The most pressing challenge facing the Lincolns in their primitive home was clearing the land. Large for his age, Abe set to work with an axe, and later he remembered that for the next fifteen years he was “almost constantly handling that most useful instrument.”14 He felled trees, chopped them into logs, cleared undergrowth, dug stumps, and grubbed up roots for drying and burning. When not so engaged, he was harrowing, planting, hoeing, plowing, weeding, harvesting, or butchering.
Taking grain to a distant mill provided young Abe a break from that soul-crushing routine. He especially enjoyed watching the mill machinery in action. Even waiting in line at the mill afforded him pleasure. There he would meet other boys, who would joke, tell stories, fight, and wrestle. Lincoln always remembered a bizarre incident that occurred one day at Noah Gordon’s mill. Impatient with the mare powering the grindstone, Lincoln hit her with a whip, yelling, “Get up, you lazy old devil!” Just as he uttered the words, “Get up,” the horse kicked him unconscious. Upon coming to, he involuntarily completed his injunction: “you lazy old devil!” Lincoln regarded this as a most remarkable event and often discussed it with Herndon.15
Once the family had cleared enough land and planted a small crop of corn and vegetables, Thomas built a log cabin, which his family occupied for thirteen years. A windowless, one-story structure measuring 18 by 20 feet, it was high enough to accommodate an overhead bedroom reached by a ladder of pegs stuck into the log walls. There Lincoln and Dennis Hanks slept. Thomas fashioned a few pieces of crude furniture, including a pole bedstead and a slab table and stools. Thirteen people would eventually crowd together in this dismal abode, which afforded little comfort or privacy. (In “one of the best” cabins in southwestern Indiana at this time, William Faux noted that “Males dress and undress before the females, and nothing is thought of it.” Faux inferred that “Shame, or rather what is called false shame, or delicacy, does not exist here.”)16
Death of Nancy Hanks
No sooner had the Lincoln family abandoned the half-faced camp in 1817 than Nancy’s aunt and uncle, Thomas and Betsy Sparrow, arrived from Kentucky to occupy it. They brought with them their foster child, Dennis Hanks, bastard son of Mrs. Lincoln’s aunt Nancy. Dennis became a kind of surrogate older brother to his second cousin Abe, a decade his junior. The Sparrows had in effect adopted Nancy when she was quite young; she and everyone else in the Little Pigeon Creek area regarded them as her virtual, if not biological, parents. Indeed, young Abraham thought of the Sparrows as his grandparents.
In 1818, within months of the Sparrows’ arrival, an epidemic of “milk sickness” swept through southwest Indiana. Cows contracted the malady by eating weeds that contained the toxic substance tremetol; the disease killed not only the cows but also the humans who drank their infected milk. Doctors at that time knew neither the cause of the disease nor a cure for it, which struck down Mrs. Peter Brooner, a neighbor of the Lincolns, and then Thomas and Betsy Sparrow. Nancy Lincoln nursed all three of them as they sickened and died. And then in late September, she, too, contracted the disease.
If Nancy Hanks died the way most victims of milk sickness did, her husband and children in the small cabin must have been horrified as her body was convulsed with nausea, her eyes rolled, and her tongue grew large and turned red. After a few days, as death approached, she probably lay in pain, her legs spread apart, her breath growing short, her skin becoming cool and clammy, and her pulse beating ever more irregularly. Before her final coma, she urged Abe and Sarah to be good to one another and to their father, and to “reverence and worship God.”17 On October 5, 1818, a week after her symptoms first appeared, she died, unattended by a physician.
Young Abe helped his father construct a coffin, a melancholy task that Thomas had performed often that season. Nancy’s body was conveyed on a homemade sled to a gravesite near the cabin, where Betsy and Thomas Sparrow were already buried. No tombstone marked her final resting place, and no preacher delivered a funeral sermon until months later, when David Elkin arrived from Kentucky and spoke to a group of about twenty mourners gathered at the grave.
