第5章 THE MYSTERIOUS YOUTH(1)

Vagrants,or little better than vagrants,were Thomas Lincoln and his family making their way to Indiana.For a year after they arrived they were squatters,their home an "open-faced camp,"that is,a shanty with one wall missing,and instead of chimney,a fire built on the open side.In that mere pretense of a house,Nancy Lincoln and her children spent the winter of 1816-1817.Then Thomas resorted to his familiar practice of taking land on credit.The Lincolns were now part of a "settlement"of seven or eight families strung along a little stream known as Pigeon Creek.Here Thomas entered a quarter-section of fair land,and in the course of the next eleven years succeeded--wonderful to relate--in paying down sufficient money to give him title to about half.

Meanwhile,poor fading Nancy went to her place.Pigeon Creek was an out-of-the-way nook in the still unsettled West,and Nancy during the two years she lived there could not have enjoyed much of the consolation of her religion.Perhaps now and then she had ghostly council of some stray circuit-rider.

But for her the days of the ecstasies had gone by;no great revival broke the seals of the spirit,stirred its deep waters,along Pigeon Creek.There was no religious service when she was laid to rest in a coffin made of green lumber and fashioned by her husband.Months passed,the snow lay deep,before a passing circuit-rider held a burial service over her grave.

Tradition has it that the boy Abraham brought this about very likely,at ten years old,he felt that her troubled spirit could not have peace till this was done.Shadowy as she is,ghostlike across the page of history,it is plain that she was a reality to her son.He not only loved her but revered her.

He believed that from her he had inherited the better part of his genius.Many years after her death he said,"God bless my mother;all that I am or ever hope to be I owe to her."Nancy was not long without a successor.Thomas Lincoln,the next year,journeyed back to Kentucky and returned in triumph to Indiana,bringing as his wife,an old flame of his who had married,had been widowed,and was of a mind for further adventures.This Sarah Bush Lincoln,of less distinction than Nancy,appears to have been steadier-minded and stronger-willed.Even before this,Thomas had left the half-faced camp and moved into a cabin.But such a cabin!It had neither door,nor window,nor floor.Sally Lincoln required her husband to make of it a proper house--by the standards of Pigeon Creek.She had brought with her as her dowry a wagonload of furniture.These comforts together with her strong will began a new era of relative comfort in the Lincoln cabin.[1]

Sally Lincoln was a kind stepmother to Abraham who became strongly attached to her.In the rough and nondescript community of Pigeon Creek,a world of weedy farms,of miserable mud roads,of log farm-houses,the family life that was at least tolerable.The sordid misery described during her regime emerged from wretchedness to a state of by all the recorders of Lincoln's early days seems to have ended about his twelfth year.At least,the vagrant suggestion disappeared.Though the life that succeeded was void of luxury,though it was rough,even brutal,dominated by a coarse,peasant-like view of things,it was scarcely by peasant standards a life of hardship.There was food sufficient,if not very good;protection from wind and weather;fire in the winter time;steady labor;and social acceptance by the community of the creekside.That the labor was hard and long,went without saying.But as to that--as of the whippings in Kentucky--what else,from the peasant point of view,would you expect?

Abraham took it all with the same stoicism with which he had once taken the whippings.By the unwritten law of the creekside he was his father's property,and so was his labor,until he came of age.Thomas used him as a servant or hired him out to other farmers.Stray recollections show us young Abraham working as a farm-hand for twenty-five cents the day,probably with "keep"in addition;we glimpse him slaughtering hogs skilfully at thirty-one cents a day,for this was "rough work."He became noted as an axman.

In the crevices,so to speak,of his career as a farm-hand,Abraham got a few months of schooling,less than a year in all.

A story that has been repeated a thousand times shows the raw youth by the cabin fire at night doing sums on the back of a wooden shovel,and shaving off its surface repeatedly to get a fresh page.He devoured every book that came his way,only a few to be sure,but generally great ones--the Bible,of course,and Aesop,Crusoe,Pilgrim's Progress,and a few histories,these last unfortunately of the poorer sort.He early displayed a bent for composition,scribbling verses that were very poor,and writing burlesque tales about his acquaintances in what passed for a Biblical style.[2]

One great experience broke the monotony of the life on Pigeon Creek.He made a trip to New Orleans as a "hand"on a flatboat.Of this trip little is known though much may be surmised.To his deeply poetic nature what an experience it must have been:the majesty of the vast river;the pageant of its immense travel;the steamers heavily laden;the fleets of barges;the many towns;the nights of stars over wide sweeps of water;the stately plantation houses along the banks;the old French city with its crowds,its bells,the shipping,the strange faces and the foreign speech;all the bewildering evidence that there were other worlds besides Pigeon Creek!