Abraham Lincoln. William Eleroy Curtis

he was only six years old, was turned adrift, without home or care, for at ten years of age we find him "a wandering, laboring boy" who was left uneducated and supported himself by farm work and other menial employment, and learned the trades of carpenter and cabinet-maker. But he must have had good stuff in him, for when he was twenty-five years old he had saved enough from his wages to buy a farm in Hardin County. Local tradition, which, however, cannot always be trusted, represents him to have been "an easy going man, and slow to anger, but when 'roused a formidable adversary." He was above the medium height, had a powerful frame, and, like his immortal son, had a wide local reputation as a wrestler.

      While learning his trade in the carpenter shop of Joseph Hanks, Thomas Lincoln married Nancy Hanks, his own cousin, and the niece of his employer. He probably met her at the house of Richard Berry, with whom she lived, and must have seen a good deal of her at the home of her uncle. At all events, the cousins became engaged; their nuptial bond was signed according to the law on June 10, 1806, and two days later they were married by the Rev. Jesse Head, at the home of Richard Berry, near Beechland, Washington County, Kentucky.

      Nancy Hanks was descended from William Hanks, who came to this country in 1699 and settled at Plymouth, Massachusetts. Four of his five sons moved to Amelia County, Virginia, where they had a large tract of land. One of their descendants, Joseph Hanks, married Nancy Shipley, and in 1789 moved to Kentucky with a large party of his relatives. In 1793 he died, leaving eight children, who were scattered among their relatives, and Nancy, the youngest, when nine years old, found a home with her aunt, Lucy Shipley, the wife of Richard Berry. She is represented to have been a sweet-tempered and handsome woman, of intellect, appearance, and character superior to her position; and could even read and write, which was a remarkable accomplishment among the women of that day. She taught her husband to write his name. But she had no means whatever, being entirely dependent upon her uncle, and it is probable that she was willing to marry even so humble a husband as Thomas Lincoln, for the sake of securing independence and a home.

      Thomas Lincoln took his wife to a little log cabin in a hamlet called Elizabethtown, probably because he thought that it would be more congenial for her than his lonely farm in Hardin County, which was fourteen miles away; and perhaps he thought that he could earn a better living by carpenter work than by farming. Here their first child, Sarah, was born about a year after the marriage.

      Thomas Lincoln either failed to earn sufficient money to meet his household expenses or grew tired of his carpenter work, for, two years later, he left Elizabethtown and moved his family to his farm near Hodgensville, on the Big South Fork of Nolen Creek. It was a miserable place, of thin, unproductive soil and only partly cleared. Its only attraction was a fine spring of water, shaded by a little grove, which caused it to be called "Rock Spring Farm." The cabin was of the rudest sort, with a single room, a single window, a big fireplace, and a huge outside chimney.

      In this cabin Abraham Lincoln was born on February 12, 1809, and here he spent the first four years of his childhood. It was a far reach to the White House. Soon after his nomination for the Presidency he furnished a brief autobiography to Mr. Hicks, an artist who was painting his portrait, in which he said—

      "I was born February 12, 1809, in then Hardin County, Kentucky, at a point within the now County of Larue, a mile or a mile and a half from where Hodgen's mill now is. My parents being dead, and my own memory not serving, I know no means of identifying the precise locality. It was on Nolen Creek.

      "A. Lincoln.

      "June 14, 1860."

      The precise spot has since been clearly identified, and the cabin was still standing after his death.

      In 1813 the family removed to a more comfortable home on Knob Creek, six miles from Hodgensville, where Thomas Lincoln bought a better farm of two hundred and thirty-eight acres for one hundred and eighteen pounds and gave his note in payment. This was Abraham Lincoln's second home, and there he lived for four years.

      We know little about his childhood, except that it was of continual privation in a cheerless home, for Thomas Lincoln evidently found it difficult to supply his family with food and clothing. Mr. Lincoln seldom talked freely of those days, even to his most intimate friends, although from remarks which he dropped from time to time they judged that the impressions of his first years were indelible upon his temperament and contributed to his melancholy. On one occasion, being asked if he remembered anything about the War of 1812, he said that when a child, returning from fishing one day, he met a soldier in the road and, having been admonished by his mother that everybody should be good to the soldiers, he gave him his fish.

      Copyright, 1900, by McClure, Phillips & Co.

      THE BIRTHPLACE OF ABRAHAM LINCOLN

      Thomas and Nancy Lincoln had three children. Sarah, the eldest, at the age of fourteen married Aaron Griggsby and died in childbirth a year later. Thomas, the third child, died when only three days old.

      When Abraham was about seven years old his father became restless and went across the river into Indiana to look for a new home. It has been represented by some of Lincoln's biographers that the motive of his removal was his dislike of slavery; that he wished to remove his son from its influence; but Lincoln attributed the determination to other reasons, particularly his father's difficulty in securing a valid title to his land. It is quite as probable that, like other men of his temperament, he thought he could do better in a new place; like other rolling stones, that he could gather more moss in a new soil. He found a purchaser for his farm who gave him in payment twenty dollars in money and ten barrels of whiskey, which Thomas Lincoln loaded upon a flat-boat, with his household furniture, floating it down Knob Creek to Rolling Fork, to Salt River, to the Ohio River, and down the Ohio to Thompson's Ferry in Perry County, Indiana. The boat upset on the way and part of the whiskey and some of his carpenter tools were lost. He plunged into the forest, found a location that suited him about sixteen miles from the river, called Pigeon Creek, where he left his property with a settler, and, as his boat could not float upstream, he sold it and walked back to Hodgensville to get his wife and two children. He secured a wagon and two horses, in which he carried his family and whatever of his household effects were then remaining.

      Arriving at his location, which was a piece of timber land a mile and a half east of what is now Gentryville, Spencer County, he built a log cabin fourteen feet square, open to the weather on one side, and without windows or chimney. This was Abraham Lincoln's third home, and the family lived in that rude, primitive way for more than a year, managing to raise a patch of corn and a few vegetables during the following summer, which, with corn meal ground at a hand grist-mill seven miles away, were their chief food. Game, however, was abundant. The streams were full of fish and wild fruits could be gathered in the forest. The future President of the United States slept upon a heap of dry leaves in a narrow loft at one end of the cabin, to which he climbed by means of pegs driven into the wall. A year after his arrival Thomas Lincoln entered the quarter section of land he occupied and made his first payment under what was familiarly known as the "two-dollar-an-acre law," but it was eleven years before he could pay enough to obtain a patent for half of it. He then erected a permanent home of logs which was comparatively comfortable and was perhaps as good as those occupied by most of his neighbors.

      In the fall of 1818 the little community of pioneers was almost exterminated by an epidemic known as "milk sickness," and among the victims was Nancy Hanks Lincoln, who was buried with her neighbors in a little clearing in the forest in a coffin made of green lumber, cut with a whip-saw by her husband. There were no ceremonies at her burial, but several months later Abraham, then ten years old, wrote to Parson David Elkin, the itinerant Free-will Baptist preacher at Hodgensville, of his mother's death, and begged him to come to Indiana and preach her funeral sermon. Nancy Lincoln must have been highly esteemed or this poor parson would not have come a hundred miles through the wilderness in answer to this summons from her child, for several months later he appeared according to appointment, and all the settlers for many miles around assembled to hear him. It was the most important event that had ever occurred in the community and was remembered longer than any other.