Chapter III The Lincolns Leave Kentucky — They Settle in Southern Indiana — Conditions of Life in Their New Home
In 1816 a great event happened to the little boy. His father emigrated to Indiana from Knob Creek (Thomas Lincoln had removed from the farm on Nolin Creek to one some fifteen miles northeast, on Knob Creek, when Abraham was four years old). “This removal was partly on account of slavery, but chiefly on account of the difficulty in land titles in Kentucky,” says his son. It was due, as well, no doubt, to the fascination which an unknown country has always for the adventurous, and to that restless pioneer spirit which drives even men of sober judgment continually towards the frontier, in search of a place where the conflict with nature is less severe—some spot farther on, to which a friend or a neighbor has preceded, and from which he sends back glowing reports. It may be that Thomas Lincoln was tempted into Indiana by the reports of his brother Josiah, who had settled on the Big Blue River in that State. At all events, in the fall of 1816 he started with wife and children and household stores to journey by horseback and by wagon from Knob Creek to a farm selected on a previous trip he had made. This farm, located near Little Pigeon Creek, about fifteen miles north of the Ohio River, and a mile and a half east of Gentryville, Spencer County, was in a forest so dense that the road for the travellers had to be hewed out as they went.
To a boy of seven years, free from all responsibility, and too vigorous to feel its hardships, such a journey must have been, as William Cooper Howells, the father of the novelist, says of his own trip from Virginia to Ohio, in 1813, “a panorama of delightful novelty.” Life suddenly ceased its routine, and every day brought forth new scenes and adventures. Little Abraham saw forests greater than he had ever dreamed of, peopled by strange birds and beasts, and he crossed a river so wide that it must have seemed to him like the sea. To Thomas and Nancy Lincoln the journey was probably a hard and sad one; but to the children beside them it was a wonderful voyage into the unknown.
A New Home in Indiana
On arriving at the new farm an axe was put into the boy’s hands, and he was set to work to aid in clearing a field for corn, and to help build the “half-face camp” which for a year was the home of the Lincolns. There were few more primitive homes in the wilderness of Indiana in 1816 than this of young Lincoln’s, and there were few families, even in that day, who were forced to practise more makeshifts to get a living. The cabin which took the place of the “half-face camp” had but one room, with a loft above. For a long time there was no window, door, or floor; not even the traditional deer-skin hung before the exit; there was no oiled paper over the opening for light; there was no puncheon covering on the ground.
The furniture was of their own manufacture. The table and chairs were of the rudest sort—rough slabs of wood in which holes were bored and legs fitted in. Their bedstead, or, rather, bed-frame, was made of poles held up by two outer posts, and the ends made firm by inserting the poles in auger-holes that had been bored in a log which was a part of the wall of the cabin; skins were its chief covering. Little Abraham’s bed was even more primitive. He slept on a heap of dry leaves in the corner of the loft, to which he mounted by means of pegs driven into the wall.
Their food, if coarse, was usually abundant; the chief difficulty in supplying the larder was to secure any variety. Of game there was plenty—deer, bear, pheasants, wild turkeys, ducks, birds of all kinds. There were fish in the streams, and wild fruits of many kinds in the woods in the summer, and these were dried for winter use; but the difficulty of raising and milling corn and wheat was very great. Indeed, in many places in the West the first flour cake was an historical event.5 Corn dodger was the every-day bread of the Lincoln household, the wheat cake being a dainty reserved for Sunday mornings.
Potatoes were the only vegetables raised in any quantity, and there were times in the Lincoln family when they were the only food on the table; a fact proved to posterity by the oft-quoted remark of Abraham to his father after the latter had asked a blessing over a dish of roasted potatoes—that they were “mighty poor blessings.” Not only were they all the Lincolns had for dinner sometimes; one of their neighbors tells of calling there when raw potatoes, pared and washed, were passed around instead of apples or other fruit.
The food was prepared in the rudest way, for the supply of both groceries and cooking utensils was limited. The former were frequently wanting entirely, and as for the latter, the most important item was the Dutch oven. An indispensable article in the primitive kitchen outfit was the “gritter.” It was made by flattening out an old piece of tin, punching it full of holes, and nailing it to a board. Upon this all sorts of things were grated, even ears of corn, in which slow way enough meal was sometimes secured for bread. Old tin was used for many other little contrivances besides the “gritter,” and every scrap was carefully saved. Most of the dishes were of pewter; the spoons, iron; the knives and forks, horn-handled.
The Lincolns of course made their own soap and candles, and if they had cotton or wool to wear they had literally to grow it. One of the “old settlers” of Illinois says of her experience in clothing her family:
“As for our clothes, we had to raise, pick, spin, and weave cotton for winter and summer. We also made linsey of wool and flax. The first indigo we had we raised. Besides that we used sumac berries, white-walnut bark, and other barks for coloring.
“Now for cotton picking. We children had to lie before the fire and pick the seed from the cotton bolls before we could go to bed. The warmer the cotton the better it picked; so we would take a good sweat. The next day that had to be carded and spun; so some would soap the cotton, some card, and some spin; and when we would get enough spun and colored to make a dress apiece we would put it in the loom and weave it. It did not take fifteen or twenty yards to make a dress then; six or eight yards of linsey were enough for any woman.”
