picture of George Washington hanging on the wall. The crude fireplace is filled with green branches, the simple attempt at decoration which is the tribute of womankind. As darkness falls the tallow dips are lighted and while the housewife clears away the remnants of the meal, the men light their pipes and puff the fragrant home-grown tobacco. There is much talk. And what is the subject? Neighborhood gossip? It commences here, but a fugitive slave has been captured somewhere near, and sullen and silent, or weeping and protesting, has been taken back to unrequited toil. One of the visitors is a Constitutionalist and argues the rights of the slave states to their property in Negroes. Then there is heated argument in which the wife joins. Another visitor is an Abolitionist and the conversation takes a sympathetic turn, with carefully proclaimed suggestions from Thomas Lincoln on the right of the Southern planters to be recompensed for the property which the flaw in the constitution concedes to them. One cannot think of Nancy Hanks Lincoln, with the child of freedom already moving under her heart, agreeing with her husband in this doctrine. We may be sure that the mother-tobe of the future Emancipator scorns the logic of statesmen and places herself squarely on the side of humanity. Her husband argues for the rights of free labor as against that of slave labor. The male's duty to himself, to his mate and to his offspring, the primal animal instinct which runs through all animate creation that has risen to the least level of recognition of duty, prompts him to declare against the dictum that makes his labor cheap because millions of other laborers of another race and color are held in bondage and forced to work for nothing. His sense of competition prompts him to combat the institution of slavery, even while his reverence for gov ernment inspires him to uphold the Constitution of the Fathers of the Republic. For we may be sure that the Declaration of Independence was well revered by all the Lincolns from their earliest generation in America. And we may also know from the Biblical names which all the Lincolns bestowed upon the male children of the family, that the Laws of Moses, the great protest of the Children of Israel against human bondage, and the magnificent struggle of that nation of freedom-lovers to break the chains of slavery and to set up a nation of democracy for themselves, was ingrained in the very nerve and marrow of the Lincoln tribe. What will be the mother's thoughts in such a scene? Will not they cluster about the future of her child? Will she not wish the child to be a man? Will not her thoughts see him possessed of a mind for solving these big questions which are forever ringing in her ears? Will not she see him possessed with almost divine attributes which shall not only inspire him to great deeds, but shall give him the heart and soul to sympathize with those oppressed people whose sorrows and longings are often pictured to her with backwoods eloquence; whose sufferings she has often looked upon while powerless to interfere to save the victim, or even to offer consolation or to apply the simple healing remedies her frontier life had taught her to extract from herbs and wildwood barks? Is it not likely that this woman, a child of nature, rather delicate in body, sensitive, beautiful in form and feature, and with a well-known love for song and story, especially the sublime song and story of the Old Testament; is it not likely that such a nature, approaching motherhood and thrilled night and day with the hope and faith of maternity, in the holy softness of great shadowing trees, the faithful stars filling the upper heavens with their innumerable mes |