The Lincoln Reader

Paul M. Angle

• Publisher: Golden Springs Publishing
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781787200241
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: American Civil War History
• Index: History

The Lincoln Reader weaves a biography of Abraham Lincoln written by sixty-five authors, meshing history, anecdotes and research to provide a fascinating view of the Emancipating President. Paul Angle, the noted Lincoln scholar, has selected passages from the works of Lincoln's contemporaries, later biographers, and even Lincoln himself, to form a composite portrait of one of the wisest and most beloved American presidents. These passages, interwoven by Angle's running commentary, blend into a single vivid narrative of Lincoln's life, from his boyhood in Indiana to his assassination and funeral. First published in 1947, The Lincoln Reader has long been considered the most definitive, complete, and authentic retelling of the life of Abraham Lincoln.

CHAPTER ONE—Kentucky Childhood

ON THE TWELFTH of February, 1809, Abraham Lincoln was born in central Kentucky. His family lived in primitive surroundings. He enjoyed none of the advantages that even then were not uncommon—good schooling, wealth, family influence. Yet he rose above his environment to leadership in the law, to political prominence, to the Presidency. There, in little more than four years, his supreme fitness was proved. And when he died, at the end of the severest crisis in the nation’s history, all mankind called him great.

Biographers, baffled by the gap between his humble origin and enduring fame, have sought to find an explanation for his genius in heredity. On the paternal side, his ancestry has been traced to Samuel Lincoln, a weaver’s apprentice who emigrated from England to the New World and settled at Hingham, Massachusetts, in 1637. For nearly a century and a half the family line was carried on by sturdy, respectable citizens in Massachusetts, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Virginia. Then one named Abraham yielded to the lure of the West and crossed the mountains to Kentucky, where his son Thomas grew to manhood and married Nancy Hanks. Of this union the sixteenth President of the United States was born.

As far as the records show, no other Lincoln gave any sign of greatness. On the other hand, none possessed qualities that require apology.

The maternal ancestry of Abraham Lincoln remains obscure. Nancy Hanks, his mother, may have been the illegitimate daughter of Lucy Hanks; she may also have been born in wedlock before her mother became a widow. The evidence is inconclusive. Neither hypothesis, however, accounts for the greatness of her son. The Hankses, an undistinguished family, never attained even the modest status of the Lincolns; and those who subscribe to the theory of Nancy’s illegitimacy can give no good reason for believing that Abraham Lincoln’s unknown grandfather was possessed of extraordinary capacity.

When not even the bare record of a man’s ancestry can be established, and when what little is known reveals no continuity of personality between himself and his forbears, the story of his life is best begun with his own birth.

1

IN SENTENCES as bare of ornament as the cabin in which he was born, Abraham Lincoln described his birth and early childhood, and related all the family history that he knew. The autobiography, written in the third person, was prepared for John Locke Scripps of Chicago, who was gathering material for a campaign biography of the Republican nominee.

ABRAHAM LINCOLN was born February 12, 1809, then in Hardin, now in the more recently formed county of La Rue, Kentucky. His father, Thomas, and grandfather, Abraham, were born in Rockingham County, Virginia, whither their ancestors had come from Berks County, Pennsylvania. His lineage has been traced no farther back than this. The family were originally Quakers, though in later times they have fallen away from the peculiar habits of that people. The grandfather, Abraham, had four brothers—Isaac, Jacob, John, and Thomas. So far as known, the descendants of Jacob and John are still in Virginia. Isaac went to a place near where Virginia, North Carolina, and Tennessee join; and his descendants are in that region. Thomas came to. Kentucky, and after many years died there, .whence his descendants went to Missouri. Abraham, grandfather of the subject of this sketch, came to Kentucky, and was killed by Indians about the year 1784. He left a widow, three sons, and two daughters. The eldest son, Mordecai, remained in Kentucky till late in life, when he removed to Hancock County, Illinois, where soon after he died, and where several of his descendants still remain. The second son, Josiah, removed at an early day to a place on Blue River, now within Hancock County, Indiana, but no recent information of him or his family has been obtained. The eldest sister, Mary, married Ralph Crume, and some of her descendants are now known to be in Breckenridge County, Kentucky. The second sister, Nancy, married William Brumfield, and her family are not known to have left Kentucky, but there is no recent information from them. Thomas, the youngest son and father of the present subject, by the early death of his father, and very narrow circumstances of his mother, even in childhood was a wandering laboring-boy, and grew up literally without education. He never did more in the way of writing than to bunglingly write his own name. Before he was grown he passed one year as a hired hand with his uncle Isaac on Watauga, a branch of the Holston River. Getting back into Kentucky, and having reached his twenty-eighth year, he married Nancy Hanks—mother of the present subject—in the year 1806. She also was born in Virginia; and relatives of hers of the name of Hanks, and of other names, now reside in Coles, in Macon, and in Adams counties, Illinois, and also in Iowa. The present subject has no brother or sister of the whole or half blood. He had a sister, older than himself, who was grown and married, but died many years ago, leaving no child; also a brother, younger than himself, who died in infancy.{1}

2

OF LINCOLN’S BIRTH and childhood little more is known than what he himself wrote. A great artist, however, needs few materials. From neighborhood traditions, old men’s memories, and a poet’s understanding of men and women, Carl Sandburg amplifies the sparse facts of Lincoln’s own record.

