Abe’s First Seven Years
Abe had a reputation as a quiet, bashful, polite boy who liked solitude and was “rather noted for Keeping his clothes cleaner longer than any others.”117 He was also described as the “shyest, most reticent, most uncouth and awkward-appearing, homeliest and worse dressed” boy in the neighborhood.118 He often served as a peacemaker helping settle disagreements. Abe was also regarded as a good wrestler, though he would not fight unless he had to. One day, in the shade of a big tree at the mill, he was attacked without provocation or warning by a bigger boy, who was supported by two friends. Onlookers were astonished when Lincoln whipped each of them in succession and challenged any others who wished to do battle.
Lincoln’s pastimes were shaped by his rural surroundings. He liked fishing and hunting with his dog. When the dog would run a rabbit into a hollow tree, Abe used his axe to chop it out. The future president nearly drowned crossing Knob Creek over a footlog; he lost his balance, fell in, and had to be rescued by his friend, Austin Gollaher. Abe and Gollaher improvised their play. Whatever they did, Lincoln delighted in excelling. Lincoln remembered Gollaher and many other Kentuckians fondly. During the Civil War, he asked a resident of the Bluegrass State about the Cessnas, Brownfields, Friends, Ashcrafts, and Kirkpatricks. He expressed a special interest in Gollaher, declaring: “I would rather see Gollaher than any man living.” Lincoln then told a scatological story about a prank the two had played as boys.119
In Kentucky, Abe briefly attended a school taught by Zachariah Riney, a pious Roman Catholic who was popular with students and respected for his character and education. In later years, Lincoln always spoke of him “in terms of grateful respect” and remembered that Riney made no effort to proselytize his small scholars.120 On the first day of class, Abe appeared wearing a long, one-piece linsey shirt and, improbably, a sunbonnet. He returned home weeping because his schoolmates teased him. To spare him further humiliation, his mother braided a more masculine straw hat. The windowless, dirt-floored schoolhouse, situated about 3 miles from the Lincolns’ cabin, was made of rough logs forming little niches where the youngsters played hide-and-seek.
Later, Abe was a pupil of his neighbor, Caleb Hazel, a young man with a rudimentary education who ran a school 4 or 5 miles from the Lincolns’ cabin. Like most other frontier instructors, Hazel taught by subscription, starting up a school when enough parents were willing to pay sufficient sums to make it worthwhile. A friend said Hazel “could perhaps teach spelling reading & indifferent writing & perhaps could Cipher to the rule of three—but had no other qualifications of a teacher except large size & bodily Strength to thrash any boy or youth that came to his School.”121 This last quality was necessary on the frontier, where schoolboys occasionally assaulted their teachers. Thrashings were sometimes administered with switches resembling ox-gads, 5 feet long and quite thick. Once Hazel sent Abe to cut a switch to be used on a classmate, an errand he disliked because, as Gollaher put it, “he never wanted to see anybody punished.”122 Hazel used only a spelling book, and when the more advanced pupils finished it, he would start them over again on one-syllable words. Lincoln went to Hazel more to keep his sister company than to learn much himself, but he did manage to master his letters and a little spelling. Lincoln’s brief experience with Caleb Hazel was typical of frontier education at the time—a rough cabin staffed by a scarcely educated teacher using a scant supply of rudimentary books and relying on recitations and liberal doses of harsh physical discipline. Good students were sometimes rewarded with a swig of whiskey or a chaw of tobacco. Years later, Lincoln described the educational system he had known: “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 was looked upon as a wizzard.”123 “The rule of three” was the means for solving problems involving proportions, where the student was given three numbers in a proportion and asked to calculate the fourth (34 is to 15 as 7 is to X—what is the value of X?)
Lincoln’s schooling, at least in the alphabet, may have begun at home. Nancy Hanks Lincoln could not write but was able to read. She often read to her children from the Bible, much to Abe’s delight. Her foster parents, Thomas and Elizabeth Sparrow, seemed to care about literacy. They made their other foster child, Dennis Hanks, into the best-educated member of the family; he could write as well as read. It is probably to the Sparrows’ credit that Nancy was regarded as better educated than most girls in the area. Her son, as an adult, would demonstrate intimate familiarity with scripture.
