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AFTER STEPPING ONTO Indiana soil, the family had to “pack through” sixteen miles of almost impenetrable forest and underbrush. Dense fog could darken the forest in the middle of the day. With his ax and hunting knife, Thomas cut his way to the farm, felling oak, hickory, beech, maple, and walnut trees entangled with grapevines. No wonder the early pioneers called these forest thickets the “roughs.”
Arriving in the region near Pigeon Creek, the Lincolns immediately set about to build a “half-faced camp,” a rough log shelter enclosed on three sides with a blazing fire on the fourth. After a few days they began erecting a cabin on a knoll overlooking their land.
Learning to use the ax, Abraham helped his father build the cabin and establish the farming. Thomas constructed a pole bedstead in a corner opposite the fireplace where Abraham could climb up to sleep. Young Abraham learned from his carpenter father to build a three-legged stool, which, though small, rested sturdily because of its precise balance. Photographs from later in the century often pictured old, rundown cabins on the frontier, but the Lincoln cabin was new and smelled of fresh-cut timber.
The memory of clearing the Indiana land with his ax became part of Lincoln’s campaign biography thirty-four years later: “A., though very young, was large of his age, and had an axe put into his hands at once; and from that till within his twenty-third year, he was almost constantly handling that most useful instrument.”
An ax in Lincoln’s day would have been hand forged of bar iron and cast steel, giving it its proper shape in relation to its weight. It took up to two days to make such an ax. The price would have been an enormous three to five dollars. Many woodsmen chose to split and finish their own handles from second-growth hickory. Men in frontier Kentucky and Indiana would ride a hundred miles on horseback to purchase such an ax, or to have their favorite ax resteeled. Pioneers often discussed the proper weight of an ax and the best kind of handle as much as they discussed politics.
Abraham helped his father clear the land, chop wood, and split fence rails. Early on, he developed the muscle coordination necessary for a powerful swing. As he grew in size and coordination, young Abe could fell trees of four to six feet in diameter. Handling an ax with such skill was a sign that a boy was becoming a man.
Wild animals flourished in the forest around Pigeon Creek. Deer, wolves, panthers, wildcats, bears, turkeys, quail, and grouse were all plentiful. During the Lincolns’ first winter in Indiana, before they were able to plant vegetables, the family lived on forest game.
More than two decades later, Lincoln returned to Indiana and wrote a poem describing the scene of his youth:
When first my father settled here,
’twas then the frontier line:
The panther’s scream filled night with fear
And bears preyed on the swine.
THE LINCOLNS’ FIRST YEAR in Indiana, 1817, was lonely. Their nearest neighbors with children near Abraham’s age lived several miles away—through the forest. In winter, the encirclement by the never-ending trees increased the sense of darkness and isolation.
A few months after their arrival, “a few days before the completion of [my] eighth year, in the absence of [my] father,” Abraham asked his mother’s permission to borrow his father’s gun because he had spied a flock of wild turkeys flying overhead. In a frontier household, guns were a regular part of daily life, and their use became a central part of a boy’s rite of passage. In his campaign statement, he described what happened next. “A., standing inside, shot through a crack, and killed one of them.”
Lincoln surprised himself with his response to his accurate marksmanship. Upon examining the beautiful dead bird, he found himself filled not with pride but sorrow. At that moment, young Abraham made an unexpected choice: “[I have] never since pulled a trigger on any larger game.” Even more unexpected, he decided to include this admission in his presidential campaign autobiography.
In the fall of 1817, a break in the loneliness came with the arrival of Nancy’s aunt, Elizabeth Sparrow; her husband, Thomas; and Dennis Hanks, Lincoln’s mother’s cousin. The Sparrows had come from Kentucky, the victims of an “ejectment” suit like the one that had helped persuade Thomas Lincoln to relocate to Indiana the year before. Abraham was especially pleased to welcome Dennis Hanks, who, at eighteen, exuded good fun. Abe came to enjoy him as an older friend.
