And Dennis swung the baby back and forth, keeping up a chatter about how tickled he was to have a new cousin to play with. The baby screwed up the muscles of its face and began crying with no letup.
Dennis turned to Betsy Sparrow, handed her the baby and said to her, “Aunt, take him! He’ll never come to much.”
So came the birth of Abraham Lincoln that 12th of February in the year 1809—in silence and pain from a wilderness mother on a bed of corn-husks and bearskins—with an early laughing child prophecy he would never come to much.
And though he was born in a house with only one door and one window, it was written he would come to know many doors, many windows; he would read many riddles and doors and windows.
The Lincoln family lived three crop years on the farm where baby Abraham was born. It was a discouraging piece of land with yellow and red clay, stony soils, thick underbrush, land known as “barrens.” It was called the Rock Spring farm because at the foot of one of its sloping hills the rocks curved in like the beginning of a cave; coats of moss spotted the rocks and rambled with quiet streaks of green over the gray; a ledge of rock formed a beckoning roof with room for people to stand under; and at the heart of it, for its center, was a never-ending flow of clear, cool water.
With the baby she called Abe in her arms, Nancy Hanks came to this Rock Spring more than once, sitting with her child and her thoughts, looking at running water and green moss. The secrets of the mingled drone and hush of the place gave her reminders of Bible language, “Be ye comforted,” or “Peace, be still.”
Cooking, washing, sewing, spinning, weaving, helping keep a home for a man and two babies, besides herself, in a one-room cabin, took a good deal of her time. If there were flies creeping over the face of the baby Abe, she had to drop her work and shoo the flies away. There were few hours in the year she was free to sit with her child and her thoughts, listening to the changing drone and hush of Rock Spring saying, “Be ye comforted,” or “Peace, be still.”
The baby grew, learning to sit up, to crawl over the dirt floor of the cabin; the gristle became bone; the father joked about the long legs getting longer; the mother joked about how quick he grew out of one shirt into another.
Sparrows and Hankses who came visiting said, “He’s solemn as a papoose.” An easy and a light bundle he was to carry when the family moved to a farm on Knob Creek, eight miles from Hodgenville, on the main highway from Louisville to Nashville.
Chapter V
ON THE KNOB Creek farm the child Abraham Lincoln learned to talk, to form words with the tongue and the roof of the mouth and the force of the breath from lungs and throat. “Pappy” and “Mammy,” the words of his people meaning father and mother, were among the first syllables. He learned what the word “name” meant; his name was Abraham, the same as Abraham in the Bible, the same as his grandfather Abraham. It was “Abe” for short; if his mother called in the dark, “Is that you, Abe?” he answered, “Yes, Mammy, it’s me.” The name of the family he belonged to was “Lincoln” or “Linkun,” though most people called it “Linkern” and it was sometimes spelled “Linkhorn.”
The family lived there on Knob Creek farm, from the time Abe was three or so till he was past seven years of age. Here he was told “Kaintucky” meant the state he was living in; Knob Creek farm, the Rock Spring farm where he was born, Hodgenville, Elizabethtown, Muldraugh’s Hill, these places he knew, the land he walked on, was all part of Kentucky.
Yet it was also part of something bigger. Men had been fighting, bleeding, and dying in war, for a country, “our country”; a man couldn’t have more than one country any more than he could have more than one mother; the name of the mother country was the “United States”; and there was a piece of cloth with red and white stripes having a blue square in its corner filled with white stars; and this piece of cloth they called “a flag.” The flag meant the “United States.” One summer morning his father started the day by stepping out of the front door and shooting a long rifle into the sky; and his father explained it was the day to make a big noise because it was the “Fourth of July,” the day the United States first called itself a “free and independent” nation.
His folks talked like other folks in the neighborhood. They called themselves “pore” people. A man learned in books was “eddicated.” What was certain was “sartin.” The syllables came through the nose; joints were “j’ints”; fruit “spiled” instead of spoiling; in corn-planting time they “drapped” the seeds. They went on errands and “brung” things back. Their dogs “follered” the coons. Flannel was “flannen,” a bandanna a “bandanner,” a chimney a “chimbly,” a shadow a “shad-der,” and mosquitoes plain “skeeters.” They “gethered” crops. A creek was a “crick,” a cover a “kiver.”