IN MAY AND THE BLOSSOM TIME of the year 1808, Tom and Nancy with little Sarah moved out from Elizabethtown to the farm of George Brownfield, where Tom did carpenter work and helped farm.

The Lincolns had a cabin of their own to live in. It stood among wild crab apple trees.

And the smell of wild crab apple blossoms, and the low crying of all wild things, came keen that summer to the nostrils of Nancy Hanks.

The summer stars that year shook out pain and warning, strange laughters, for Nancy Hanks.

The same year saw the Lincolns moved to a place on the Big South Fork of Nolin’s Creek, about two and a half miles from Hodgenville. They were trying to farm a little piece of ground and make a home. The house they lived in was a cabin of logs cut from the timber nearby.

The floor was packed-down dirt. One door, swung on leather hinges, let them in and out. One small window gave a lookout on the weather, the rain or snow, sun and trees, and the play of the rolling prairie and low hills. A stick-clay chimney carried the fire smoke up and away.

One morning in February of this year, 1809, Tom Lincoln came out of his cabin to the road, stopped a neighbor and asked him to tell “the granny woman,” Aunt Peggy Walters, that Nancy would need help soon.

On the morning of February 12, a Sunday, the granny woman was there at the cabin. And she and Tom Lincoln and the moaning Nancy Hanks welcomed into a world of battle and blood, of whispering dreams and wistful dust, a new child, a boy.

A little later that morning Tom Lincoln threw some extra wood on the fire, and an extra bearskin over the mother, went out of the cabin, and walked two miles up the road to where the Sparrows, Tom and Betsy, lived. Dennis Hanks, the nine-year-old boy adopted by the Sparrows, met Tom at the door.

In his slow way of talking—he was a slow and a quiet man—Tom Lincoln told them, “Nancy’s got a boy baby.” A half sheepish look was in his eyes, as though maybe more babies were not wanted in Kentucky just then.

The boy, Dennis Hanks, took to his feet, down the road to the Lincoln cabin. There he saw Nancy Hanks on a bed of poles cleated to a corner of the cabin, under warm bearskins.

She turned her dark head from looking at the baby to look at Dennis and threw him a tired, white smile from her mouth and gray eyes. He stood by the bed, his eyes wide open, watching the even, quiet breaths, of this fresh, soft red baby.

“What you goin’ to name him, Nancy?” the boy asked.

“Abraham,” was the answer, “after his grandfather.”

Soon came Betsy Sparrow. She washed the baby, put a yellow petticoat and a linsey shirt on him, cooked dried berries with wild honey for Nancy, put the one-room cabin in better order, kissed Nancy and comforted her, and went home.

Little Dennis rolled up in a bearskin and slept by the fireplace that night. He listened for the crying of the newborn child once in the night and the feet of the father moving on the dirt floor to help the mother and the little one. In the morning he took a long look at the baby and said to himself, “Its skin looks just like red cherry pulp squeezed dry, in wrinkles.”

He asked if he could hold the baby. Nancy, as she passed the little one into Dennis’s arms, said, “Be keerful, Dennis, fur you air the fust boy he’s ever seen.”

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 let-up.

Dennis turned to Betsy Sparrow, handed her the baby, and said to her, “Aunt, take him! He’ll never come to much.”{2}

3

WITH A WOMAN’S INTUITION, Ida M. Tarbell pictures the life of Nancy Hanks Lincoln on the Sinking Spring farm, where the Lincoln family lived during the first two years of Abraham’s life.

THE LIFE THAT NANCY HANKS with her children led in this cabin was in all its details the same life that she was to lead up to her death. Here on her hillside farm there were none even of the simple excitements that she may have enjoyed in E-town. She was more alone here, though she had neighbors at no great distance. But her life was like that of them all, and in many of its details like the life of the Lincolns who first came to this country, Samuel and his wife Martha in Hingham, Massachusetts, in the middle of the seventeenth century.

Here, as there, the fireplace of the cabin was the very heart of the place. Nancy’s fireplace, as we see it today, was deep and wide, with a long stone mantel and big hearthstone. The chimney was outside—a cat-and-clay chimney, as it was called, made by mixing cut straw or grass with stiff clay and laying it in alternate layers with split lathes of hard wood. Within, hooks were fitted and the long crane from which to suspend pots.