It is probable that young Abraham Lincoln wore little cotton or linsey-woolsey. His trousers were of roughly tanned deer-skin, his foot-covering a home-made moccasin, his cap a coonskin; it was only the material for his shirt or blouse which was woven at home. If this costume had some obvious disadvantages, it was not to be despised. So good an authority as Governor Reynolds says of one of its articles—the linsey-woolsey shirt—“It was an excellent garment. I have never felt so happy and healthy since I put it off.”
These “pretty pinching times,” as Abraham Lincoln once described the early days in Indiana, lasted until 1819. The year before, Nancy Lincoln had died, and for many months no more forlorn place could be conceived than this pioneer home bereft of its guiding spirit; but finally Thomas Lincoln went back to Kentucky and returned with a new wife—Sally Bush Johnston, a widow with three children, John, Sarah, and Matilda. The new mother came well provided with household furniture, bringing many things unfamiliar to little Abraham—“one fine bureau, one table, one set of chairs, one large clothes-chest, cooking utensils, knives, forks, bedding, and other articles.” She was a woman of energy, thrift, and gentleness, and at once made the cabin home-like, and taught the children habits of cleanliness and comfort.
Abraham Becomes a Laborer
Abraham was ten years old when his new mother came from Kentucky, and he was already an important member of the family. He was remarkably strong for his years, and the work he could do in a day was a decided advantage to Thomas Lincoln. The axe which had been put into his hand to help in making the first clearing, he had never been allowed to drop; indeed, as he says himself, “from that till within his twenty-third year he was almost constantly handling that most useful instrument.” Besides, he drove the team, cut the elm and linn brush with which the stock was often fed, learned to handle the old shovel-plough, to wield the sickle, to thresh the wheat with a flail, to fan and clean it with a sheet, to go to mill and turn the hard-earned grist into flour. In short, he learned all the trades the settler’s boy must know, and so well that when his father did not need him he could hire him to the neighbors. Thomas Lincoln also taught him the rudiments of carpentry and cabinet-making, and kept him busy much of the time as his assistant in his trade. There are houses still standing, in and near Gentryville, on which it is said he worked. The families of Lamar, Jones, Crawford, Gentry, Turnham, and Richardson, all claim the honor of having employed him upon their cabins.
As he grew older he became one of the strongest and most popular “hands” in the vicinity, and much of his time was spent as a “hired boy” on some neighbor’s farm. For twenty-five cents a day—paid to his father—he was hostler, ploughman, wood-chopper, and carpenter, besides helping the women with the “chores.” For them he was ready to carry water, make the fire, even tend the baby. No wonder that a laborer who never refused to do anything asked of him, who could “strike with a mall heavier blows” and “sink an axe deeper into the wood” than anybody else in the community, and who at the same time was general help for the women, never lacked a job in Gentryville.
Of all the tasks his rude life brought him, none seems to have suited him better than going to the mill. It was, perhaps, as much the leisure enforced by this trip as anything else that attracted him. The machinery was primitive, and each man waited his turn, which sometimes was long in coming. A story is told by one of the pioneers of Illinois of going many miles with a grist, and waiting so long for his turn that, when it came, he and his horse had eaten all the corn, and he had none to grind. This waiting with other men and boys on like errands gave an opportunity for talk, story-telling, and games, which were Lincoln’s delight.
In 1826 he spent several months as a ferryman at the mouth of Anderson Creek, where it joins the Ohio. This experience suggested new possibilities to him. It was a custom among the farmers of Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois at this date to collect a quantity of produce, and float down to New Orleans on a raft, to sell it. Young Lincoln saw this, and wanted to try his fortune as a produce merchant. An incident of his projected trip he related once to Mr. Seward:
“Seward,” he said, “did you ever hear how I earned my first dollar?”
“No,” said Mr. Seward.
“Well,” replied he, “I was about eighteen years of age, and belonged, as you know, to what they call down South the ‘scrubs;’ people who do not own land and slaves are nobody there; but we had succeeded in raising, chiefly by my labor, sufficient produce, as I thought, to justify me in taking it down the river to sell. After much persuasion I had got the consent of my mother to go, and had constructed a flatboat large enough to take the few barrels of things we had gathered to New Orleans. A steamer was going down the river. We have, you know, no wharves on the Western streams, and the custom was, if passengers were at any of the landings, they were to go out in a boat, the steamer stopping, and taking them on board. I was contemplating my new boat, and wondering whether I could make it stronger or improve it in any part, when two men with trunks came down to the shore in carriages, and looking at the different boats, singled out mine, and asked, ‘Who owns this?’ I answered modestly, ‘I do.’ ‘Will you,’ said one of them, ‘take us and our trunks out to the steamer?’ ‘Certainly,’ said I. I was very glad to have the chance of earning something, and supposed that each of them would give me a couple of bits. The trunks were put in my boat, the passengers seated themselves on them, and I sculled them out to the steamer. They got on board, and I lifted the trunks and put them on the deck. The steamer was about to put on steam again, when I called out, ‘You have forgotten to pay me.’ Each of them took from his pocket a silver half-dollar and threw it on the bottom of my boat. I could scarcely believe my eyes as I picked up the money. You may think it was a very little thing, and in these days it seems to me like a trifle, but it was a most important incident in my life. I could scarcely credit that I, the poor boy, had earned a dollar in less than a day; that by honest work I had earned a dollar. I was a more hopeful and thoughtful boy from that time.”
Soon after this, while he was working for Mr. Gentry, the leading citizen of Gentryville, his employer decided to send a load of produce to New Orleans, and chose young Lincoln to go as “bow-hand,” “to work the front oars.” For this trip he received eight dollars a month and his passage back.