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IN THE LATE SUMMER of 1818, a ravaging illness spread through southern Indiana, a mysterious disease that infected whole communities. No one could anticipate its coming or fathom its cure. Later, it was discovered that one contracted the disease by drinking milk from a cow who had ingested a poisonous white snakeroot plant while grazing.
In September, the “milk sick” struck the Lincoln family. It claimed first the life of Thomas Sparrow, and shortly thereafter his wife, Elizabeth.
By the end of September, Nancy, Abraham’s mother, began to experience the “trembles,” symptoms of the dreaded disease. She died seven days later, the saddest day in Abraham’s young life. He watched as his father, who had made coffins for others, wielded a whipsaw to construct a green pine coffin for his wife of twelve years. On October 5, 1818, Abraham stood in a densely wooded grove of persimmon trees while his mother, age thirty-four, was buried about one-fourth of a mile from the family log cabin. He was only nine. Abraham never mentioned her in any of his autobiographical writings. That she was a loving, nurturing presence we hear from others. Nathaniel Grigsby, Lincoln’s boyhood Indiana friend, said of Nancy Hanks Lincoln, “Her good humored laugh I can see now—is as fresh in my mind as if it were yesterday.”
The death of Nancy Hanks Lincoln, who died of “milk sick” at the age of thirty four on October 5, 1818, left a huge hole in the heart of nine-year-old Abraham Lincoln.
On February 12, 1819, Abraham marked his tenth birthday in a home that had little cause for celebration. With the death of the Sparrows and Nancy Hanks Lincoln, the family life of Thomas, Abraham, Sarah, and Dennis Hanks was sliding into disarray. In the fall, thirteen months after his wife’s death, Thomas decided to return to Kentucky to seek a new wife and mother for his children. In Elizabethtown he called upon Sarah Bush Johnston, a widow. Thomas had known Sarah for many years and may have courted her before he married Nancy. Sarah had been married to Daniel Johnson, the town jailer, who had died in 1816. She had to provide for her three children, Elizabeth, John, and Matilda, and was left with the considerable debts of her husband.
Thomas arrived unannounced at Sarah’s door. Whatever romantic feelings they may have experienced, they had urgent practical needs to be met. Each had lost a spouse. Thomas and his children needed a wife and mother. Sarah and her children needed a husband and father. Part of Thomas’s proposal to Sarah was his commitment to pay off her debts. They married in Elizabethtown on December 2, 1819. Thomas was now forty-one and Sarah thirty-one. A second Lincoln procession set out for Indiana three years after the first.
Upon her arrival at Pigeon Creek, Sarah discovered how much work there was to do. She took charge and directed all hands to attack the dirty, disheveled cabin. No more hunting for Thomas Lincoln and Dennis Hanks, she said, until they had constructed a floor, put in a door, and made some proper furniture.
She found Abraham clad only in buckskins. “She Soaped—rubbed and washed the Children so that they look pretty neat—well & clean,” Dennis described. She then dressed Abraham and his sister in some of her own clothing.
The real mending that Sarah brought was the healing of two broken families. Her impact was enormous. She brought order to a household; more important, she brought love and concern for young Abraham. Years later, in his campaign autobiography, he remarked, “She proved a good and kind mother to A.”
Going to the mill was an indispensable part of the pioneer routine. When Abraham was ten, his father let him go to the mill alone, toting a heavy sack of corn and a bag of meal. He rode a mile and a half to Noah Gordon’s mill, then waited his turn as the
horses went around a circle supplying the power for grinding the corn. When it was his turn, he hitched his mare to the arm of the mill. With the impatience of youth, Abraham hit the mare with a switch to move her along. The horse responded with a prompt kick that sent young Abe slumping to the ground. He lay unconscious and bleeding until Gordon picked him up. In 1860, he remembered this incident. “In [my] tenth year [I] was kicked by a horse, and apparently killed for a time.”
Sarah Bush Lincoln, Abraham Lincoln’s stepmother, came into his life when he was ten years old. She loved him and consistently encouraged his education. This photograph was taken much later, when she lived in Illinois.