A man silent was a “say-nothin’.” They asked, “Have ye et?” There were dialogues, “Kin ye?” “No, I cain’t.” And if a woman had an idea of doing something she said, “I had a idy to.” They made their own words. Those who spoke otherwise didn’t belong, were “puttin’ on.” This was their wilderness lingo; it had gnarled bones and gaunt hours of their lives in it.
Words like “independent” bothered the boy. He was hungry to understand the meanings of words. He would ask what “independent” meant and when he was told the meaning he lay awake nights thinking about the meaning of the meaning of “independent.” Other words bothered him, such as “predestination.” He asked the meaning of that and lay awake hours at night thinking about the meaning of the meaning.
Chapter VI
SEVEN-YEAR-OLD Abe walked four miles a day going to the Knob Creek school to learn to read and write. Zachariah Riney and Caleb Hazel were the teachers who brought him along from A B C to where he would write the name “A-b-r-a-h-a-m L-i-n-c-o-l-n” and count numbers beginning with one, two, three, and so on. He heard twice two is four.
The schoolhouse was built of logs, with a dirt floor, no window, one door. The scholars learned their lessons by saying them to themselves out loud till it was time to recite; alphabets, multiplication tables, and the letters of spelled words were all in the air at once. It was a “blab school”; so they called it.
The Louisville and Nashville pike running past the Lincoln cabin had many different travelers. Covered wagons came with settlers moving south and west, or north to Ohio and Indiana; there were peddlers with knickknacks to spread out and tell the prices of; congressmen, members of the legislature meeting at Lexington, men who had visited Henry Clay at Ashland.
Coming back from a fishing trip, with one fish, Abe met a soldier who came from fighting in the Battle of New Orleans with General Jackson, and Abe, remembering his father and mother had told him to be good to soldiers, handed the soldier the one fish.
The Lincolns got well acquainted with Christopher Columbus Graham, a doctor, a scientist, who was beginning to study and write books about the rocks, flowers, plants, trees, and wild animals of Kentucky; Graham slept in the bed while the Lincolns slept on the floor of the cabin, more than once; he told in the evening talk about days camping with Daniel Boone, and running backward with Boone so as to make foot-tracks pointing forward to mislead the Indians; he talked about stones, leaves, bones, snake-skins he was carrying in a sack back to Louisville; he mentioned a young storekeeper at Elizabethtown, named John James Audubon, who had marvelous ways with birds and might some day write a great book about birds. The boy Abe heard traveling preachers and his father talk about the times when they held church meetings in cabins, and every man had his rifle by his side, and there were other men with rifles outside the cabin door, ready for Indians who might try to interrupt their Sabbath worship. And the boy never liked it when the talkers slung around words like “independent” and “predestination,” because he lay awake thinking about those long words.
Abe was the chore-boy of the Knob Creek farm as soon as he grew big enough to run errands, to hold a pine-knot at night lighting his father at a job, or to carry water, fill the woodbox, clean ashes from the fireplace, ho
e weeds, pick berries, grapes, persimmons for beer-making. He hunted the timbers and came back with walnuts, hickory and hazel nuts. His hands knew the stinging blisters from using a hoe-handle back and forth a summer afternoon, and in autumn the mash of walnut-stain that wouldn’t wash off, with all the rinsing and scrubbing of Nancy Hanks’s homemade soap. He went swimming with Austin Gollaher; they got their backs sunburnt so the skin peeled off.
Wearing only a shirt—no hat nor pants—Abe rode a horse hitched to a “bull-tongue” plow of wood shod with iron. He helped his father with seed corn, beans, onions, potatoes. He ducked out of the way of the heels of the stallion and brood mares his father kept and paid taxes on.
The father would ride away to auctions, once coming home with dishes, plates, spoons, and a wash basin, another time with a heifer, and again with a wagon that had been knocked down to the highest bidder for 8½ cents.
