CHAPTER II

GODLY PARENTAGE

To come to its best in every way, character must have a sound physical basis. The father of Abraham Lincoln, though not as tall as his tall son, was five feet ten inches high, weighed 195 pounds, and was so compactly built that it was said no point of separation could be found at any place between his ribs. Thomas Lincoln was equal to any call upon his strength. Habitually inoffensive and peace-loving, once aroused he never failed to give of himself a good account. Until Ida Tarbell wrote her painstaking Life of Lincoln, Thomas Lincoln was commonly believed to be shiftless. Now we know that at a time when few indeed made even a tolerable living, Thomas Lincoln at least provided for the bare necessities of his increasing family; and he was a good man, adding to devoutness a jovial and buoyant temperament.

It was a Christian home in which the Christian statesman was brought up. The parents were

church members, at first affiliated with a free-will Baptist Church in Kentucky and later with the Presbyterians in Indiana. The home life was conventionally religious. The family altar was set up at the beginning and was never down. No meal began without a blessing even though at times there was little on the table for which to offer thanks. One day when potatoes made up the entire menu, the youthful Abe, with a twinkle in his honest eyes but no irreverence in his heart, remarked to his good father, "Dad, I call these mighty poor blessings."

Good children are apt to have good mothers. Both in his mother, Nancy Hanks, and later in his step-mother, Sally Johnston, Lincoln was unusually fortunate. Both were godly women, and both passed on to Abe their godliness. They laid deep and wide the foundations of a Christian manhood which sustained him amid the changing scenes and vicissitudes of his epochal career. Nancy Hanks's forebears early hailed from Plymouth, though they were not among Mayflower folk. Then they moved to Virginia whence Nancy's father moved across into Kentucky where on her father's death, when she was barely nine years old, she grew up into a sweet-tempered and fair womanhood, the centre-as tradition has it-both of

country merry-making and of industrious housewifery. Three children came the first three years of her happy married life, and she lost a little of her buoyancy and vigour in her conscientious efforts to meet her maternal responsibilities. But though such hard circumstances would have turned ordinary women into slatterns, they simply brought out the heroically adequate in Nancy Hanks and made her worthy to bring up her little children, the second of whom died in early infancy.

When in his later years, his mother, who died before he reached the age of ten, was but a tender memory, Lincoln used to say: "All that I am or hope to be I owe to my angel mother." Nancy Hanks Lincoln accepted the responsibilities of motherhood amid the rude hardships of a frontier life, with a sense of reverence that lifted her above the dull and deadly routine of the commonplace and impecunious. A shack alone protected the little family from the chilly blasts of winter, and on one side the only doorway was a curtain made of skins. The sack mattress on which the father and the mother slept was filled with husks or leaves, and even into it the little folks from their rude shake-down on the floor, peculiarly accessible to the winds, would often crawl for warmth. The only food they had was sometimes brought down

in the forest by the mother's rifle as well as by the father's, and was supplemented by fish caught in the nearest stream, corn raised from the stubborn soil and turned into Johnny-cake before the open fire by the busy hands of the fond mother whose eyes at the same time were ever on her young.

Hers was a busy life under handicaps, yet mother love was never once forgotten or disowned. No matter what demands were made upon her time and strength she always gave first thought to her children. She taught them to read their Bible1 and such other books as were available. Abraham Lincoln's earliest recollection of his mother was of sitting at her knee with his sister drinking in the tales and legends that were read or told to them by her.'

When Abe was past nine years, and the dreamy haze of Indian summer was in the air, his mother passed away, telling him with dying breath:

"I am going away from you, Abraham, and shall not return. I know that you will be a good boy; that you will be kind to Sarah and your father. I want you to live as I have taught you, and to love your Heavenly Father and keep His commandments."3

1 Phoebe Hanaford, Life of Lincoln, p. 20.

Noah Brooks, Works of Lincoln, vol. viii., p. 6. 3 Arnold, Life of Lincoln, p. 27.

Though stunned by the blow which had fallen upon him, Thomas Lincoln, in the usual exigencies of pioneer life, made with his own axe and saw the coffin for his loved one, and as the glowing colours of the dying year were lighting up the west, he laid her to rest, who had been his staff of life as well as mother of his children, in a clearing in the woods not far from the cabin she had made to bloom into a Christian home. No minister could then be had. Besides, the custom still persists among the mountain whites sometimes of having the formal burial service long after the interment. The grief-bowed man added, however, to the last sad offices he performed a homely prayer attended by the reading of a Bible passage as he knew that Nancy Hanks would have desired.

Swiftly the long and dreary winter swept down on the wifeless home without a mother. The little family did the best they could. Abe cheered them as he later cheered a nation in its darkest days. He never once forgot the final admonition of his mother to be kind to Sarah and his father. Already religion was coming to its proper place in that great soul; for it was Abe, who when the spring returned and he agreed with his father that the burial service was incomplete without a minister, wrote the letter to a preacher, a long hundred miles