exceptions, just as they are in the North and South of to-day. But Lincoln's conception of this elevating and Christianizing Southern institution, like that of his greatly admired friend, John Brown, was that of slavery among savages. But slavery in the midst of the most splendid specimens of Christian manhood and Christian womanhood was an institution of no mean character, but one in which the noble virtues were taught, and upon which peace and contentment smiled. A SKETCH OF LINCOLN'S LIFE. We have had much to say about Lincoln and his peculiarities. A few authentic facts from his biographers may not be out of order here. They will tend to reveal the man and account in part, at least, for his disregard of the Constitution. As we have seen, he never did treat the Constitution as the product of the States but simply as the work of individuals in the interest of individuals, and not States in the interest of States. His family came from England in 1637. His grandfather, Abraham Linckom, moved from Virginia to Kentucky in 1789, following in the wake of Daniel Boone. His youngest son, Tom Linckern, was the father of our Abraham Lincoln. The spelling of the name took its present form at some time later in Illinois. "Tom Linckern (Lincoln) was a cabinet maker, but was too lazy to make much use of it. He was entirely illiterate, but he had social qualities, among them the ability to tell the stories picked up in a vagrant life. He could not write his name till his first wife taught him to scrawl it, the farthest reach of education he ever acquired...... "Tom was taken with spasms of religion, belonging part of the time to no denominations, and then again to several in succession, none of which affected the truth of the statement of his relative, John Hanks: 'Happiness was the end with him.' "On June 12, 1806, near Beachland, in Washington County, Kentucky, Thomas married Nancy Hanks, daughter of Joseph Hanks, of Elizabethtown, in whose shop he had learned his trade. She is said to have been melancholy, sensative, brooding, frail with native refinement, the rudiments of an education and delicate instincts......which failed to make his marriage an ideal one.... "Abraham Lincoln was born in Hardin County, Kentucky, February 12, 1809." This infant spent his life in what was called a camp, because it was made of poles....... Life on the frontier was not luxurious and little Abraham's father was not the most enterprising of settlers......He was but four when his father, who spent his life in moving, went on to another farm, 15 miles to the northeast, on Knob Creek. In 1816 when Abraham was seven, Tom took another change, this time sampling Indiana. He proceeded on horseback, aided by one wagon, to a new farm near Little Pigeon Creek, about 15 miles North of the Ohio river and one and one-half east of Gentryville, in Spencer County...... So primitive was the country, that on the journey Tom was in places compelled to cut his way through forests. When he reached his This camp was one of the destination......he built a camp. It was half-faced proudest achievements of Tom's history. which signifies that it was a shed of poles, entirely open on one side, roughly protecting the wife and two small children from the weather in the other three directions. In this shed, winter and summer, the family lived a whole year, while Tom and Abe cleared a little patch for corn, and Tom built a permanent dwelling. Into this mansion he moved before it was half completed, and found it so attractive that he left it for a year or two withFor chairs there were threeout doors, windows or floors. legged stools; the bedstead was made of poles stuck in between the logs in the angle of the cabin......The bedclothes were skins. When Abe went to bed, however, it was not in this, the only room in the cabin, but in the loft on a bunch of leaves which he reached by climbing a ladder, made of wooden pegs driven into the logs. There was a dining table, consisting of a large, hewed log standing on four legs, and the nourishment was prepared and served by Mrs. Linckern with the aid of a pot, a kettle, a skillet, and a few tin and pewter dishes. ."The woods were full of malaria, which in 1818, in October, took the life of Nancy Hanks Lincoln. Tom made a coffin of green lumber, cut with a whip-saw and, taking his children and a handful of Gentryville friends, buried her. "It is probable, however, that when Abraham Lincoln, in after years spoke of his 'angel of a mother,' or his 'sainted mother,' it was not of this frail woman that he thought, but of the stronger and more decisive person with whom his father filled her place. Tom had wished to marry Sarah Bush when he was a bachelor, but Sarah was not impressed by his talents. and chose a man named Johnson. A very few months after Nancy died, Tom started for Kentucky, where his old friend was the widowed mother of three children. To her he offered himself again, alleging reformed habits and an improved worldly condition. On these representations she took him, and soon after Abraham and his sister saw their cabin approached by the most prosperous woman who had ever entered their lives. In the wagon which carried her goods were furniture, cooking utensils, and bedding of a magnificence and luxury beyond their experience. Not too much cast down by the contrast between her husband's story and his cabin, she took both him and it in hand. She forced him to put in doors and floor, perhaps