It is not clear how literate Abe was when he left Kentucky. Zachariah Riney’s daughter said that Abe “learned to read well at the first session” of her father’s school.124 An Indiana playmate and William Makepeace Thayer, who interviewed many of Lincoln’s friends, both alleged that Lincoln could read before he turned 8. John Locke Scripps asserted that Lincoln could also write by that age. More modestly, William Dean Howells in his 1860 campaign biography claimed that Lincoln had only “acquired the alphabet and the rudiments of education” while in the Blue-grass State.125 Dennis Hanks stated flatly, “Abe read no books in Ky.”126
In backwoods Kentucky, the churches and preachers were as primitive as the schools and teachers. There were three major varieties of religion: “very ignorant Baptists, very noisy Methodists, and very dogmatic Presbyterians.”127 The two Baptist ministers whom the Lincoln family knew best, William Downs and David Elkin, hardly served as models of Christian decorum. The bibulous, disorderly, lazy, and slovenly Downs founded the Little Mount Church only after the Rolling Fork congregation had expelled him. Elkin was hard-drinking, ignorant, impoverished, indolent, and dressed sloppily. Elkin’s grandson testified that “when my grandfather went to preaching he did not know but one letter in the alphabet and that was the letter O, and he knew it because it was round.”128
Nancy and Thomas belonged to Baptist churches in Kentucky and Indiana, and their home library contained a catechism as well as a Bible. According to John Locke Scripps, the pioneers “were glad of an opportunity to hear a sermon, whether delivered by one of their own religious faith or not. Thus it was at least with the father and mother of young Lincoln, who never failed to attend, with their family, upon religious worship.” They “gladly received the word, caring less for the doctrinal tenets of the preacher than for the earnestness and zeal with which he enforced practical godliness.”129
In 1816, Thomas Lincoln decided to relocate to Indiana. His brother Josiah, his second cousins Austin and Davis Lincoln, his friend James Carter, the widow and children of Hananiah Lincoln, and Nancy Hanks’s uncle, Joseph Hanks, all lived there. Thomas joined a chain migration from the Rolling Fork of the Salt River in Kentucky to Little Pigeon Creek in southwestern Indiana. Migrants from all over Kentucky poured into Indiana after the War of 1812, when Indian tribes surrendered claims to the southern half of the territory. (“Kentucky had taken Indiana without firing a shot,” wags quipped.)130 The head of the government land office in Vincennes reported that in 1817, the year Thomas Lincoln entered his claim for 160 acres there, “the applications were so numerous that it was impossible to record them as rapidly as they came in.”131
Troubles besetting Thomas in Kentucky strengthened the lure of Indiana. In February 1816, an ejectment suit filed against him threatened to force him off his rented Knob Creek acres. Having already lost money on his Mill Creek and Sinking Spring farms because of imperfect titles, Thomas at first retained a lawyer to fight the suit but abruptly changed his mind. In May, a court instructed him to ascertain that the road from Muldraugh’s Hill through Knob Creek Valley was maintained properly. That order may have helped persuade him to leave. Unusually bad weather later in the year might have also influenced Thomas. Winter came early to Hardin County in 1816, with frost appearing as early as the end of July. By September, ice a quarter inch thick covered the ground. The temperatu
re did not rise above freezing in October, and November was bitterly cold.
Thomas cobbled together a flatboat, loaded it with his tools and barrels of whiskey (his meager capital), left Nancy and the children at Knob Creek, and shoved off for the Ohio River. Before reaching it, his raft capsized, pitching whiskey, tools, and sailor into the Rolling Fork. After salvaging some of his cargo with the help of friendly onlookers, Thomas continued his journey, crossing the Ohio River at Thompson’s Ferry. Aided by Francis Posey, who hauled his goods for him in an ox-drawn wagon, Thomas hacked his way through an Indiana forest choked with grapevines and underbrush. The vines were so dense a knife could be driven into the tangle all the way up to the handle. At one point it took several days to chop through just 18 miles of forest. Thomas, whose whole life was a struggle, said “that he never passed through a harder experience than he did going from Thompson’s Ferry to Spencer County, Indiana.”132
Thomas was uncertain where to stake his claim. He was looking for familiar terrain and, like other settlers, wanted to avoid commercial arteries like the Ohio River. A friendly pioneer, William Wood, recommended the site that Thomas chose for his cabin, and promised to guard Thomas’s possessions while he fetched his family.
