the "mill-boy of the slashes," the "hero of Tippecanoe," the "hero of New Orleans," the "canal-boat mule driver," and greatest of all, "Honest Old Abe, the rail-splitter of Illinois,"-men who are popular heroes because they had little sympathy with forms or ceremonies, and believed one man to be just as good as another.

A generation has passed since Abraham Lincoln died. Already he has been clothed with such romance, that the more light there is shed upon his life, the more difficult its interpretation becomes. That he will always be associated with the great charter of freedom for the slave is certain. That his tragic death will always lend additional halo to his name seems likely. And yet, more satisfactory explanation of his popularity may, perhaps, be found in the fact that he always kept close to the plain people, whom he so often mentioned, for he was a man "whose meek flock the people joyed to be, not lured by any cheat of birth, but by his clear-grained human worth, and brave old wisdom of sincerity."

EARLY YEARS OF ABRAHAM LINCOLN*

BY GOLDWIN SMITH, D. C. L. (Oxon), Ex-Professor of ConstiTUTIONAL HISTORY, CORNELL UNIVERSITY, N. Y.

OUR readers need not be afraid that we are going to bore them with the Slavery Question or the Civil War. We deal here not with the Martyr President, but with Lincoln in embryo, leaving the great man at the entrance of the grand scene.

After the murder, criticism, of course, was for a time. impossible. Martyrdom was followed by canonization, and the popular heart could not be blamed for overflowing in hyperbole. The fallen chief “was Washington, he was Moses, and there were not wanting even those who likened him to the God and Redeemer of all the earth. These latter thought they discovered in his early origin, his kindly nature, his benevolent precepts, and the homely anecdotes in which he taught the people, strong points of resemblance between him and the Divine Son of Mary." A halo of myth naturally gathered around the cradle of this new Moses. Among other fables, it was believed that the President's family had fled from Kentucky to Indiana to escape the taint of Slavery. Thomas Lincoln, the father of Abraham, was migratory enough, but the course of his migrations was not determined by high moral motives, and we may safely affirm that had he ever found himself among the fleshpots of Egypt, he would have stayed there, how

By Permission, from Self-Culture" Magazine, Edited by G. Mercer Adam.

ever deep the moral darkness might have been. He was a thriftless "ne'er do weel," who had very commonplace reasons for wandering away from the miserable, solitary farm in Kentucky, on which his child first formed a sad acquaintance with life and nature, and which, as it happened, was not in the slave-owning region of the State. His decision appears to have been hastened by a "difficulty" he got into, which is set forth in one of the biographies of his son, to which we are indebted for many of the facts in this paper.' *

Lincoln senior drifted to Indiana, and in a spot which was then an almost untrodden wilderness built a casa santa, which his connection, Dennis Hanks, calls "that darned little half-faced camp"-a dwelling enclosed on three sides and open on the fourth, without a floor, and called a camp, it seems, because it was made of poles, not of logs. He afterwards exchanged the "camp" for the more ambitious "cabin;" but his cabin was "a rough, rough log one," made of unhewn timber, and without floor, door, or window. In this "rough, rough" abode, his lanky, lean-visaged, awkward and somewhat pensive, though strong, hearty and patient son Abraham had a "rough, rough" life, and underwent experiences which, if they were not calculated to form a Pitt or a Turgot, were calculated to season a politician, and make him a winner in the tough struggle for existence, as well as to identify him with the people, faithful representation of whose aims, sentiments, tastes, passions and prejudices was the one thing needful to qualify him for obtaining the prize of his ambition.

"For two years Lincoln (the father) continued to live alone in the old way. He did not like to farm, and he never

got much of his land under cultivation. His principal crop was corn; and this, with the game which a rifleman so expert would easily take from the woods around him, supplied his table." It does not appear that he employed any of his mechanical skill in completing and furnishing his own cabin. It has already been stated that the latter had no window, door or floor. The son slept in the loft, "to which he ascended by means of pins driven into holes in the wall."

Of his father's disposition, Abraham seems to have inherited at all events the dislike to labor, though his sounder moral nature prevented him from being an idler. His tendency to politics came from the same element of character as his father's preference for the rifle. In after-life, we are told, his mind "was filled with gloomy forebodings and strong apprehensions of impending evil, mingled with extravagant visions of personal grandeur and power.' His melancholy, characterized by all his friends as "terrible," was closely connected with the cravings of his demagogic ambition, and the root of both was in him from a boy.

In the Indiana cabin Abraham's mother, whose maiden name was Nancy Hanks, died, far from medical aid, of the epidemic called milk sickness. She was preceded in death by her relatives, the Sparrows, who had succeeded the Lincolns in the "camp," and by many neighbors, whose coffins Thomas Lincoln made out of "green lumber cut with a whip-saw." Upon Nancy's death he took to his green lumber again and made a box for her. "There were about twenty persons at her funeral. mit of a deeply wooded knoll, about half a mile southeast of the cabin, and laid her beside the Sparrows. If there were any burial ceremonies, they were of the briefest. The

They took her to the sum

great trees were originally cut away to make a small cleared space for this primitive graveyard; but the young dogwoods have sprung up unopposed in great luxuriance, and in many instances the names of pilgrims to the burial place of the great Abraham Lincoln's mother are carved on their bark. With this exception, the spot is wholly unmarked. The grave never had a stone, nor even a board, at its head or its foot; and the neighbors still dispute as to which of these unsightly hollows contains the ashes of Nancy Lincoln." If Democracy in the New World sometimes stones the prophets, it is seldom guilty of building their sepulchres. Out of sight, off the stump, beyond the range of the interviewer, heroes and martyrs soon pass from the mind of a fast-living people; and weeds may grow out of the dust of Washington. But in this case what neglect has done good taste would have dictated; it is well that the dogwoods are allowed to grow unchecked over the wilderness grave. Thirteen months after the death of his Nancy, Thomas Lincoln went to Elizabethtown, Kentucky, and suddenly presented himself to Mrs. Sally Johnston, who had in former days rejected him for a better match, but had become a widow. "Well, Mrs. Johnston, I have no wife and you have no husband, I came a purpose to marry you. I knowed you from a gal and you knowed me from a boy. I have no time to lose, and if you are willin', let it be done straight off." "Tommy, I know you well, and have no objection to marrying you; but I cannot do it straight off, as I owe some debts that must first be paid." They were married next morning, and the new Mrs. Lincoln, who owned, among other wonderous household goods, a bureau that