Chapter III
BOYHOOD

W

HEN ABRAHAM was nine years old his mother died. An epidemic of "milk sickness" carried away several of the scattered population of the frontier settlement, which did not boast even a visiting doctor. For seven days the slender toil-worn woman lingered on the verge of the great mystery, with Sarah, the eldest child of eleven years, and the boy Abraham, her only attendants. Thomas Lincoln, the father, could hardly have spared the time from getting family supplies out of the rugged surroundings, to remain long at her bedside. When she knew the end to be near, Mrs. Lincoln called her two children to her and whispered her final admonitions. She bade them be good to one another, and expressed the hope that they might live, as they had been taught by her, to love their kin and worship God. Placing her hand on Abe's head she told him to be kind to his father and sister. And then they were alone.

The mother of him who was to be the Liberator of a race. paid her debt to nature in the very heart of nature. The weary body was at rest and, let us believe, the soul found ineffable peace and spiritual understanding. The winds in the trees chanted a requiem for her while the majesty of death put its seal upon the sad, sweet face and stilled forever the limbs that had borne the heat and burden of a pioneer existence.

For a year after his loss Thomas Lincoln kept the home and did what he could to fill the place of the departed mother to his children. But no matter how solicitous he may have been for their comfort, his care must have been of the most primitive kind. We are informed that the boy and girl slept on a bed of corn husks and leaves in one corner of the living room. Their clothing was scant and ragged. Their food was the plainest and illy prepared. They ran wild in the woods. Those frequent admonitions to duty and love which the mother had culled from her experience to use for their instruction, no longer fed their young minds with precious maxims. They were waifs in a wilderness, subject to the thoughts and habits of a community made up of the rude and uncultured. But the great brooding spirit of Nature wrapped them about and poured into their young lives the balm of her immeasurable tenderness.

It did another thing that had a tremendous influence on the events which were yet in the womb of time. It moved Thomas Lincoln to return to his old Kentucky home and bring back a second mother for his children. Sally Bush Johnston was a widow of some means and Thomas Lincoln had once sought her hand in marriage. He seemed to have found her as lonely in her widowhood as he was in his bereavement. His wooing was brief. The marriage followed hard upon, and with all her household goods they came to the Indiana clearing.

Sally Bush Lincoln almost immediately changed the crude cabin, which was little more than a bare shelter from the weather, into a home. Under her inspiration Thomas Lincoln set to work to improve the cabin, inside and out, and the little family was soon enjoying the comforts and some of the refinements of a more mature civilization.

The new mistress immediately took young Abe to her heart. The settled melancholy, which was a large part of his mother's nature, and which she had bequeathed in even fuller measure to her son, had no place in the homely, motherly heart of the woman who now presided over the destinies of the future Emancipator. She was a practical, commonsense sort, with an inexhaustible capacity for loving and with that clear understanding of others which is an attribute of such love. She seems to have felt from the first that the slender, homely backwoods boy, with his awkward manners, inquisitive conversation, and, at intervals, sudden bursts of passion which flowed over into utter forgiveness, was destined for some great adventure. And whatever she could do to keep his feet in the right path she did unceasingly and wholeheartedly. There is continual evidence that she tried to peer through the clumsy speech into his heart, and prayed that love for him would make her wise to understand aright. How well she succeeded, the words and acts of this remarkable character through all the course of his life give ample proof. Abraham's second mother brought to his instruction and development qualities and virtues which were necessary to supplement those mystical and poetical characteristics bequeathed to him by his first mother, and which, without such addition, might have made him a revolutionary poet but which could never have given to the world the Lincoln we know the patient, far-seeing, liberty-loving Constitutionalist.

In Herndon's "Life of Lincoln" we have this portrait of the practical side of Sarah Bush Lincoln. Having described the coming of the creaking wagon loaded with its furniture from the Johnston home in Kentucky, and its transfer to the bare interior of the cabin, Herndon goes on to say:

"What effect the new family (Mrs. Johnston had three children by her first husband, John, Sarah and Matilda), their collection of furniture, cooking utensils, and comfortable bedding must have had on the astonished and motherless pair, who from the door of Thomas Lincoln's forlorn cabin watched the well-filled wagon as it came creaking through the woods, can better be imagined than described. Surely Sarah and Abe, as the stores and supplies were rolled in through the doorless doorways, must have believed that a golden future awaited them. The presence and smile of a motherly face in the cheerless cabin radiated sunshine into every neglected corner. If the Lincoln mansion did not in every respect correspond to the representations made by its owner to the new Mrs. Lincoln before marriage, the latter gave no expression of disappointment or surprise. With truly womanly courage and zeal she set resolutely to work to make right that which seemed wrong. Her husband was made to put new doors and windows in the cabin. The cracks between the logs were plastered up. A clothes press filled the space between the chimney jamb and the wall, and the mat of corn husks and leaves on which the children had slept in the corner gave way to the comfortable luxuriance of a feather bed. She washed the two orphans and fitted them out in clothes taken from the stores of her own. The work of renovation in and around the cabin continued until even Thomas Lincoln himself, under the general stimulus of the new wife's presence, caught the inspiration and developed signs of intense activity."

Sarah Bush is described by her granddaughter in after years as "a very tall woman, straight as an Indian, of fair complexion, and was, when I first remember her, very handsome, sprightly, talkative, and proud. She wore her hair

curled until gray; was kind hearted and very charitable and industrious."

also very

But notwithstanding her thoroughly practical side, the strain of mysticism, which crops out from almost every person who had anything to do with Lincoln's early life, had its controlling seat in this good woman's nature; for does she not say to Herndon after the death of President Lincoln: "I did not want Abe to run for President, and I did not want to see him elected. I was afraid something would happen to him, and when he came down to see me, after he was elected President, I still felt, and my heart told me, that something would befall him, and that I should never see him again."

From the plain cabin in the Indiana forest Abraham Lincoln went forth to the first school he ever attended. The teacher was Hazel Dorsey and the school house a mile and a half from the Lincoln farm. He studied assiduously what books he had, and before the firelight in the evening practiced compositions on the back of a wooden shovel, as well as with pieces of chalk on the logs he shaved for the purpose. He had to "knock off" school when there was any work on the farm or in the woods that he could help to do, so that a few months during a year or two in the log school house was all the schooling he got at this time. Then the neighborhood probably concluded it could not afford a school teacher, as for several years we hear no more of Abe's being schooled: or until he was fourteen, when Andrew Crawford taught for a short time, and again when he was seventeen, when he walked four miles to be instructed by one Swasey and became proficient in spelling and composed several "compositions" which were so highly considered that they were kept in manuscript until they became a part of the history of a Nation's martyr. He is said to have loved his books and