Abe and his sister picked pails of currants and blueberries for mother Nancy to spread in the sun to dry and put away for winter eating. There were wild grapes and pawpaws; there were bee trees with wild honey; there were wild crab-apples and red haws. If it was a good corn year, the children helped shell the corn by hand and put it between two big flag stones, grinding it into cornmeal. The creeks gave them fish to fry. Tom Lincoln took his gun and brought back prairie turkey, partridge, rabbit, sometimes a coon, a bear, or a deer; and the skins of these big animals were tanned, cut and sewed into shirts, trousers, moccasins; the coonskins made caps.
There were lean times and fat, all depending on the weather, the rains or floods, how Tom Lincoln worked and what luck he had fishing and hunting. There were times when they lived on the fat of the land and said God was good; other times when they just scraped along and said they hoped the next world would be better than this one.
It was wilderness. Life dripped with fat and ease. Or it took hold with hunger and cold. All the older settlers remembered winter in the year 1795, when “cold Friday” came; Kentucky was “cold as Canada,” and cows froze to death in the open fields. The wilderness is careless.
Between the roadway over the top of Muldraugh’s Hill and the swimming-hole where Abe Lincoln and Austin Gollaher ducked each other, there are tall hills more correctly called limestone bluffs. They crowd around Knob Creek and shape the valley’s form. Their foundations are rocks, their measurements seem to be those of low mountains rather than hills. They seem to be aware of proportions and to suggest a quiet importance and secrets of fire, erosion, water, time, and many repeated processes that have stood them against the sky so that human settlers in the valley feel that around them are speakers of reserves and immensities.
The valley through which Knob Creek wanders there near Muldraugh’s Hill, shooting its deep rushes of water when the hill rains flush the bottoms, has many keepers of the darker reticences of the crust of the earth and the changers that hold on to their lives there. That basic stream has a journal of its movement among pools inconceivably quiet in their mirrorings during days when the weather is fair and the elements of the sky at ease, and again of movement among those same pools when the rampages between the limestone banks send the water boiling and swirling. The naming of Muldraugh’s Hill was a rich act in connotation, for it has whisperings of namelessly shrewd and beautiful wishes that the older and darker landscapes of Ireland breathe.
Trees crowd up its slopes with passionate footholds as though called by homes in the rocky soil; their climbings have covered sides and crests till they murmur, “You shall see no tall hills here unless you look at us.” Caverns and ledges thrust their surprises of witchery and wizardry, of gnomes and passwords, or again of old-time intimations and analogues, memories of reckless rains leaving wave-prints to hint or say Muldraugh’s Hill and the Knob Creek valley are old-timers in the making of the world, old-timers alongside of the two-footed little mover known as man. In the bottom lands the honeysuckle ranges with a strength nothing less than fierce; so deep are its roots that, unless torn away by the machines of man, the bees count on every year a boomer harvest of its honey-stuff; black and brown butterflies, spotted and streaked with scrolls and alphabets of unknown tongues from the world of wings—these come back every year to the honeysuckle.
Redbud, wild rose, and white daisies that look like scatterings of snow on green levels rise up with their faces yearly. Birds have made the valley a home; oncoming civilization has not shut off their hopes; homes for all are here; the martins learned a thousand years before the white man came that ten martins that fight with despair can kill and pick the eyes out of the head of a hawk that comes to slaughter and eat martins. And horses have so loved the valley, and it has so loved them in return, that some of the fastest saddle and riding nags remembered of men got their flying starts here.
Such was the exterior of the place and neighborhood where Abe Lincoln grew up from three to seven years of age, where he heard travelers talk, where he learned to write and sign his name, where, in fact, he first learned the meanings of names and how to answer, “Yes, it’s me,” if his mother called in the dark, “Is that you, Abe?”
Chapter VII
IN THE YEAR 1816 Tom Lincoln was appointed road surveyor. The paper naming him for that office said he was named in place of George Redman to repair the road “leading from Nolen to Pendleton, which lies between the Bigg Hill and the Rolling Fork.” It further commanded “that all hands that assisted said Redman do assist Lincoln in keeping said road in repair.” It was a pasty red clay road. That the county was beginning to think about good roads showed that civilization was breaking through on the wilderness. And that Tom Lincoln was named as road surveyor showed they were holding some respect for him as a citizen and taxpayer of that community. At the county courthouse the recorder of deeds noticed that Thomas Lincoln signed his name, while his wife, Nancy, made her mark.