BY AGE TEN, LINCOLN’S attention and affections would have typically begun to flow from his mother to his father, but the Lincoln family didn’t always follow typical patterns. Even as Sarah Bush Johnston became a binding force in the family, an unbinding was occurring between father and son.
Cousin Dennis Hanks, who continued to live with the Lincolns, later offered contradictory reminiscences on Thomas and Abraham’s relationship. On the one hand, Dennis stated, “I have Seen his father Nock him Down,” but on the other hand he recalled, “the Old Man Loved his Children.” Years later, Dennis doubted whether “Abe Loved his father Very well or Not.” Augustus H. Chapman, son-in-law of Dennis Hanks, added his perspective. “Thos. Lincoln never showed by his actions that he thought much of his son Abraham when a boy.”
Many years later, when Lincoln served in Congress, he responded to a query from Solomon Lincoln of Massachusetts about his family history. “Owing to my father being left an orphan at the age of six years, in poverty, and in a new country, he became a wholly uneducated man; which I supposed is why I know so little of our family history.” How does one interpret Lincoln’s comments? Are his words descriptive—is this simply how he remembered his father? Or prescriptive—is he judging his father? As an adult who made it on his own, Abraham showed little empathy for his father, who as a boy found himself suddenly bereft of a father, and as a young farmer struggled against lawsuits that challenged parts or all of three farms.
At the same time, Abraham’s stepmother’s love and encouragement became critical to his development. Sarah Bush Lincoln believed that what she gave was returned in kind. “I can say what scarcely one woman—a mother—can say in a thousand and it is this—Abe never gave me a cross word or look and never refused … to do anything I requested him.”
Decades later, when Lincoln was traveling the judicial circuit in Illinois, he told his law partner William Herndon, “God bless my mother; all that I am or ever hope to be I owe to her.” There is some dispute as to whether Lincoln was referring to his birth mother or stepmother, but the larger point is that the praise of his mother only emphasized his silence about his feelings for his father.
IF THE PREVIOUS GENERATIONS of American Lincolns had a hunger for the land, Abraham was developing an insatiable hunger for learning. His stepmother said that young Abe “ didn’t like physical labor—was diligent for Knowledge—wished to Know & if pains & Labor would get it he was sure to get it.” His youngest stepsister, Matilda Johnston, recalled, “Abe was not Energetic Except in one thing—he was active & persistent in learning.” From an early age this yearning to learn directed the way young Abraham spent his free time.
At the age of ten, Lincoln attended school for the first time in Indiana. In the winter of 1818–19, he and his sister attended a school in a cabin of rough-hewn logs on the Noah Gordon farm. The term of the early subscription schools in Spencer County was usually only one to three months, from December into early March, before the boys returned to work in the fields. In remote districts like Pigeon Creek, school was often held only every two years.
Abraham’s first teacher in Indiana was Andrew Crawford. In addition to teaching spelling and grammar, he instructed the children in courtesy and manners, including the art of introducing and receiving guests. A student would leave the schoolhouse, and as he or she reentered another student would introduce the guest to all the children in the room.
Lincoln would look back on his part-time studies in the rustic Indiana schoolhouses with a mixture of affirmation, amusement, and regret. In a brief autobiographical statement written in 1859, Lincoln recalled, “There were some schools, so called; but no qualification was ever required of a teacher, beyond ‘readin, writin, and cipherin’ to the Rule of Three. If a straggler supposed to understand latin, happened to sojourn in the neighborhood, he would be looked upon as a wizard.” His regret about what he missed is caught in his observation “There was absolutely nothing to excite ambition for education.” The “nothing” Lincoln spoke of included the lack of real encouragement from his father. Lincoln’s motivation would have to come from within.
Nathaniel Grigsby and Abraham Lincoln went to school together in Indiana. Grigsby remembered that “Whilst other boys were idling away their time Lincoln was at home studying hard.” Grigsby said that Lincoln liked to “cipher on the boards [calculate numbers].” His persistence struck Grigsby. “Abe woulde set up late reading & rise Early doing the Same.” David Turnham, a neighbor and friend, remembered that “What Lincoln read he read and re-read.”