The feeding of the fireplace was one of the essential tasks of a pioneer home. And it was one of the tasks that later was to fall to the baby that now lay in Nancy’s arms. He was to learn that a woodpile was only one degree less important to the life of the home than the cupboard. He was to learn to gather for the fire-place for months before winter set in, as Nancy did for her larder. There must be logs as long as the opening, of a half dozen different sizes; they must be green and dry, hard and soft, and there must be chips to kindle a low fire, brush to make a blaze. He was to learn that a fire must never go out after cold sets in. And he was to master all the ceremonials of the fireplace—putting on the back log, packing the coals at night, stirring them in the morning, and choosing just the right wood for quick heat. The baby Abraham was to learn all this, and to learn—who ever better?—the joys of the fireside, and how it might light one on the way to knowledge.

Nancy was not troubled at her fireplace with a multiplicity of cooking utensils like a housewife of today. Her chief reliance was the Dutch oven, a big iron pot with a cover, standing on long legs and kept continuously on the coals. After the Dutch oven, the most important article was her long-handled frying pan. On this she roasted the game with which the larder of her home was always filled, both in Kentucky and later in Indiana. Here, too, she fried the salt pork and bacon which the pioneer always preferred to venison, rabbit or wild turkey, and, of course, it was on this frying pan that she made the hot bread and cakes which went with the meats....

Her bread baking she did in a clay oven—not so good an oven as that which Thomas’s mother had used back in Virginia, for that was brick, but it was an oven of the same kind. Nancy had an outside fireplace, too, where in summer she kept her Dutch oven going, and in the fall tried out lard, and made soap and prepared the tallow for the candles. All through the summer, like every pioneer housewife, she gathered wild berries and dried them. All though the fall she cut and strung apples and pumpkins to dry....In the fall, too, she wrapped up in dry leaves or bits of paper apples and pears to keep for her children’s Christmas....

She was skilled in spinning and weaving, and there were few days that did not find her at her loom or wheel, or cutting up and making into garments for Thomas, little Sarah, the baby Abraham, the linsey-woolsey she had spun. From her loom, too, came woolen blankets in the fine and simple designs of her time. When she collected by long patience enough pieces of cotton for a quilt she patched it in some famous pattern, and as she worked she rocked her baby in the simple cradle we can well believe Tom Lincoln had made for her.{3}

4

IN 1811, Thomas Lincoln moved to a farm ten miles north and east of the one on which Abraham was born. Albert J. Beveridge, with fine feeling for the rugged country in which it was located, describes the new farm and its surroundings, and relates something of the boy’s life there.

SOME SEVEN OR EIGHT MILES north and east from the Sinking Spring farm, a tremendous stone escarpment called Muldraugh’s Hill divides the Barrens from the lower and heavily timbered land to the northward. This vast cliff is pierced by a valley four miles in length and from one fourth of a mile to two miles broad. High hills, abrupt, and mountainous in appearance, rise on either side. Lengthwise through the valley a deep and rapid stream, Knob Creek, hurries to the Rolling Fork, a large stream at the valley end; and the Rolling Fork, in turn, flows into Salt River which empties into the Ohio.

From the gorges of the lofty elevations on either side of the valley smaller streams feed Knob Creek which has its rise in the cliffs that separate the valley from the higher land of the Barrens. For five hundred feet this eminence sharply falls to land and streams below; and the abutting hills, stretching out from the parent cliff like gnarled and knotted arms of a giant, are almost as imposing.

Formed as it is of the silt carried from the surface of the hills, the product of decomposing vegetation throughout ages of time, the soil of this valley is extremely rich and productive. Some of the little triangles of land that project from Knob Creek into the hills on either side are not surpassed in fertility—the mere dropping of seed with the slightest cultivation suffices to yield a crop. In 1813,{4} when Thomas Lincoln moved to Knob Creek from his sterile farm on the edge of the Barrens, the main stream and tribut...

Table of contents

• Title page
• TABLE OF CONTENTS
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• FOREWORD
• CHAPTER ONE-Kentucky Childhood
• CHAPTER TWO-Youth in Indiana
• CHAPTER THREE-New Salem
• CHAPTER FOUR-“The DeWitt Clinton of Illinois”
• CHAPTER FIVE-Attorney and Counsellor at Law
• CHAPTER SIX-Romance and Marriage
• CHAPTER SEVEN-Mr. Lincoln of Illinois
• CHAPTER EIGHT-Leader of the Illinois Bar
• CHAPTER NINE-The House on Eighth Street
• CHAPTER TEN-Rebirth in Politics: 1854-1858
• CHAPTER ELEVEN-The Great Debates
• CHAPTER TWELVE-“The Taste Is in My Mouth a Little”
• CHAPTER THIRTEEN-Candidate and President-elect
• CHAPTER FOURTEEN-The New President
• CHAPTER FIFTEEN-The Momentous Issue
• CHAPTER SIXTEEN-The War Begins
• CHAPTER SEVENTEEN-Search for a General
• CHAPTER EIGHTEEN-Emancipation
• CHAPTER NINETEEN-Life in the White House
• CHAPTER TWENTY-Gettysburg
• CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE-Years of Victory
• CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO-The Second Election
• CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE-Peace
• CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR-Death-and a People’s Grief
• EPILOGUE
• BIBLIOGRAPHY
• REQUEST FROM THE PUBLISHER