Chapter VI Amusements of Lincoln’s Life in Indiana — His First Sorrows
If Abraham Lincoln’s early struggle for both livelihood and education was rough and hard, his life was not without amusements. At home the rude household was overflowing with life. There were Abraham and his sister, a step-brother and two step-sisters, and a cousin of Nancy Hanks Lincoln, Dennis Hanks, whom misfortune had made an inmate of the Lincoln home—quite enough to plan sports and mischief and keep time from growing dull. Thomas Lincoln and Dennis Hanks were both famous story-tellers, and the Lincolns spent many a cozy evening about their cabin fire, repeating the stories they knew.
Of course the boys hunted. Not that Abraham ever became a true sportsman; indeed, he seems to have lacked the genuine sporting instinct. In a curious autobiography, written entirely in the third person, which Mr. Lincoln prepared at the request of a friend in 1860,9 he says of his exploits as a hunter: “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 Abraham, with a rifle gun, standing inside, shot through a crack and killed one of them. He has never since pulled the trigger on any larger game.” This exploit is confirmed by Dennis Hanks, who says: “No doubt about A. Lincoln’s killing the turkey. He done it with his father’s rifle, made by William Lutes of Bullitt County, Kentucky. I have killed a hundred deer with her myself; turkeys too numerous to mention.”
But there were many other country sports which he enjoyed to the full. He went swimming in the evenings; fished with the other boys in Pigeon Creek, and caught chubs and suckers enough to delight any boy; he wrestled, jumped, and ran races at the noon rests. He was present at every country horse-race and fox-chase. The sports he preferred were those which brought men together: the spelling-school, the husking-bee, the “raising;” and of all these he was the life by his wit, his stories, his good nature, his doggerel verses, his practical jokes, and by a rough kind of politeness—for even in Indiana in those times there was a notion of politeness, and one of Lincoln’s schoolmasters had even given “lessons in manners.” Lincoln seems to have profited in a degree by them; for Mrs. Crawford, at whose home he worked some time, declares that he always “lifted his hat and bowed” when he made his appearance.
There was, of course, a rough gallantry among the young people; and Lincoln’s old comrades and friends in Indiana have left many tales of how he “went to see the girls,” of how he brought in the biggest back-log and made the brightest fire; then of how the young people, sitting around it, watching the way the sparks flew, told their fortunes. He helped pare apples, shell corn, and crack nuts. He took the girls to meeting and to spelling-school, though he was not often allowed to take part in the spelling-match, for the one who “chose first” always chose “Abe Lincoln,” and that was equivalent to winning, as the others knew that “he would stand up the longest.”
The nearest approach to sentiment at this time, of which we know, is recorded in a story Lincoln once told to an acquaintance in Springfield. It was a rainy day, and he was sitting with his feet on the window-sill, his eyes on the street, watching the rain. Suddenly he looked up and said:
“Did you ever write out a story in your mind? I did when I was a little codger. One day a wagon with a lady and two girls and a man broke down near us, and while they were fixing up, they cooked in our kitchen. The woman had books and read us stories, and they were the first I ever had heard. I took a great fancy to one of the girls; and when they were gone I thought of her a great deal, and one day when I was sitting out in the sun by the house I wrote out a story in my mind. I thought I took my father’s horse and followed the wagon, and finally I found it, and they were surprised to see me. I talked with the girl and persuaded her to elope with me; and that night I put her on my horse, and we started off across the prairie. After several hours we came to a camp; and when we rode up we found it was the one we had left a few hours before, and we went in. The next night we tried again, and the same thing happened—the horse came back to the same place; and then we concluded that we ought not to elope. I stayed until I had persuaded her father to give her to me. I always meant to write that story out and publish it, and I began once; but I concluded it was not much of a story. But I think that was the beginning of love with me.”10
Early Sorrows
His life had its tragedies as well as its touch of romance—tragedies so real and profound that they gave dignity to all the crudeness and poverty which surrounded him, and quickened and intensified the melancholy temperament he had inherited from his mother. Away back in 1816, when Thomas Lincoln had started to find a farm in Indiana, bidding his wife be ready to go into the wilderness on his return, Nancy Lincoln had taken her boy and girl to a tiny grave, that of her youngest child; and the three had there said good-by to a little one whom the children had scarcely known, but for whom the mother’s grief was so keen that the boy never forgot the scene.
Two years later he saw his father make a green pine box and put his dead mother into it, and he saw her buried not far from their cabin, almost without prayer. Young as he was, it was his efforts, it is said, which brought a parson from Kentucky, three months later, to preach the sermon and conduct the service which seemed to the child a necessary honor to the dead.11 As sad as the death of his mother was that of his only sister, Sarah. Married to Aaron Grigsby in 1826, she had died a year and a half later in child-birth, a death which to her brother must have seemed a horror and a mystery.
Apart from these family sorrows there was all the crime and misery of the community—all of which came to his ears and awakened his nature. He even saw in those days one of his companions go suddenly mad. The young man never recovered his reason, but sank into idiocy. All night he would croon plaintive songs, and Lincoln himself tells how, fascinated by this mysterious malady, he used to rise before daylight to cross the fields and listen to this funeral dirge of the reason. In spite of the poverty and rudeness of his life the depth of his nature was unclouded. He could feel intensely, and his imagination was quick to respond to the touch of mystery.