Lincoln’s hunger for learning could never be satiated by part-time teachers and two-month school terms. Years later, he would say in his autobiographical third-person voice, “What he has in the way of education, he has picked up.” Young Abe begged, borrowed, and then devoured a small library of books. Each book that Lincoln read by the fireplace in Indiana became a log in the foundation of the schoolhouse of his mind.
Dennis Hanks recalled that “Abe was getting hungry for books, reading Evry thing he could lay his hands on.” These books included classics such as Aesop’s Fables, Robinson Crusoe, The Arabian Nights, as well as William Scott’s Lessons in Elocution and Noah Webster’s American Spelling Book. Hanks added, “He was a Constant and I may Say Stubborn reader.”
Eastman Johnson’s appealing painting The Boyhood of Lincoln portrays the young Lincoln reading by the light of a fire in his log cabin home. The painting suggests that, regardless of social station, learning is Lincoln’s key to a life of purpose and meaning.
Lincoln read the King James Version of the Bible, which in the early nineteenth century often functioned as a textbook for its readers. Lincoln did not simply read the Bible. In Indiana, he began his lifelong practice of memorizing whole sections. One of his favorite portions to memorize was the Psalms.
When Lincoln read Aesop’s Fables, he was not just reading ancient tales; through the editor’s foreword he learned lessons for American young people. An edition that Lincoln may well have read bemoaned the religious and political teachings put before European children. American editions of Aesop’s Fables featured exhortations at the end of each tale. Young Lincoln may well have been drawn to the moral added to the conclusion of “The Crow and the Pitcher.” Through the ages young people have responded to the story of the thirsty crow who, flying over a farm, sees a pitcher with a small amount of water in it sitting on a picnic table. The crow attempts to drink the water but cannot reach it. At last he collects stones and drops them one by one into the pitcher until he can drink.
The traditional moral of the story is that necessity is the mother of invention. The American editor enhanced the moral by telling his young readers that when meeting “a difficulty,” the person “of sagacity” should be ready to employ “his wit and ingenuity … to avoid or get over an impediment” and “makes no scruple of stepping out of the path of his forefathers.”
Lincoln also likely read the tale of “The Lion and the Four Bulls.” The lion cannot attack the four bulls as long as they stand together in the pasture. But once they separate, they become easy prey. The moral of this fable is “A kingdom divided against itself cannot stand”—words that would go on to have profound meaning in Lincoln’s life.
According to Grigsby and Turnham, Lincoln also enjoyed Starke Dupuy’s Hymns and Spiritual Songs. Dupuy, of
French Huguenot background, was the son of a Baptist minister of Woodford County, Kentucky. Published in Louisville in 1818, his hymnbook became popular in Kentucky and Tennessee. In addition to traditional hymns focusing on God, the book’s “Spiritual Songs” focused on the experience of life with God and were sung to popular tunes of the day. Although young Abraham did not have a voice for singing, he enjoyed the practice of reading hymns aloud.
Lincoln also reportedly read John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, which appealed to both children and adults in a culture where religious questions permeated everyday conversations. If a pioneer family had only a few books in their home, it was likely that two would be the Bible and Pilgrim’s Progress. The prefaces to American editions of Pilgrim’s Progress in the early nineteenth century encouraged readers to read Bunyan’s stories aloud on “the Lord’s day evening” as well as on weekday evenings. The tales of Mr. Worldly Wiseman, Obstinate, Goodwill, and Patience inspired men and women whose daily lives were interspersed regularly with fire and flood, sickness and death; many saw the stories as a map toward a better life.
According to his stepsister Matilda Johnston, Lincoln read William Grimshaw’s History of the United States, published in 1820. Grimshaw, who emigrated from Ireland, where he experienced intolerance, made no excuses for the colonists’ turning a blind eye to slavery. “What a climax of human cupidity and turpitude! The colonists … place the last rivet in the chain.” In the last paragraph of his history, Grimshaw, at the time a resident of Philadelphia, told the reader: “Let us not only declare by words, but demonstrate by our actions, that ‘all men are created equal.’ ”
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