No witnesses described Lincoln’s reaction to his mother’s death, nor did he say anything directly about its effect on him. Many years later, however, he indirectly revealed something of his emotions when he consoled a young girl whose father had been killed in the Civil War: “It is with deep grief that I learn of the death of your kind and brave Father; and, especially, that it is affecting your young heart beyond what is common in such cases. In this sad world of ours, sorrow comes to all; and, to the young, it comes with bitterest agony, because it takes them unawares.” Significantly he added, “I have had experience enough to know what I say.”18
During the lonely winter following his mother’s death, Lincoln cherished hearing the Bible stories she had once told him because they brought back memories of her voice. In January 1861, he spoke of “the sad, if not pitiful condition” of his family after Nancy died.19 In the late 1840s, Lincoln read William Cowper’s poem, “On Receipt of My Mother’s Picture” and marked one stanza that may well have reminded him of Nancy Hanks Lincoln:
Oh that those lips had language! Life has pass’d
With me but roughly since I heard thee last.
Those lips are thine—thy own sweet smile I see,
The same that oft in childhood solaced me.20
Lincoln’s sister Sarah, who was only 11 when her mother died, assumed the domestic responsibilities of cooking, cleaning, washing, mending clothes, and spinning wool. She was a good-natured, amiable, gentle, intelligent, dark-skinned, heavyset girl. Nathaniel Grigsby remembered her as having an “extraordinary Mind—She was industrious—more so than Abraham—Abe worked almost alone from the head—whilst she labored both.” Like her brother, she “could meet & greet a person with the very Kindest greeting in the world—make you Easy at the touch & word.”21 Austin Gollaher, who was quite fond of Sarah, described her as “just as pretty as Abe was homely,” with “big brown eyes and curly chestnut hair.”22 But even with the help of kindly neighbors who pitched in, she could hardly replace her mother in the household. The gloom that settled over the cabin after Nancy Hanks Lincoln’s death would not lift for more than a year, not until Thomas remarried.
The “profound agony” caused by the loss of his mother left its mark on Abe. Psychologists have found that bereavement in childhood “is one of the most significant factors in the development of depressive illness in later life” and that “a depressive illness in later years is often a reaction to a present loss or bereavement which is associated with a more serious loss or bereavement in childhood.”23 When a parent dies, the quality of the child’s relationship with the surviving parent becomes critically important; inadequate care of the child seems to be a central cause of later depression.
In the wake of Nancy’s death, Lincoln’s unsympathetic father failed to provide Abe with adequate care, and partly as a result, Lincoln would be plagued with depression as an adult. At one point Thomas left his two children with their young cousin Sophie Hanks (who had come to live with the Lincolns around 1818) to fend for themselves while he drifted down the Ohio River to sell pork. He again left the children when he wooed Sarah Bush Johnston in Kentucky, where, according to family tradition, he spent more time than he had intended to. One source alleged that the children, having given him up for dead, became “almost nude for the want of clothes and their stomachs became leathery from the want of food.”24 By the time their new stepmother arrived at the end of 1819, she found Sarah and Abe “wild—ragged and dirty,” and thought her stepson “the ugliest chap that ever obstructed my view.”25
The year and a quarter that separated Nancy Lincoln’s death and Sarah Bush Johnston Lincoln’s arrival was miserable for both children and left enduring scars. Children often regard the early death of a parent as a deliberate abandonment. Throughout his life Lincoln feared being abandoned and was inclined to attack those who forsook their party or their principles. He also
harbored an abiding wariness of women in general; his mother’s death evidently taught him that women are unreliable and untrustworthy.
Stepmother
When Thomas proposed marriage to Sarah Bush Johnston in Kentucky in the fall of 1819, it was the second time he had asked for her hand. They had known each other since childhood. He had had dealings with some of her eight siblings, including her brother Isaac, who had accompanied him to New Orleans in 1806. Sarah had rejected Thomas’s first proposal in favor of Daniel Johnston, who passed away a decade after their wedding, leaving her a widow with three young children.
