Abraham Lincoln's Childhood
Replica of the log house where Lincoln spent his childhood
In the log schoolhouse, which he could visit but little, he was taught
only reading, writing, and elementary arithmetic. Among the people
of the settlement, bush farmers and small tradesmen, he found none of
uncommon intelligence or education; but some of them had a few books,
which he borrowed eagerly. Thus he read and reread, AEsop's Fables,
learning to tell stories with a point and to argue by parables; he read
Robinson Crusoe, The Pilgrim's Progress, a short history of the United
States, and Weems's Life of Washington. To the town constable's he went
to read the Revised Statutes of Indiana. Every printed page that fell
into his hands he would greedily devour, and his family and friends
watched him with wonder, as the uncouth boy, after his daily work,
crouched in a corner of the log cabin or outside under a tree, absorbed
in a book while munching his supper of corn bread. In this manner he
began to gather some knowledge, and sometimes he would astonish the
girls with such startling remarks as that the earth was moving around
the sun, and not the sun around the earth, and they marvelled where
"Abe" could have got such queer notions. Soon he also felt the impulse
to write; not only making extracts from books he wished to remember, but
also composing little essays of his own. First he sketched these with
charcoal on a wooden shovel scraped white with a drawing-knife, or on
basswood shingles. Then he transferred them to paper, which was a scarce
commodity in the Lincoln household; taking care to cut his expressions
close, so that they might not cover too much space,--a style-forming
method greatly to be commended. Seeing boys put a burning coal on the
back of a wood turtle, he was moved to write on cruelty to animals.
Seeing men intoxicated with whiskey, he wrote on temperance. In
verse-making, too, he tried himself, and in satire on persons offensive
to him or others,--satire the rustic wit of which was not always fit for
ears polite. Also political thoughts he put upon paper, and some of
his pieces were even deemed good enough for publication in the county
weekly.
Thus he won a neighborhood reputation as a clever young man, which he
increased by his performances as a speaker, not seldom drawing upon
himself the dissatisfaction of his employers by mounting a stump in the
field, and keeping the farm hands from their work by little speeches in
a jocose and sometimes also a serious vein. At the rude social frolics
of the settlement he became an important person, telling funny, stories,
mimicking the itinerant preachers who had happened to pass by, and
making his mark at wrestling matches, too; for at the age of seventeen
he had attained his full height, six feet four inches in his stockings,
if he had any, and a terribly muscular clodhopper he was. But he
was known never to use his extraordinary strength to the injury or
humiliation of others; rather to do them a kindly turn, or to enforce
justice and fair dealing between them. All this made him a favorite in
backwoods society, although in some things he appeared a little odd,
to his friends. Far more than any of them, he was given not only to
reading, but to fits of abstraction, to quiet musing with himself, and
also to strange spells of melancholy, from which he often would pass in
a moment to rollicking outbursts of droll humor. But on the whole he
was one of the people among whom he lived; in appearance perhaps even
a little more uncouth than most of them,--a very tall, rawboned youth,
with large features, dark, shrivelled skin, and rebellious hair; his
arms and legs long, out of proportion; clad in deerskin trousers, which
from frequent exposure to the rain had shrunk so as to sit tightly on
his limbs, leaving several inches of bluish shin exposed between their
lower end and the heavy tan-colored shoes; the nether garment held
usually by only one suspender, that was strung over a coarse homemade
shirt; the head covered in winter with a coonskin cap, in summer with a
rough straw hat of uncertain shape, without a band.
It is doubtful whether he felt himself much superior to his
surroundings, although he confessed to a yearning for some knowledge
of the world outside of the circle in which he lived. This wish was
gratified; but how? At the age of nineteen he went down the Mississippi
to New Orleans as a flatboat hand, temporarily joining a trade many
members of which at that time still took pride in being called "half
horse and half alligator." After his return he worked and lived in the
old way until the spring of 1830, when his father "moved again," this
time to Illinois; and on the journey of fifteen days "Abe" had to drive
the ox wagon which carried the household goods. Another log cabin was
built, and then, fencing a field, Abraham Lincoln split those historic
rails which were destined to play so picturesque a part in the
Presidential campaign twenty-eight years later.
Having come of age, Lincoln left the family, and "struck out for
himself." He had to "take jobs whenever he could get them." The first
of these carried him again as a flatboat hand to New Orleans. There
something happened that made a lasting impression upon his soul:
he witnessed a slave auction. "His heart bled," wrote one of his
companions; "said nothing much; was silent; looked bad. I can say,
knowing it, that it was on this trip that he formed his opinion on
slavery. It run its iron in him then and there, May, 1831. I have
heard him say so often." Then he lived several years at New Salem,
in Illinois, a small mushroom village, with a mill, some "stores" and
whiskey shops, that rose quickly, and soon disappeared again. It was a
desolate, disjointed, half-working and half-loitering life, without any
other aim than to gain food and shelter from day to day. He served as
pilot on a steamboat trip, then as clerk in a store and a mill; business
failing, he was adrift for some time. Being compelled to measure his
strength with the chief bully of the neighborhood, and overcoming him,
he became a noted person in that muscular community, and won the esteem
and friendship of the ruling gang of ruffians to such a degree that,
when the Black Hawk war broke out, they elected him, a young man of
twenty-three, captain of a volunteer company, composed mainly of roughs
of their kind. He took the field, and his most noteworthy deed of valor
consisted, not in killing an Indian, but in protecting against his own
men, at the peril of his own life, the life of an old savage who had
strayed into his camp.