Knob Creek settlers taking their corn to Hodgens Mill or riding to Elizabethtown to pay their taxes at the court or collect bounties on wolfskins at the county courthouse, talked a good deal about land-titles, landowners, landlords, land-laws, land-lawyers, land-sharks. Tom Lincoln about that time was chopping down trees and cutting brush on the Knob Creek land so as to clear more ground, raise corn on it and make a farm out of it. And he wasn’t satisfied; he was suspicious that even if he did get his thirty acres cleared and paid for, the land might be taken away from him. This was happening to other settlers; they had the wrong kind of papers. Pioneers and settlers who for years had been fighting Indians, wolves, foxes, mosquitoes, and malaria had seen their land taken away; they had the wrong kind of papers. Daniel Boone, the first man to break a path from civilization through and into the Kentucky wilderness, found himself one day with all his rich, bluegrass Kentucky lands gone, not an acre of his big farms left; he had the wrong kind of papers; that was why he moved from Kentucky to Missouri.
Though Tom Lincoln was paying taxes on his thirty-acre farm, he was sued as a “tresspasser.” He had to prove he wasn’t a squatter—which he did. He went to court and won his suit. His little thirty-acre piece was only one of many pieces of a 10,000-acre tract surveyed in 1784 and patented to one man, Thomas Middleton, in 1786.
Poor white men were having a harder time to get along. Hardin County had been filling up with Negroes, slave black men, bought and sold among the rich and well-to-do. The Hodgens, La Rues, and other first families usually had one or two, or six or a dozen, Negroes. More than half the population of Hardin County were colored. And it seemed that as more slave black men were brought in, a poor white man didn’t count for so much; he had a harder time to get along; he was free with the freedom of him who cannot be sold nor bought, while the black slave was free with the security of the useful horse, mule, cow, goat, or dog whose life and health is worth money to the owner.
Already, in parts of Kentucky and farther south, the poor white men, their women and children, were using the name of “nigger” for the slaves, while there were black slaves in families of quality who used the name of
“po’ w’ite” for the white people who owned only their clothes, furniture, a rifle, an ax, perhaps a horse and plow, and no land, no slaves, no stables, and no property to speak of.
While these changes were coming in Kentucky, the territory of Indiana came into the Union as a state whose law declared “all men are born equally free and independent” and “the holding any part of the human creation in slavery, or involuntary servitude, can only originate in usurpation and tyranny.” In crossing the Ohio River’s two shores, a traveler touched two soils, one where the buying and selling of black slaves went on, the other where the Negro was held to be “part of human creation” and was not property for buying and selling. But both soils were part of the Union of states.
Letters and reports reaching Hardin County about this time told of rich, black lands in Indiana, with more bushels of corn to the acre than down in Kentucky, Government land with clear title, the right kind of papers, for two dollars an acre. This helped Tom Lincoln to decide in the year 1816 to move to Indiana. He told the family he would build a flatboat, load the household goods on it, float by creeks to the Ohio River, leave the household goods somewhere along the river while he went afoot up into Indiana, located his land, and registered it. Then he would come back, and the family, afoot and on horseback, would move to the new farm and home.
Chapter VIII
THE BOY, ABE, had his thoughts, some running ahead wondering how Indiana would look, some going back to his seven little years in Kentucky. Here he had curled around his mother’s apron, watched her face, and listened to her reading the Bible at the cabin log-fire, her fingers rambling through his hair, the hands patting him on the cheek and under the chin. God was real to his mother; he tried to make pictures in his head of the face of God far off and away in the sky, watching Kentucky, Hodgenville, Knob Creek, and all the rest of the world He had made. His thoughts could go back to the first time on a winter night around the fire when he lay flat on his stomach listening to his father as he told about his brothers, Mordecai and Josiah, and their father, Abraham Lincoln, who had staked out claims for more than 2,000 acres of land on the Green River. One day Abraham Lincoln and his three boys were working in a field; all of a sudden the father doubled up with a groan of pain and crumpled to the ground, just after the boys had heard a rifle-shot and the whining of a bullet. “Indians,” the boys yelled to each other.
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