Thomas found 30-year-old Sarah Bush Johnston very attractive. She was handsome, tall, with good posture and a light complexion, and was sprightly, talkative, proud, kind, and charitable. Although her family was “rough, uncouth, [and] uneducated,” they occupied rungs far higher on the social and economic ladder than did the Hankses.26 William Herndon said she “was far above Thomas Lincoln—somewhat cultivated and quite a lady.”27 She impressed people in both Kentucky and Indiana as industrious, strong, healthy, intelligent, and gentle. A tidy housekeeper with good manners and a knack for managing children, she, unlike Thomas’s first wife, enjoyed a spotless reputation.
Thomas courted his prospective bride matter-of-factly, blurting out to her one day as she was doing laundry: “Well Miss Johns[t]on, I have no wife & you have no husband[.] I came a purpose to mary you[.] I knowed you from a gal & you knowed me from a boy—I have no time to loose and if you are willing, let it be done Straight off.” She replied that it was “so sudden” and “asked for time to consider, but he said he was not in a mood to fool away time on such an important business as wife hunting.” To this she rejoined: “Tommy I know you well & have no objection to marrying you, but I cannot do it straight off as I owe some debts that must first be paid” and “could never think of burdening the man I marry with debt; it would not be right.” Thomas promptly settled with her creditors (paying them approximately $3) and showed her the receipts. Meanwhile, her friends and brothers urged her to accept the proposal. She assented, and so they were married on December 2, 1819.28 Thomas hired his brother-in-law to haul the bride’s many household goods, including a bureau, table, spinning wheel, set of chairs, large chest of drawers, cooking utensils, dishes, cutlery, and two beds.
Arriving in Indiana with her three children, Sarah was taken aback by the quasi-ursine condition of the Lincoln cabin and its inhabitants and quickly proceeded to improve both. “I dressed Abe & his sister up—looked more human,” she recalled.29 She scrubbed them until they were “well & clean” and eliminated the lice that had taken up residence in Abe’s unruly hair.30 Appearances mattered to Sarah. When she was a girl, her mother thought her excessively proud because she cared about looking good and keeping up with fashion. When Thomas insisted that she sell some of her furniture because “it was too fine for them to keep,” she refused. After replacing the crude puncheon tables and stools in the Indiana cabin, she swiftly effected other improvements. A floor was laid down, and doors and windows were installed. She dressed Sarah and Abe in some of the abundant clothing she had brought from Kentucky. In just a few weeks she revolutionized the Lincolns and their house, so that everything was “snug & comfortable.”31
Sarah was a good cook, though her culinary skills were wasted on Abe, whom she described as “a moderate Eater” who obediently “ate what was set before him, making no complaint: he seemed Careless about this.”32 Her meals were evidently nutritious, for the boy enjoyed good health. She probably served him the customary pioneer diet in Indiana, which consisted of cornbread, mush and milk, pork, chickens, quails, squirrels, and wild turkeys. Occasionally, she “used to get some sorghum and ginger and make some gingerbread. It wasn’t often, and it was our biggest treat,” Lincoln recalled.33
Sarah Bush Lincoln tended to Abraham’s emotional as well as physical needs. Augustus H. Chapman reported that she “took an espical liking to young Abe” and “soon dressed him up in entire new clothes & from that time on he appeared to lead a new life.” She encouraged him to study, for she recognized that he was “a Boy of uncommon natural Talents,” which she did all she could to foster.34 She even moderated Thomas Lincoln’s reluctance to let Abe read. “I induced my husband to permit Abe to read and study at home as well as at school,” she told an interviewer. “At first he [Thomas] was not easily reconciled to it, but finally he too seemed willing to encourage him to a certain extent.”35
Abe and his stepmother grew remarkably close. “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 in fact, or Even in appearance, to do any thing I requested him,” she remembered. In turn, she “never gave him a cross word.” She and Abe, she thought, were kindred souls: “His mind & mine—what little I had [—] seemed to run together—move in the same channel.” Abe “was dutiful to me always—he loved me truly I think.” She compared him favorably to her own son John: “Both were good boys, but I must Say … that Abe was the best boy I Ever Saw or Ever Expect to see.”36 He “always wanted to do just as I wanted him.”37
Lincoln reciprocated the love of his stepmother, whom he called “mama.” In 1861, he told Augustus H. Chapman that “she had been his best Friend in this world & that no Son could love a Mother more than he loved her.” From Lincoln’s affectionate tone Chapman concluded that “few children loved there parents as he loved this Step Mother.”38 Joshua Speed, Lincoln’s closest confidant, recalled that Lincoln’s “fondness for his step mother and his watchful care over her after the death of his father [in 1851] deserves notice. He could not bear to have any thing said by any one against her.” Near the end of his life, Lincoln told Speed “of his affection for her and her kindness to him.”39 To Herndon and others Lincoln said she was “considerate and attentive,” a “kind, tender, loving mother” and a “noble woman” to whom he was “indebted more than all the world for his kindness—amiability, etc.”40 Curiously, Lincoln seldom visited his stepmother, even after Thomas died. Perhaps he hesitated to return to the paternal cabin lest it remind him of the grim one in Indiana where he had grown up.