In an 1860 autobiographical sketch, Abraham Lincoln declared that his family’s move was “partly on account of slavery; but chiefly on account of the difficulty in land titles in Ky.”133 Some have inferred from this statement that Thomas Lincoln ardently opposed slavery, but that seems unlikely. Lincoln told others that his father moved in order to improve his standard of living. Dennis Hanks scoffed at the idea that Tom left Kentucky because of slavery. “This is untrue,” said Hanks. He moved “to better his Condition.… Slavery did not operate on him.”134 In 1866, E. R. Burba of Hodgenville reported that “I have never heard that Slavery was any Cause of his leaving Ky—and think quite likely it was Not—for there were very few Slaves in the whole Country round here then.”135 In Kentucky, Thomas had served without apparent qualms on a slave patrol, a kind of informal police headed by a captain empowered to whip slaves found away from their owners without a pass. Lincoln’s campaign-year remark—“This removal was partly on account of slavery”—may have been made for political consumption. It may also have referred to Thomas’s dislike of a social system that afforded little upward mobility to poor whites like himself. In 1860, John Locke Scripps alleged that Thomas Lincoln “realized in his daily experience and observation how slavery oppresses the poorer classes, making their poverty and social disrepute a permanent condition through the degradation which it affixes to labor.”136 Many such settlers in Indiana, harboring no moral objections to slavery, actively (and successfully) campaigned to keep free blacks from moving into their state.
Before leaving Kentucky, Lincoln and his mother visited the grave of his brother, Thomas, who had died in infancy around 1812. As he crossed the Ohio with his sister and parents, 7-year-old Abraham did not seem like a prodigy destined for greatness. Dennis Hanks thought that “Abe Exhibited no special traits in Ky, Except a good kind—somewhat wild nature.”137 Another Kentuckian remembered him simply as the “gawkiest, dullest looking boy you ever saw,” unremarkable except for an exceptionally powerful memory.138 In that cold autumn the Lincoln family packed up and plunged into the wilderness of southwestern Indiana, seeking a new beginning in “wild and desolate” Hurricane Township.139
2
“I Used to Be a Slave”
Boyhood and Adolescence in Indiana
(1816–1830)
In 1817, a British traveler described Indiana as “a vast forest, larger than England, just penetrated in places, by the back-wood settlers, who are half hunters, half farmers.”1 Late in the previous year, Thomas Lincoln, his wife, and their two children entered the Buck Horn Valley of that state, which had just been admitted to the Union.
The family’s journey from Kentucky was an arduous one, relentlessly exposing them to the rigors of camping out on cold winter nights. They brought with them little more than clothes, bedding, a Dutch oven, a skillet, and some tinware. The family had lost all their ironware when Thomas’s raft overturned on his earlier expedition. Upon reaching their home site they began a new life with just these few household possessions. Their lack of domestic animals and separation by miles from their nearest neighbors added to the uncertainty of their new existence.