windows, which consisted of greased paper over a hole, and she taught the children some of the order and habits of civilization." (Abraham Lincoln, the Man of the People-Hapgood pp. 4-9). "It was a superstitious community and to the very day of his death Linckern never failed to believe in supernatural portents. If a dog ran directly across the hunter's path, bad luck would follow unless the little fingers were hooked together and vigorously pulled as long as the dog remained in sight; charmed twigs pointed to springs and buried treasure; faith doctors with their mysterious ceremonies wrought cures. If a bird alighted in the window, one of the family would die; a horse breathing on a child gave whooping cough......If a fence was not made in the light of the moon it would sink; and Friday was fatal to every enterprise." (Hapgood p. 15). When Lincoln was nearly twenty-one years of age, in March, 1830, his father moved to Macon County, Illinois, and settled about ten miles west of Decatur. In 1822, when Lincoln was 13, an abolition newspaper was started about 100 miles from the village, and during his whole boyhood and youth there was plenty to lead his mind, at least occasionally, onto the topic. "The talkative youth presented a pictorial appearance in coat, trousers and moccasins of tanned deer hide." (Hapgood p. 16). Under the head of "Beginnings of Politics and Love," Mr. Hapgood says: "In the summer, 1833, he went to Springfield to assist John Calhoun, the county surveyor......His work left him time to He was read Paine, Volney, and Voltaire, according to Herndon, who makes him out quite an argumentative disbeliever. evidently very popular with his neighbors...... "In 1835 he returned to New Salem, found Ann Rutledge, the girl of the tavern, was in trouble. Her fiance had gone away about a year before, and Ann had heard disquieting rumors.. As months passed on and Ann received no letters she told her secret, and all her friends met the story with convincing scepticism. "Lincoln asked the girl to be his wife. She consented in the Spring to marry him when another year had enabled her to have an autumn and winter season in Jacksonville academy, and had helped him to make a further start in life. "But Ann never reached the academy. summer passed her memories haunted her. Lincoln we do not know. science. Had she wronged him? Was he still faithful? Had Her death came she every right to love him in spite of silence? She fell so ill that Lincoln was kept from her presence. August 25, 1835. As the spring and What she felt about McNair (her fiance) was on her con "Lincoln always tending toward fits of gloom, had his mind almost unsettled by the blow. For the sadness that marked his face through life many reasons have been given by those who know him best. One of his most intelligent friends believed that Others find it inherited from constitpation was the real cause. his unhappy mother. Others tell of the gloom of the pioneer life, the desert spaces, the malaria, the loneliness, the absence of opportunity for a man who feels his powers ready within him. Whatever the cause, almost all, who knew Lincoln well, believed that the death of Ann Rutledge was an aggravation of the morbid tendency...... Two months later McNair returned with proof of his honesty and gave a final touch to the pioneer tragedy. Lincoln in one fashion or another, for several years loved rather readily, seeming in a mood to offer his hand and heart whenever a sympathetic relation was established, but in case of Ann alone was the feeling deep. He and his friends feared for his sanity. As long as five or six years, he consulted Dr. Drake, a celebrated Cincinnati doctor, by letter, but the physician refused to give an opinion without a personal interview, and Lincoln was unable to make the trip. To a fellow member of the Legislature within two years after the death, the representative from Sangamon said that although he was alone, that he no longer dared to carry a pocket-knife in spite of his old time love for whittling. After the first election to the presidency, he answered his old friend, Isaac Colgate, who asked if it was true he ran a little wild about the Rutledge matter: 'I really did. I ran off the track. It was my first. I loved the woman dearly. She was a handsome girl; would have made a good loving wife; was natural and quite intellectual, though not highly educated. I did honestly and truly love the girl, and think often of her now.' There was a popular belief that in all weather he used to sit for hours alone on her grave..... "Apparently it was this experience more than any other which fixed the habit of reciting mournful verse......One of them has been made famous as his favorite, the poem which he recited for some thirty years at every opportunity. Part of it is: "Oh! Why should the spirit of mortal be proud? He passeth from Life to his rest in the grave.' "This brand of melancholy poetical reflection became such a large settled part of Lincoln's life that it is, next to his wit, perhaps his most famous personal trait...... "The melancholy which increased after Ann Rutledge's death, however, is but one side of as enigmatical a character as is known in history. If the great President is ever to be understood as a man, it must be by reconciling wonderful sanity with vagaries almost insane, and it is the wilder and queerer side of his nature that comes to the front for several years after Ann's death...... |