Just as Sarah Bush Lincoln seemed to prefer her stepson to her own boy, Thomas Lincoln favored his stepson John D. Johnston over Abe. Remarkably, however, little stepsibling rivalry developed between the two boys. Sarah remembered them quarreling but once, and she thought theirs was an unusually harmonious relationship for stepbrothers. A year younger than Abe, Johnston was a handsome, kind-hearted, generous, hospitable fellow whose major defects were indolence and a quarrelsome streak. His glibness and sociability gave the impression that he was smarter than his shy stepbrother, Abe. Sophie Hanks reported that Abe would stick up for John when he was in the right but “let him get licked” when he was not. She added that John “was not very truthful. Sometimes he would do some devilment. John would not always tell the truth, and Uncle Tom would say, ‘Wait till Abe comes, and we’ll find out about it.’ ”41 In adulthood Johnston became known as “the Beau Brummel of Goose Nest Prairie,” who wore the best clothes, even if he could not afford them.42 He may have had a drinking problem; a ledger showed that Johnston once purchased over 14 gallons of whiskey in four months. After Lincoln had become a successful lawyer and politician, Johnston “would tell with much relish how he once thought Abe a fool, because, instead of spending his evenings sporting with the young folks, he seemed to care for nothing but some old musty books.” To Johnston and his contemporaries, such behavior “was clear proof of Abe’s insanity. ‘But, now,’ said he, ‘Abe is a great and wise man, and I am a fool still.’ ”43 Sarah Bush Lincoln said that “John used to be the smartest when they were little fellows. But Abe passed him. Abe kept getting smarter all the time, and John he went just so far and stopped. I never saw another boy get smarter and smarter like Abe did.”44
All in all, it is hard to imagine anyone more different from Lincoln than Johnston. Nonetheless, Lincoln spoke of
him “in the Most affectionate Manner” and said that he and his stepbrother “were raised together, slept together, and liked each other as well as actual brothers could do.”45 When Abe’s sister told him to keep away from the Johnstons or they would ruin him, Abe just laughed and said that John was “all right.”46 In 1848 he wrote to John, “You have always been [kind] to me.”47
In time, however, Lincoln became impatient with Johnston’s laziness, and though he extended himself to help John’s children, he was reluctant to subsidize him. For his part, Johnston may have resented Lincoln’s lectures on his lack of diligence and may have believed that Lincoln did not do enough for Thomas and Sarah, who lived with Johnston. Dennis Hanks reported that eventually the stepbrothers became “Enimes for awhile on this ground,” and added mysteriously, “I Don’t want to tell al[l] the thing[s] that I No,” for “it would Not Look well in history.” Still, Hanks concluded, “I think Abe Dun more for John than he des[er]ved.… Abe treated John well.”48
Abraham Lincoln: A Life, Volume 1 Page 6