Hardships in Frontier Indiana
The Lincolns quickly erected a crude shelter called a “half-faced camp.” This temporary expedient commonly thrown up by pioneers had three pole walls and a roof of poles and brush. Where the fourth wall would be, on the southern exposure, a fire was kept burning in cold weather. The Lincolns’ pole house had animal skins that covered the open side when the wind howled and the fire was out. It was in this structure, which Dennis Hanks unfondly called “that Darne Little half face Camp,” that the family lived for an undetermined time, probably several months.2 Hanks’s distaste for that camp, which he and his foster parents occupied temporarily in 1817, is understandable. It would be relatively comfortable in warm, dry weather, but when winter storms raged and the south wind blew rain and smoke into their faces it proved nearly intolerable. Acquaintances of the Lincolns testified that young Abe lived “amid want, poverty and discomfort that was … about on the plane of the slaves he was destined to emancipate,” and they described the winter of 1816–1817 as “a veritable childhood Valley Forge of suffering.”3
Compared to this Little Pigeon Creek neighborhood, Hardin County, Kentucky, seemed a model of settled civilization. Lincoln portrayed it as a “wild region” of “unbroken forest” where “many bears and other wild animals” roamed.4 Though it was “as unpoetical as any spot of the earth,” it inspired him to write poetry thirty years later:
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.5
When the Crawford family first moved to the Little Pigeon Creek area nine years after the Lincolns, through the unchinked spaces in their cabin walls they observed the eyes of wolves reflecting light from the fireplace. Less menacing fauna also abounded near the Lincolns’ lean-to, from which 7-year-old Abe shot a wild turkey. He later recalled that event with regret. In an 1860 third person autobiographical sketch, Lincoln wrote: “A few days before the completion of his eighth year, in the absence of his father, a flock of wild turkeys approached the new log-cabin, and A. with a rifle gun, standing inside, shot through a crack, and killed one of them. He has never since pulled a trigger on any larger game.”6
If game was readily at hand, water was not. Thomas dug holes in his property for badly needed water, only to come up with “a miserable article” that had to be strained.7 A Yankee douser offered to find water on the farm for a five dollar fee, but the cash-strapped Thomas would not part with that much for “a pig in the polk.” With a pet cat tagging along, young Abe often trudged back and forth to fetch clean water from a spring one mile away.8 It is hard to know why Thomas settled so far from a water source; typically, pioneers made proximity to good water a priority. Perhaps he was one of those who feared that a dread disease called “milk sickness” was likely to be contracted near spring branches.
Little Pigeon Creek’s social environment was as primitive as the physical setting. One resident stated in 1866 that the early settlers were quite sociable, kind, and accommodating—“more so than now”—but that “there was more drunkenness and stealing on a small scale, more immorality, less Religion, less well placed Confidence.”9 Pioneer customs, Dennis Hanks recalled, were “very Ruff.”10
Ignorance and superstition prevailed among the early Hoosiers. They believed that breaking a mirror or carrying a hoe or an ax into a cabin would bring a death in the family within a year’s time. The wailing of a dog portended a death the next day. If a dog crossed a hunter’s path, it was bad luck unless he locked his little fingers together. Frid
ay was considered an inauspicious day to begin planting or harvesting. If a bird lit on a window or entered the house, it was regarded as a harbinger of woe. Farmers should plant, sow, and fence only if the signs of the moon were propitious. Subterranean crops like potatoes had to be planted in the dark of the moon, unlike tomatoes and beans, which must be planted in the light of the moon. The pioneers hired wizards to restore sick cows to health and thought that a child who was breathed on by a horse would contract whooping cough. Young girls swallowed chicken hearts in the hopes that they would facilitate their quest for true love. Carrying a bag of eggs in one hand and a bag of salt in the other, young men mounted mules facing backward and rode for a mile; if no accident occurred, they concluded that they would have good luck throughout the coming year.
Although Lincoln eventually shed many of the qualities of backwoods Indiana, he remained superstitious throughout life. His law partner, William Herndon, to whom Lincoln once confided, “I feel as if I shall meet with some terrible end,” said that a Baptist upbringing “made him [Lincoln] a fatalist” and that a streak of superstition ran through him “like a bluish red vein runs through the whitest marble.”11 When a dog bit one of his children, Lincoln took the boy to Terre Haute, Indiana, to be cured by a “mad stone,” which would supposedly drain off any poison when applied to the wound. As a congressman in the late 1840s, he declined to be a member of a party of thirteen people, an act that prompted a friendly colleague to declare sharply that he would rather be dead than be as superstitious as Lincoln. In 1842, Lincoln told his best friend, Joshua Speed, “I always was superstitious.”12 To Henry C. Whitney he confided that as a boy, “I used to wander out in the woods all by myself. It had a fascination for me which had an element of fear in it—superstitious fear. I knew that I was not alone just as well as I know that you are here now. Still I could see nothing and no one, but I heard voices. Once I heard a voice right at my elbow—heard it distinctly and plainly. I turned around, expecting to see some one, of course. No one there, but the voice was there.” When Whitney asked what the voice said, Lincoln did not reply: “Deep gloom—a look of pain—settled on his countenance and lasted some minutes.”13
Abraham Lincoln: A Life, Volume 1 Page 5
